23 December 2017

Add a Pleasing Background Light to Your TV With These Ambilight Kits


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Ambilight adds ambient backlight effects to televisions compliment on-screen video content. An Ambilight kit dynamically adjusts elements such as color and brightness to create a more immersive multimedia experience. Adding Ambilight strips to a TV or monitor truly transforms video, gaming, and even audio. Check out the best ways to add a pleasing background light to your TV with these Ambilight kits. From all-in-one packs to do-it-yourself options, these are the best Ambilight kits you can buy. 1. LEDGlow Million Color Home Accent Lighting Kit LEDGLOW's Home LED Lighting Kit LEDGLOW's Home LED Lighting Kit LEDGlow Home Theater LED Accent...

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5 New Instagram Hacks to Fix Annoying or Missing Features


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Over 800 million people use Instagram every month, making it one of the biggest social networks around. There’s a lot more to it than sharing photos though. Check out these apps that take your Instagram to the next level. Instagram has added several new features over the years, such as Instagram Stories, a robust website, and more. It’s no wonder the app grew to $2 billion in two years. Such constant innovation also leads to third-party developers coming up with ways to make your experience better. From circumventing restrictions like the 15-second limit in Stories to bypassing the one-link problem,...

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Check now to see if you liked any Russian troll accounts on Facebook


 This fall saw ever-rising estimates of the number of people reached by Russian-backed troll accounts — just shy of 150 million at last count . Now the social network has at last released the tool it promised last month allowing users to see if they liked or followed one of the many pages or pieces of content put online during the sketchy attempt at mass manipulation. Read More
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The Weirdest Programming Principles You’ve Never Heard Of


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We’ve already walked you through the most essential programming principles you need to know about, but there’s another class of programming principles that may prove even more beneficial than those. Whereas the aforementioned principles teach you how to be smart with your code, the following principles will teach you to be wise with your code. Some of them are strange, and many of them are humorous, but they’re all equally practical and important. Take heed! 1. The Bloat Principle This one has so many variations that it’s hard to pick one as the main one. Perhaps the most “official” version is...

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Pixel art coloring book apps are the newest App Store craze


 Has your kid bugged you to let them download Sandbox Coloring? You’re probably not alone. The latest trend blowing up on the App Store is a new twist on the coloring book apps that have been popular for a couple of years. Now, instead of having users pick and choose their colors as before, this new group of coloring book apps – four of which recently snagged spots in the App… Read More

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22 December 2017

9 Privacy-Friendly Android Apps You Should Be Using


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These days, you can find an Android app for just about anything. Want to know what the weather will be like next week? No problem. Need to explore your device’s file system? It’s easy. Dying to waste a few hours playing high-quality games? There are thousands to choose from. But the app-for-everything nature of the store does have a notable downside: privacy. Honestly, how many of you research an app’s stance on privacy and security before you install it? The result of our collective laissez-faire approach to software installation is a growing number of apps that are a privacy nightmare....

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That time I got locked out of my Google account for a month


 How much of your digital life would you lose if you lost a single password? Without it, you are locked out and the cold reality of using free cloud services like Google is that you don’t have a human arbiter to help you. If you think back to earlier times where, say you lost your bank book, your local banker probably knew who you were and could help you navigate the process of getting… Read More
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Inside “Fin”, the elite human/AI assistant


 “I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More

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5 Electron Apps for Linux You Should Try Today


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Programs written using the Electron framework don’t have the best reputations. A lot of this has to do with the way they seem to use up a lot of resources. They are, after all, based off Google’s Chrome web browser, with all the benefits and trappings of it. That’s not to say that all of them are bad. In fact, there are a few out there which make use of the easy development the framework provides to do things which other previous programs have not. Here are a few such examples. 1. Etcher Naturally, the program which lets you easily...

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CNN is killing its Snapchat news show only four months after its debut


 CNN is giving up on its Snapchat news show, which launch only four months ago. “The Update,” as the program was called, had been designed for Snapchat’s vertical video format, but didn’t feature video produced only for Snapchat, nor did it have dedicated anchors. Instead, the news featured on “The Update” was a curated selection of CNN’s reporting from… Read More
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A look at 42 women in tech who crushed it in 2017


What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. All the while, women in tech have been driving their… Read More
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CNN is killing its Snapchat news show only four months after its debut


 CNN is giving up on its Snapchat news show, which launch only four months ago. “The Update,” as the program was called, had been designed for Snapchat’s vertical video format, but didn’t feature video produced only for Snapchat, nor did it have dedicated anchors. Instead, the news featured on “The Update” was a curated selection of CNN’s reporting from… Read More

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The Biggest and Best Tech News Stories of 2017


The end of the year is nigh, and 2017 has been an epic year for technology. We thought it would be a good idea to look back over the past year in tech news to see which stories made the headlines. But remember, we try to cover tech news you can make use of, as that’s our thing… January In January, Netflix launched a new app for DVD rentals, Instagram added ads to Stories, Chrome added support for FLAC files, Samsung explained why the Galaxy Note 7 exploded, Google announced all new Chromebooks would run Android apps, and HP recalled...

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Amazon acquires connected camera and doorbell startup Blink


 Amazon has acquired Blink (via Slashgear), a startup founded in 2014 that builds connected Wi-Fi home security cameras, as well as a new video doorbell introduced earlier this week. The company got its start via a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $1 million for its totally wireless home monitoring system. Amazon has already made forays into connected home video cameras and even home… Read More

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A Short Guide to X299 Motherboards and Intel Core i9s


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Intel’s new and fastest line of processors, the new Core i9 series, has drawn significant attention. It puts the company ahead of its chief rival, AMD, in the speed wars and the core wars. But if you want a taste of the action, you need a new motherboard to go with it: the X299 chipset. What is this new motherboard? What are the advantages and disadvantages? And is it really worth it? Let’s dive in and find out. What Is a Chipset? The X299 Chipset Explained The first thing you need to understand is what a chipset does. To put...

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The Best Tech Gifts for the Geeks in Your Life


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It is difficult to pick the right gift for people, but it’s even more difficult when you don’t know anything about their interests. If you’re perplexed about what gift to buy for a geeky loved one, try one of these. Keep in mind, these are actual tech gifts. In case your friend already has all of these, you can always look at non-essential geeky gifts for techies. Streaming Sticks or Media Players as Tech Gifts? Geeks love their TV shows, so make it easy for them to watch their favorites on a big screen. A smart TV isn’t the best...

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How to Open AI Files Without Adobe Illustrator


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Vector-based images are commonly used by graphic designers. The files are small, yet the images themselves are infinitely resizable. They’re perfect for drawings, and especially for things like logos and icons. Adobe Illustrator is the leading graphic design package, which means its native filetype (AI) is the industry standard. The trouble is, AI is a proprietary format owned by Adobe. So figuring out how to open AI files without Illustrator can be difficult. And support varies quite considerably, depending on what you want to do with it. Put simply, opening an AI file just to view is easy. Opening it...

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How to Use Gmail Offline: The Complete Guide


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Anyone who deals with emails knows that processing emails require an active internet connection. A spotty internet connection could leave you with limited or even no access to your emails. What if you could set up Gmail offline and access all your emails without internet? It would be a real boon, especially when you’re traveling or taking a flight. Fortunately, if you use Gmail, you’re in luck. Today, let’s see how you can setup and use Gmail offline. Read This Before You Start As you may have guessed, Gmail Offline can be used only with Google Chrome. You should never...

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7 Things Apple Needs to Improve on iPhone X


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The Apple iPhone X is perhaps the most significant new Apple handset to launch since the first iPhone arrived in 2007. Nonetheless, despite mostly great reviews, Cupertino’s latest flagship device does have some annoyances, both on the hardware and software side. In this article, I’ll highlight seven things that bother me about the new handset and what Apple can do to eliminate them, either with a software update or on a future iPhone. Hardware Apple won’t change the hardware on the iPhone X. Instead, it will eventually release a new iPhone in 2018 that builds on what worked (and didn’t...

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Meet Molekule, the sleekest air purifier on the market


 Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More

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