Cord Cutting Only Sucks If You're Trying to Replicate Cable

Did You Know? During World War II, the BBC temporarily banned the song “Deep in the Heart of Texas” from their radio rotation during working hours over concerns that the song’s beat was so hard to resist clapping along to that it would slow down productivity whenever it came on the radio. Geek Trivia The Soundtrack For The Video Game Quake Was Composed By? John Romero → Brian Eno → Moby → Trent Reznor → Advertisement Download Free Kit: The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook The Essentials of Information Security brings together the latest in information, coverage of important developments, and expert commentary to help with your Information Security related decisions. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Update Your Apple TV to tvOS 11 The Best Android Games Exclusive to the NVIDIA SHIELD How to Make Your iPhone Use JPG and MP4 Files Instead of HEIF and HEVC Cord Cutting Only Sucks If You’re Trying to Replicate Cable Access More Settings in iOS 11’s Control Center with 3D Touch The Most Wonderfully Stupid Sonic the Hedgehog Fan Games How to Recover a Deleted File: The Ultimate Guide Can Other People See the Tweets I’ve Liked? How to Quickly Transfer Files from a Computer to Your Phone with Portal How to Stop the IMDB App from Sending You Notifications Why Do Some Websites Have Pop-Up Warnings About Cookies? Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Linkbait The term Linkbait refers to website content that uses flashy/catchy/sensational headlines, controversial topics, humorous images/videos, etc. to increase webpage views, website traffic, inbound user links, and improve the website’s ranking in search engine results. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Some birds use discarded cigarettes to fumigate their nests One man's trash is another bird's pest containment strategy. [The Economist] In Taiwan, Modest Test of Driverless Bus May Hint at Big Things to Come Only 12 passengers can fit, but still: it's a self-driving bus in an actual city. [The New York Times] Amazon Won by Losing the Smartphone War It's hard to imagine Amazon going all in on the Echo if they had a successful line of smartphones. [Bloomberg] How to Update Your Apple TV to tvOS 11 The latest version of tvOS is out now for the fourth-generation Apple TV (as well as the new Apple TV 4K). Here’s how to update the streaming box and get all the new features. Read This Article → The Best Android Games Exclusive to the NVIDIA SHIELD NVIDIA’s line of SHIELD products is a great example of what Android can do when put in the right hands—SHIELD Tablet is still one of the best Android tablets around, and SHIELD Android TV is the top Android TV box you can buy. Read This Article → How to Make Your iPhone Use JPG and MP4 Files Instead of HEIF and HEVC In iOS 11, the photos and videos you take will no longer be encoded in the compatible formats you’re used to. Instead of JPG for images and MPEG-4 for video, they'll use High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) and High Efficiency Video Format (HEVC), respectively. Files in these newer formats are about half the size of JPG and MP4 files of similar quality. Read This Article → Cord Cutting Only Sucks If You’re Trying to Replicate Cable The cord cutting pushback has begun. Wired, The LA Times and even my own colleagues have all argued that cutting the cord is starting to lose its luster, and that as more companies break off into their own streaming services (instead of putting their content up on Netflix), cord cutting will soon be just as expensive as cable. Read This Article → Access More Settings in iOS 11’s Control Center with 3D Touch iOS 11 has a completely new Control Center, which squeezes in more settings onto one screen without needing to swipe back and forth. However, on top of what’s currently available in Control Center, there are even more settings that you can access from that screen with a simple 3D Touch or long press. Read This Article → The Most Wonderfully Stupid Sonic the Hedgehog Fan Games Sonic is hilarious. Maybe it’s the decades of bad games. Maybe it’s the Extreme Attitude™, a 90s marketing gimmick that feels dated now. Or maybe it’s just that he’s a weird looking dude. Read This Article → How to Recover a Deleted File: The Ultimate Guide It’s happened to most of us. You delete a file, and then realize you need it back. This guide explains when you can get that file back and how to go about it. Read This Article → Can Other People See the Tweets I’ve Liked? You might think that Retweets are public and Likes are private. This makes sense, in a way: anything you Retweet is instantly pushed to your followers, and Twitter doesn’t make it clear at all what happens when you Like a tweet. Read This Article → How to Quickly Transfer Files from a Computer to Your Phone with Portal We’ve all had that moment where we need a file on our phone that happens to be on the computer. Now, there are a couple of ways you can do this: email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage like Dropbox, or even transfer it with a USB cable. But there’s a faster, easier way. Enter Portal. Read This Article → How to Stop the IMDB App from Sending You Notifications Recently, the IMDB app started sending out notifications for "Featured Trailers". As near as I can guess, this is where the production company pays IMDB to push a link to the trailer to a load of people in an effort to promote it. If IMDB isn't being paid, they're just annoying their fans for no reason. Whatever their reason, here’s how to turn these notifications off. Read This Article → Why Do Some Websites Have Pop-Up Warnings About Cookies? If you spend any time at all on the web, you’ve probably come across a fairly normal site that seems strangely concerned about cookie education. You’ll see a pop-up that warns you that yes, the site uses cookies…just like almost every other page on the web. If the warning seems redundant and ineffectual, you’re not the only one to think so. But some people think it’s necessary, and those very specific people are in the European Union. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Free Kit: The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook The Essentials of Information Security brings together the latest in information, coverage of important developments, and expert commentary to help with your Information Security related decisions. Click here to download

Why Do Some Websites Have Pop-Up Warnings About Cookies?

Did You Know? Honey crisp apples were developed by the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station’s Horticultural Research Center at the University of Minnesota in 1974 and has, thanks to runaway popularity, generated over 10,000,000 dollars in patent royalties for the school. Geek Trivia Eccentric Billionaire Howard Hughes Once Bought An Entire Casino In Order To? Convert It To A Bowling Arena → Disable Its Sign → Live On The Top Floor → Shutter Its Rooftop Bar → Advertisement Download Free Kit: The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook The Essentials of Information Security brings together the latest in information, coverage of important developments, and expert commentary to help with your Information Security related decisions. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. Can Other People See the Tweets I’ve Liked? How to Quickly Transfer Files from a Computer to Your Phone with Portal How to Stop the IMDB App from Sending You Notifications Why Do Some Websites Have Pop-Up Warnings About Cookies? Amazon Just Announced Five New Echos, Here’s What They All Do How to Hide the App Icons at the Bottom of iMessage for the iPhone How to Create a Bootable USB Installer for macOS High Sierra How to Get Twitter’s New 280-Character Limit Now Disable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Win 7, 8, or 10 How to Overhaul macOS' Spotlight Search Using Alfred How to Take Screenshots on an Android Phone or Tablet How to Save Original Photos With Instagram What’s the Difference Between OLED and Samsung’s QLED TVs? Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Link Farming Link Farming refers to the sometimes questionable process of trading/exchanging reciprocal links with other websites in order to boost one’s own SEO (Search Engine Optimization) page rank in search engine results. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. New Gravitational Wave Detection From Colliding Black Holes The two black holes combined have the mass of 53 suns. [The New York Times] The Coming Software Apocalypse 911 calls stopped working in several states because of a software glitch in 2014. That's not acceptable. [The Atlantic] A single Tesla Powerpack battery saved this Australian town over $1.5 million in grid connection costs Logan City, in Queensland, installed a solar panel array on their water treatment plant, and almost connected it to the grid for power at night. Tesla's Powerpack was much cheaper. [Electrek] How QWERTY conquered keyboards Lots of people believe QWERTY became the standard to avoid jamming, but the real reason is a lot more complex, as this video lays out. [Vox/YouTube] Can Other People See the Tweets I’ve Liked? You might think that Retweets are public and Likes are private. This makes sense, in a way: anything you Retweet is instantly pushed to your followers, and Twitter doesn’t make it clear at all what happens when you Like a tweet. Read This Article → How to Quickly Transfer Files from a Computer to Your Phone with Portal We’ve all had that moment where we need a file on our phone that happens to be on the computer. Now, there are a couple of ways you can do this: email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage like Dropbox, or even transfer it with a USB cable. But there’s a faster, easier way. Enter Portal. Read This Article → How to Stop the IMDB App from Sending You Notifications Recently, the IMDB app started sending out notifications for "Featured Trailers". As near as I can guess, this is where the production company pays IMDB to push a link to the trailer to a load of people in an effort to promote it. If IMDB isn't being paid, they're just annoying their fans for no reason. Whatever their reason, here’s how to turn these notifications off. Read This Article → Why Do Some Websites Have Pop-Up Warnings About Cookies? If you spend any time at all on the web, you’ve probably come across a fairly normal site that seems strangely concerned about cookie education. You’ll see a pop-up that warns you that yes, the site uses cookies…just like almost every other page on the web. If the warning seems redundant and ineffectual, you’re not the only one to think so. But some people think it’s necessary, and those very specific people are in the European Union. Read This Article → Amazon Just Announced Five New Echos, Here’s What They All Do At a surprise event in Seattle today, Amazon announced multiple new Echo models—some similar to the original Echo, and others very, very different. Here’s every Echo you can buy right now, and what the difference between them all is. Read This Article → How to Hide the App Icons at the Bottom of iMessage for the iPhone A new feature in iOS 11 gives you quicker access to iMessage Apps at the bottom of the screen, but if you never use them in the first place, they’re just annoying. Here’s how to hide them. Read This Article → How to Create a Bootable USB Installer for macOS High Sierra The Mac App Store is the default way to upgrade or install macOS, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Maybe you’ve got multiple Macs and a limited amount of bandwidth, and don’t want to download the entire operating system for every system. Or maybe you’re looking to install the operating system from scratch. Read This Article → How to Get Twitter’s New 280-Character Limit Now In case you haven’t heard, Twitter is testing out a longer 280-character message limit, doubling the restriction that’s been in place since the service started back in 2006. Initially, the longer limit is only available to a few select accounts during the testing period, but intrepid users have discovered how to access the new feature. Read This Article → Disable User Account Control (UAC) the Easy Way on Win 7, 8, or 10 If you’ve been using Windows for a while, you likely remember how annoying the User Account Control (UAC) was when it first popped up in Windows Vista. We showed you back then how to disable it, and you can still disable it in Windows 8 and 10. Here’s how. Read This Article → How to Overhaul macOS' Spotlight Search Using Alfred Spotlight Search on macOS has gotten a lot better over the last few years, but there’s still so much potential that’s missing. Enter Alfred, which is similar to Spotlight Search, but on some major steroids. Read This Article → How to Take Screenshots on an Android Phone or Tablet Sometimes it’s necessary to grab a still image of what’s happening on your device’s screen—that’s called a screenshot. While this used to be a hassle on Android (many moons ago), all modern handsets include the capability. Here’s how to do it. Read This Article → How to Save Original Photos With Instagram Instagram, as well as being a fun social network, is now a pretty decent editing app. You're no longer just slapping over-the-top filters on low resolution images; now you can actually make considered edits. Instagram only posts photos with a max resolution of 1080x1080px, though. The photos most smartphones take are much higher quality than that. If you want the original photo resolution with your Instagram edits applied, you need to save them elsewhere. Here's how. Read This Article → What’s the Difference Between OLED and Samsung’s QLED TVs? Organic light-emitting diodes, abbreviated as OLED, are all the rage for high-end HD televisions. The technology has jumped from phones and tablets to larger screens, and its vibrant colors and “perfect” black levels make for amazing picture quality. But it isn’t the only player in town. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Free Kit: The Essentials of Information Security Kit: Includes a Free PC Security Handbook - 2nd Edition eBook The Essentials of Information Security brings together the latest in information, coverage of important developments, and expert commentary to help with your Information Security related decisions. Click here to download