Should You Get an "Ultra HD" 4K TV?

Did You Know? Even if you have incredibly sharp hearing, there’s one thing you can’t hear—the sounds created by your body such as your heartbeat, the movement of your muscles and tendons, and your eyes moving in their sockets. Unless, that is, you’re suffering from a very rare condition called superior canal dehiscence (SCDS) wherein unusual thinness or a complete absence of the part of the temporal bone overlying the superior semicircular canal of the vestibular system (either congenital or caused by head trauma) alters your hearing such that you can’t filter out the internal sounds of your own body. Geek Trivia Which Of These Caterpillars, Found Throughout The Southeastern U.S., Is Covered In Stinging Hairs? Gulf Fritillary Caterpillars → Saltmarsh Caterpillars → Puss Caterpillars → Yellow Bear Caterpillars → Advertisement Download Leading With Strategic Thinking - Four Ways Effective Leaders Gain Insight, Drive Change, and Get Results Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success – whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or by empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over three hundred leaders from around the world. 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 Play Any Windows Game In Full Screen Borderless Windowed Mode How to Block Text Messages from a Certain Number on Android How to Make Someone an Admin or Moderator in Your Facebook Group Should You Get an “Ultra HD” 4K TV? How to Watch Live TV On Your Computer, Game Console, and Other Devices with the HDHomeRun How to Automatically Mute New Tabs in Chrome and Firefox tldr Converts man Pages Into Concise, Plain-English Explanations How to Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in Safe Mode Why Can I Only Burn 80 Minutes of Music to a CD if My MP3s Take Up Less Than 700MB of Space? How to Limit Background Activity for Apps in Android Oreo to Save Battery Life What Is the Best Lens for Landscape Photography? How Long Do Solid State Drives Really Last? Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Host-Based Modem A Host-Based Modem is a modem that uses a computer’s processor to perform some of its communications processing and allows less expensive modem circuits to be used. 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. BBC is making interactive radio plays for Alexa and Google Home The BBC is known for producing radio plays, but the format is about to get a high-tech twist: a new experiment by the broadcasting company will turn traditional audio dramas into interactive stories. [The Verge] A Year on Ice Why scientists are preparing to freeze the research vessel Polarstern in sea ice near the North Pole [The Atlantic] How to hurricane-proof a Web server Millions relied on Space City Weather—here's the configuration that weathered Hurricane Harvey. [ArsTechnica] A Simple Design Flaw Makes It Astoundingly Easy To Hack Siri And Alexa Hackers can take control of the world's most popular voice assistants by whispering to them in frequencies humans can't hear. [FastCo] How to Play Any Windows Game In Full Screen Borderless Windowed Mode If you’re a regular PC gamer, you know that playing a game in full screen mode can sometimes be a frustrating experience. Switching to a background program, using a second monitor, or suddenly getting a notification that takes focus can mess up your game. Playing the game in a window fixes these problems, but it’s less immersive and doesn’t use your monitor’s full space effectively. Read This Article → How to Block Text Messages from a Certain Number on Android Look, we all get annoying text messages from time to time. Maybe it’s spam, maybe it’s from someone you don’t want to talk to, maybe it’s some other third thing. The point is, you don’t want to get them. So let’s block ’em. Read This Article → How to Make Someone an Admin or Moderator in Your Facebook Group If you've made a Facebook Group and it's turned into an active community, you might want to bring someone else in to help you moderate and remove offensive comments. Here's how. Read This Article → Should You Get an “Ultra HD” 4K TV? Walk through any electronics showroom and most TVs you see will be some form of "Ultra HD" 4K. There are plenty of models available, and they're cheaper than ever. But should you buy one? Read This Article → How to Watch Live TV On Your Computer, Game Console, and Other Devices with the HDHomeRun There’s nothing quite like free TV with the help of an antenna. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could get that live TV stream on your computer, or tablet, or Xbox? With a simple piece of hardware, you can. Read This Article → How to Automatically Mute New Tabs in Chrome and Firefox Let’s say you’re trying to be quiet, browsing the internet at home, work, or a public space. You’re secretly filled with dread that anything you click will open a new tab with an autoplay video or blare an obnoxious audio ad. End that fear forever by keeping all your new tabs muted by default. Read This Article → tldr Converts man Pages Into Concise, Plain-English Explanations Command line users know to how read the manual: type “man” followed by the name of a command—you’ll see a detailed explanation. These manuals are useful but verbose, using hundreds of words to explain every detail of a command. Read This Article → How to Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint in Safe Mode Microsoft Office applications have a built-in Safe Mode feature. This helps when you can’t use Office normally. Perhaps Word crashes every time you open it, or maybe Excel crashes when you open a single file. You can start the application in Safe Mode and there’s a good chance it will work normally. Read This Article → Why Can I Only Burn 80 Minutes of Music to a CD if My MP3s Take Up Less Than 700MB of Space? When burning a CD, you can either burn it as a data disc or an audio CD. A data CD can hold up to 700 MB, while an audio CD can hold 80 minutes of sound. If you have 200 MB of MP3 files that add up to three hours of music, you can still only burn 80 minutes to the disc. Why is that? Read This Article → How to Limit Background Activity for Apps in Android Oreo to Save Battery Life Google has done a lot to better manage Android’s background resource usage over the last few updates, and Oreo brings another enhancement to the table with Background Execution Limits. Simply, this limits what an app can do when running in the background—both in resources used and broadcasts requested. Read This Article → What Is the Best Lens for Landscape Photography? Landscapes are one of the most popular subjects to shoot. Look out any window, and there's something to photograph. It might not be the most majestic landscape, but there's probably a photo to be made. Read This Article → How Long Do Solid State Drives Really Last? When large-scale flash storage first came to the consumer market as an alternative to conventional hard drives, the biggest concern (aside from price) was longevity. Tech fans had a pretty good idea of the general reliability of hard drives, but SSDs were still something of a wild card. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Leading With Strategic Thinking - Four Ways Effective Leaders Gain Insight, Drive Change, and Get Results Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success – whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or by empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over three hundred leaders from around the world. Click here to download