Google might fold Nest back into the Google, well, fold. The company is considering integrating Nest, which is a separate company under mutual parent Alphabet at the moment, back into Google’s hardware business. The re-integration, first reported by Wall Street Journal, is a move that Google is considering as a way to help it build out its smart home capabilities vs. Amazon, which is… Read More
Google might fold Nest back into the Google, well, fold. The company is considering integrating Nest, which is a separate company under mutual parent Alphabet at the moment, back into Google’s hardware business. The re-integration, first reported by Wall Street Journal, is a move that Google is considering as a way to help it build out its smart home capabilities vs. Amazon, which is… Read More
CPUs and graphics cards typically generate the most excitement among computer components. Nevertheless, a hard drive is an essential element of a computer. An excellent GPU and CPU won’t remain useful with an unreliable hard disk. With solid-state drives (SSD), Samsung reigns supreme. But what about traditional platter drives? Learn about the most reliable hard drives according to server companies. Should You Buy a Server-Class Hard Drive? Not all hard drives are created for the same purposes. Broadly, consumer HDDs fall into two categories: desktop or server-grade. Server-ready hard drives are engineered for 24/7 workloads and (in theory) last longer under...
Read the full article: 5 Most Reliable Hard Drives According to Server Companies
Last month, Microsoft announced its intentions to bring its Edge Browser to iOS and Android, as it works to broaden its reach on third-party mobile devices. After being made available in preview form for roughly a month, the app officially hits iOS and Android’s respective app stores starting today. The followup to the once ubiquitous Internet Explorer has been blossoming on Windows… Read More
Do you have thousands of photos on your iPhone? Is it hard to find any of the pictures you’re looking for? Is your iPhone storage full? Then you need to work on the way you manage photos. Fortunately, improving your photo management practices is easy. With a few new habits, some cloud storage, and an app or two, you can get your iPhone’s Camera Roll back under control in no time. Review Your Photos Immediately It’s easy to snap a few photos and then forget about them until… well, possibly never. And that’s the number one thing that fills up...
Read the full article: Improve Your iPhone Photo Management to Free Up More Space
If you have not heard about IFTTT, then this guide is for you. “If This Then That” is a free web-based service that gives you something better than the sum of its parts. The parts are the apps and devices you can connect together to create new experiences. Linden Tibbetts, Jesse Tane, and Alexander Tibbetts visualized their invention as a “digital duct tape”. In their first blog post, Linden Tibbetts said, The key to unlocking the creative potential of our existing digital tools might be to build a service that simplifies and consolidates the way those tools can be connected. The best...
Read the full article: The Ultimate IFTTT Guide: Use the Web’s Most Powerful Tool Like a Pro
You can use Excel for your checklists. Many apps promise to handle your to-do list, but do you really need yet another app? If you’re already spending your days in Excel, look no further. Even if you don’t want to use it as an everyday to-do list app, a checklist is a good way to keep track of what you still need to do in your spreadsheet, directly in the spreadsheet itself. Let’s see what you can do with checklists in Excel. How to Make a Checklist in Excel We’ll show you how to create a checklist with checkboxes you...
Read the full article: How to Create a Checklist in Excel Like the Pros Do
If you’ve stopped paying attention to LG in the last couple of years, you’ll learn everything you need to know from the first paragraph of its latest press release that highlights a “sweeping realignment to better address the challenges ahead.” The company’s in a tough spot. It makes good and innovative phones, but just seem to make a dent in a crowded mobile… Read More
Net neutrality, the principle that protects the free and open internet as we know it today, is under serious attack. We’ll get right to the point: net neutrality is not a partisan issue, and we don’t care where you fall on the political spectrum. The repeal of net neutrality will affect you as an internet user. Here’s what you need to know about this vital fight for the open web. What Is Net Neutrality? In case this is your first time hearing about net neutrality, let’s quickly review what it means: Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers...
Read the full article: Net Neutrality Isn’t a Partisan Issue: Here’s What’s Going to Happen to the Internet
Farmers Business Network has raised $110 million in new venture funding to support a business that may sound boring to some Silicon Valley technologists but which appears to have addressed a very real need: it’s a social network for farmers that invites them to share their data, pool their know-how, and bargain more effectively for better pricing from third parties. It’s a real… Read More
So you’ve got the iPhone X and you’re ready to dress it up. Luckily, we have you covered. From wireless chargers, to headphones, cases, and more. Here are the best accessories for making the most of your flashy new iPhone X. 1. Better Headphone Jack 2016 saw the departure of the headphone jack on the iPhone. So that means the included adapter will do the trick right? Maybe not! The included Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter has a whopping 1.5 stars on the apple website. This is down to a combination of shoddy build quality, limited third-party support and...
Read the full article: The Best Accessories for Your iPhone X
Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… Read More
Looking for a simple and free alternative to popular live chat software like Intercom or Zendesk chat? Well, the new customer chat widget from Facebook Messenger is here and anyone can embed these widgets on their website to engage with visitors in real time.
Facebook Customer Chat widget, if you are new, lets people chat with businesses without leaving the website. The widget works on both desktop computers and mobile phones. The business owner needs a Facebook Page and all the visitor needs is a regular Facebook account.
There’s no learning curve or complex installation. The visitor clicks the Facebook icon on your web page, type their message and you (the business owner) get an instant notification on your Facebook Page. If you are online, you can carry on the conversation with the visitor on the Facebook website or inside the Facebook Pages Manager app on your phone.
If you would like to give Facebook Customer Chat a try, go to Digital Inspiration, wait for the page to load and click the Facebook messenger icon in the lower right corner to start a conversation.
Step 1: To get started, go to developers.facebook.com and click the “Add a new app” button to create a new Facebook app.
Step 2: Give your app a name and click the Create button to get your own App ID. It is simple sequence of digits like 1839871239373637.
Step 3: Go to your Facebook Page, click the Settings tab, choose Messenger Platform, Whitelisted domain, enter the full URL of your website and click Save. You can also enter multiple domains if you wish to embed the same widget on multiple websites.
Step 4: Get the Facebook Page ID of the specific page that you wish to connect with the customer chat widget. All customer interactions will show in the inbox of this page.
Step 5: We are almost done. Open your website template and copy-paste the following code in the footer of your template. You need to replace the App_ID from Step 2 and Facebook Page_ID from Step 4.
<div class="fb-customerchat" page_id="PAGE_ID"></div>
<script>
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
FB.init({
appId : 'APP_ID',
autoLogAppEvents : true,
xfbml : true,
version : 'v2.11'
});
};
(function(d, s, id){
var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "http://ift.tt/2cEl5fI;;
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
</script>
That’s it. Your Facebook Chat widget is now live on your website. If you are not seeing the Facebook messenger logo on your pages yet, clear the cache and make sure the website domain is listed in the domain that you have whitelisted in step 3.
With Facebook Messenger Chat, you can set a welcome greeting that will show up instantly as soon as a visitor initiates a conversation. Similarly, you can set up an away message that will be displayed when you are unable to join the live chat.
To configure these messages, go to your Facebook Page, Settings, Messaging and update the Response Assistant section.
Please do note that the widget is served via Facebook. Thus, if you are using any adblock add-on that blocks social plugins from loading, the chat widget may not show up for you.
Destiny 2 fans will know that you get your own virtual assistant of source in the game world – Ghost, who sort of floats around and guides you. The new Alexa skill for Destiny 2 allows you to ask Ghost to do a number of things for you, including provide guidance about your in-game mission, calling backup, equipping different armour and weapon sets and providing lore and fictional… Read More
Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way… Read More
Do you understand file transfers? There’s this magical air to them. I remember on Windows I would watch the progress bar fill up at its own pace. The window would provide a time estimate that would go up and down with seemingly no relation to our linear concept of time. A batch of music albums could take five minutes to copy over, during that time providing an estimate of anywhere between three minutes and two hours. When I switched to Linux, the situation changed. File transfer times felt more reliable. Not only that, they seemed faster, too. So, does Linux...
Read the full article: Does Linux Transfer Files Faster Than Windows?
A Turkish security researcher has exposed a major bug in macOS High Sierra. The flaw makes it possible for an attacker to gain entry to a machine without a password — as well as access to powerful administrator rights. Apple has issued a patch to fix the vulnerability affecting almost all macOS High Sierra systems. Unpatched systems, however, remain insecure… What Is the Bug? The flaw was outed by Turkish developer Lemi Orhan Ergan. It allowed anyone to gain full administrative rights over a macOS High Sierra machine by simply typing “root” as the username in authentication dialog box. Then,...
Read the full article: Apple Patches Major macOS Security Issue: Check Your Updates Now
Our verdict of the Apple iPhone X:It could be the most divisive iPhone yet, but we loved it. The biggest problem is the price, since you'll need deep pockets to afford and make the most out of the iPhone X.910Each year I review an iPhone, and each year my findings are usually the same: solid device, premium price point, but no huge change in terms of how the iPhone functions. With the arrival of the iPhone X, things just got much more interesting. The iPhone X sits alongside the iPhone SE as the second non-numbered, black sheep of Apple’s smartphone family. It brings with...
Read the full article: iPhone X Review: The Future Has a Price
Instagram has added a fun new feature which lets you “remix” photos your friends have sent to you. Remixing in this case means moving and/or resizing the photo, and then adding stickers, text, or doodles of your choosing. In other words you can now graffiti all over your friends’ selfies. The internet is now a visual entity, with photos and videos seemingly becoming more important than words. I prefer words” myself, but I must admit even I have been coerced into sharing the odd selfie on social media. And now Instagram is inviting my friends to vandalize those selfies. How...
Read the full article: You Can Now Remix Your Friends’ Instagram Photos
YouTube has finally added support for multi-user logins on its Roku app — and it is glorious! Logging in to multiple YouTube accounts on the Roku is a simple process that only requires a one-time setup. Once it’s done, you can easily switch between profiles on demand. Setting Up Multiple YouTube Accounts on Roku You probably already have one user logged in to the Roku YouTube app. To add another, do the following: Launch YouTube on Roku and pull up the YouTube menu by clicking the left arrow button. Scroll up to the username of the person who is logged in and click on it. This should pull up...
Read the full article: How to Log In to Multiple YouTube Accounts on a Roku Device
Got an expensive smartphone in your hand but can’t snap those cool images with blurred “out of focus” backgrounds? Blame it on the focal length of the lens and the natural phenomenon called “depth of field“! There’s nothing you can do about that unfortunately, but I’ll let you in on a secret: you can mimic that blurred background bokeh effect in Photoshop with a single tool in two minutes flat. How to Create a Blurred Background in Photoshop In Photoshop, you can choose a focal point and blur the area around it. The Blur Gallery filters allow you to add different...
Read the full article: How to Create a Blurred Background Bokeh Effect in Photoshop
Despite Netflix’s popularity, it still has an issue with content discovery. The list of TV shows and movies on the home screen often throws up bizarre recommendations, while content you’d enjoy goes unnoticed until a friend happens to mention it in passing. Netflix uses a range of algorithms to decide what it recommends to you, but none of the behind-the-scenes genres are natively searchable within its apps. Luckily, each genre has its own secret code. It lets you pinpoint your search to find exactly what you want to watch. You can get strangely specific, such as code 354 which is...
Read the full article: How to Enter Netflix’s Secret Codes
Malware is everywhere these days. You only have to sneeze in the wrong café, and you have malware. Okay, maybe not that bad. But as the networked world expands, so does the potential for infection. This MakeUseOf guide is a step-by-step approach to removing a significant amount of malware. Furthermore, we’re going to show you how to stop malware infecting your system, to begin with. And if you don’t have to worry about malware, you’ll have more time for the finer things in life. We cannot deliver a guide detailing removal instructions for every piece of malware or ransomware out...
Read the full article: The Complete Malware Removal Guide
The Food and Drug Administration has just cleared AliveCor’s Kardiaband EKG reader as the first medical device accessory for the Apple Watch. Europe has been able to use a version of the Kardiaband for Apple Watch for some time now but, thanks to the new FDA approval, the device can now be used in the U.S., marking the first time an Apple Watch accessory will be able to be used as a… Read More
Selling more on eBay is a concept that sounds simple enough. But it actually takes a mix of business acumen, psychology, and good old elbow grease. Years ago, I sold thousands of items – everything from antiques to yard sale items – and became a Power Seller with a 100% feedback rating. More recently, my wife and I decided to sell a few items from around the house. The eBay sales tricks that worked back then continue to work today, with a few small caveats. You may be a seasoned seller. Or, you may have just started with your eBay seller...
Read the full article: 11 Critical Tips on How to Sell More on EBay
Looking for a USB-C charger? Beware! Most USB-C chargers sold on Amazon can damage your devices! Fortunately, experts like Benson Leung and Nathan-K, and websites like GTrusted, list tested USB-C chargers and cables in one location. Leung and Nathan-K collaborated on a spreadsheet containing a detailed analysis of a tremendous number of chargers and cables. The spreadsheet isn’t easy to read, so I’ve put together a list of their top recommendations along with some buying tips. First, though, we need to explain why USB-C chargers can damage your gadgets. Why USB-C Can Damage Your Devices The biggest problem with USB-C chargers: manufacturers don’t perform proper...
Read the full article: The Best USB-C Chargers: What’s Safe and What’s Dangerous?
As Twitter tries to figure out how to lock down the parts of its platform that enable harassment, as well as the spread of misleading information and illicit content, there have been a number of moments that highlight how the service, and its levers of control, are far from perfect. Read More