News: Google Adds Pac-Man, Hello Kitty & More Japanese Anime & Video Game Characters to AR Search
Gamers, anime fans, and those with an interest in Japanese culture are in for an AR treat courtesy of Google.
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How To: Use a Directional Antenna with ESP8266-Based Microcontroller
Microcontrollers like ESP8266-based boards have built-in Wi-Fi, and that's really cool, but what's even cooler is that certain pro models of the D1 Mini also have a port where you can connect a directional antenna. This can give you exceptional range, but if you were to just plug one in after opening the package, it most likely wouldn't work.
How To: Force-Close Running Apps on the iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, or 12 Pro Max
Whether it's an iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, or 12 Pro Max, know that these devices are the most powerful smartphones Apple has ever made. Still, bugs happen, and you might find yourself with an app that isn't performing quite as it should. When that happens, it's best to force-close (or force-quit) the problematic app instead of waiting for it to fix itself, which may never happen.
News: Apple Releases iOS 14.1 for iPhone, Adds Support for 10-Bit HDR Video Playback & Editing on iPhone 8 & Later
Apple just released iOS 14.1 for iPhone today, Tuesday, Oct. 20. This update first hit iPhones one week ago, but not for long — Apple pulled the release almost immediately, later seeding it to iOS developers only as a GM (golden master) release.
How To: Improve Audio Quality in Voice Memos on Your iPhone to Get Better-Sounding Files
Lossless quality isn't for everyone. If you can't distinguish between lossless audio and other formats, you probably but don't need it. But if you're a musician who's sharing ideas with bandmates or a journalist interviewing people for a video, you might want the best possible quality, which is what lossless offers. And you might not know it, but the Voice Memos app on your iPhone supports it.
How To: Is 5G Available in Your Area? Here's How to Check
In 2009, 4G LTE networks rolled out in Stockholm and Oslo, replacing 3G as a better upgrade to the mobile data technology that gives us the broadband speeds we have on our mobile devices. Over a decade later, and we have the latest, next-generation wireless network technology among us, 5G, but can you even use it?
How To: Use the Built-in Screen Recorder in Android 11
After adding and removing a screen recorder feature in Android 10, Google finally adopted a proper version in Android 11. Unlike the buggy and incomplete function last year, this one looks like a final product. And best of all, it is no longer hidden.
How To: 7 Free Pass 'n' Play Games for Your Phone That Make Coronavirus Bearable at Home
If you're quarantining with other people, consider yourself lucky — but it's not always easy. Staying in one space for so long with too many people can be challenging, so you need to find things to do to make the time go by (and to keep everyone sane). Our advice? Try out these seven free multiplayer games that only require one iPhone or Android device to play.
News: The Mechanics of Panic — Why You Shouldn't Look to Elon Musk & Social Media Experts for Coronavirus Pandemic Advice
MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman recently asked SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk possibly the best question he's ever been asked: What would he ask a hypothetical AGI system (an AI system with human-level intelligence and understanding) if he only had one question?
News: Microsoft Launches HoloLens 2 Worldwide, Here's a Close-Up Look at the $3,500 Device (Updated)
The long wait is over — the best augmented reality device on the planet is finally available.
How To: Get Google's Call Screen Feature on Your OnePlus
Spam calls are one of the most annoying things to happen in the world of smartphones for more than one reason. Not only are they bothersome, but they can also be dangerous to people who don't know any better. Google has come up with a crafty solution known as "Call Screen" to let the Google Assistant handle the call for you while you listen in on the caller like a stealth ninja.
How To: Use Google Search Operators to Find Elusive Information
Google is an incredibly useful database of indexed websites, but querying Google doesn't search for what you type literally. The algorithms behind Google's searches can lead to a lot of irrelevant results. Still, with the right operators, we can be more exact while searching for information that's time-sensitive or difficult to find.
How To: Turn Your Boring To-Do List into a Real-Life RPG
When you think about it, isn't life just one big open-world RPG just begging to be conquered? We all have a set number of specific tasks or chores we must complete every single day like clockwork. Sometimes, these items on our to-do list can become tedious and cause us to lose motivation. What if you could take those tasks and turn them into something awesome instead? Now you can.
How To: Remotely Silence Alarms, Messages, Calls, Notifications & Other Sounds on Your iPhone to Keep Others from Finding It
Imagine a scenario where you're nowhere near your iPhone, but it's on loud, and you really need to silence it. An alarm may be blaring, notifications could be spitting out sounds left and right, and calls may be ringing. Things can get annoying real quick for whoever's around it. Plus, all that attention makes it easy for someone to find and possibly steal your iPhone. Luckily, you can quiet it down.
How To: Stop Any Android App from Stealing Your Data
Many popular apps automatically share your personal data. While I have accepted a certain amount of data collection from Google, to know companies such as Facebook perform this without my consent bothers me. After some researching, I've found a great solution, and it doesn't require root.
How To: Make Your Own WhatsApp Sticker Packs on Android
WhatsApp stickers can make your chat more fun. The stickers that come with WhatsApp are fine, but they're standard and accessible to everyone. What if you wanted to show off unique stickers that your friends haven't seen? To take things to the next level, you can create your own WhatsApp Stickers.
How To: Everything You Need to Know About Adding & Editing Audio for Videos in Enlight Videoleap for iPhone
The music and sound effects that play in the background of any videos you edit helps set the tone, so it's essential to get it right. Enlight Videoleap, an extremely powerful and popular mobile video editing tool for iOS, lets you quickly and easily add audio from your iPhone and the cloud, but things can still get a little confusing when you have a timeline full of clips.
How To: Add, Customize & Animate Text Layers in Your Videos with Enlight Videoleap for iPhone
Typography is an important aspect of the video editing process. You deal with it when adding captions to news clips, giving on-screen recipes in food videos, creating burned-in subtitles for short films, making no-sound-needed videos for social media, and so much more. Enlight Videoleap for iOS makes this all easy.
How To: Use Keyframes to Animate Effects & Create Custom Transitions in Enlight Videoleap for iPhone
One of the most powerful features when editing videos with Enlight Videoleap is the keyframe tool, which allows you to add custom transitions, animate text, granularly adjust audio, move video clips across the frame, supplement effects, and more. If you want your video to change color over time or for captions to move across the screen, use keyframes in combination with Videoleap's other tools.
How To: Keep Law Enforcement Out of Your iPhone (& Your Privacy Intact)
If you're ever faced with a situation of handing over your iPhone to law enforcement (or getting it taken forcibly), whether by the police, feds, or court system, there are things you can do to prevent them from getting access to all that potentially self-incriminating data. And it takes less than a second.
Hands-On: Hands-On with the Nreal Light, Smartphone-Powered Augmented Reality Immersion
While Microsoft dominated the augmented reality news at this year's Mobile World Congress, a small AR startup we've covered in the past arrived in Barcelona, Spain, to unveil the next phase of its mission.
How To: Detect Vulnerabilities in a Web Application with Uniscan
With the number of web applications out there today, it comes as no surprise that there are just as many vulnerabilities waiting for hackers to discover. Finding those vulnerabilities can be a difficult task, but there are plenty of tools available to make the process easier. While it won't help find any zero-days, web scanners such as Uniscan will detect common vulnerabilities.
How To: Detect When a Device Is Nearby with the ESP8266 Friend Detector
Smartphones and other Wi-Fi enabled devices send radio signals called probe frames to locate nearby wireless networks, which makes them easy to track by listening for their unique MAC address. To show how this kind of tracking works, we can program a NodeMCU in Arduino to sniff the air for packets from any device we want to track, turning on an LED when it's detected nearby.
How To: Are You Eligible to Upgrade to the Latest iPhone? Here's How to Check
With new iPhone models out, you'll have updated cameras to try out, a faster processor, and new colors to choose from. The only thing that could stop you from picking one up yourself is, well, your current iPhone. Here's how to check if you're eligible to upgrade to iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max, or any other iPhone still being sold.
How To: Hide Sensitive Files in Encrypted Containers on Your Linux System
As penetration testers, we sometimes need to securely store customer data for prolonged periods. Bruteforce-resistant, vault-like containers can be created with just a few commands to protect ourselves from physical attacks and unintended data disclosures.
Hacking macOS: How to Use One Python Command to Bypass Antivirus Software in 5 Seconds
The misconception that macOS is more secure than the Windows operating system is far from the truth. With just one small command, a hacker can completely take over a MacBook and control it remotely.
How To: Measure Real-World Objects with Your iPhone in iOS 12
Thanks to Apple's ARKit 2.0 augmented reality framework in iOS 12, we now have a "Measure" app built right into our iPhones that can measure real-world objects. No more physical tape measure or ruler. No more guessing. Just whip out your iPhone, open the app, put your camera, and get measurements. Before you do, however, there are a few things you'll want to know.
How To: Create Your Own Search Engine for More Privacy & Zero Trust Issues
While there are a variety of privacy-focused search engines available like StartPage and DuckDuckGo, nothing can offer the complete trust offered by creating one's own search engine. For complete trust and security, Searx can be used as free metasearch engine which can be hosted locally and index results from over 70 different search engines.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 11 (Rotating Objects)
Continuing our series on building a dynamic user interface for the HoloLens, this guide will show how to rotate the objects that we already created and moved and scaled in previous lessons.
How To: 4 Apps to Help Improve Security on Your iPhone or iPad
As the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Apple devices are a constant target for hackers everywhere. While iOS has seen fewer common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs) in recent years, iPhones still aren't hack-proof. Fortunately, you can strengthen your security with the help of a few apps.
How To: Discover Computers Vulnerable to EternalBlue & EternalRomance Zero-Days
The public leaks of NSA tools and information have led to the release of previously secret zero-day exploits such as EternalBlue, which was used in the notorious WannaCry ransomware attack. Despite multiple patches being released, many users have failed to update their systems, so many devices are still vulnerable to these now-public attacks.
How To: Make Your Own Animoji Karaoke Video
Introduced along with the iPhone X, Animoji are animated characters, mostly animals, that are rendered from the user's facial expressions using the device's TrueDepth camera system to track the user's facial movements.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 9 (Moving Objects)
So after setting everything up, creating the system, working with focus and gaze, creating our bounding box and UI elements, unlocking the menu movement, as well as jumping through hoops refactoring a few parts of the system itself, we have finally made it to the point in our series on dynamic user interfaces for HoloLens where we get some real interaction.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 2 (The System Manager)
Now that we have installed the toolkit, set up our prefabs, and prepared Unity for export to HoloLens, we can proceed with the fun stuff involved in building a dynamic user interface. In this section, we will build the system manager.
News: Rising Tide of Dust in the US Could Mean Public Health Menace
Blowing dust and fungal spores are creating a public health problem that could be just a slice of what's to come with climate change.
Sweeter Than Blood: Researchers Are Making Mosquitoes' Preference for Sugar Deadly
If you have a taste for sweets, you have at least one thing in common with mosquitoes. While too much sugar is unhealthy for humans, a new product makes sweets deadly to mosquitoes.
How To: Get Your Hands on the New SNES Classic Edition
Nintendo's Super NES Classic system, a pint-sized version of the iconic Super NES from the '90s, is highly anticipated in the gaming world. The retro system has already met its fair share of controversies and it's been a long journey to preorder. Finally, the Super NES Classic is officially available for preorder, but it's selling out fast.
How To: View Indoor Maps for Malls & Airports in Apple Maps
Apple has some great features aimed at making the lives of globetrotters and mall aficionados significantly easier, such as having detailed floor plans for airports and shopping centers in its native Maps app. With this feature available in Apple Maps, you no longer need to rely on publicly posted maps and directions that are often hard to understand.
Hands-on: Acer Windows Mixed Reality Dev Kit & Datascape
One thing that I got more and more excited about as we got closer and closer to the Microsoft Build 2017 developers conference was finally learning about the new Acer Windows Mixed Reality head-mounted displays (HMD). Brandon Bray, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft, had teased us a few weeks earlier at the Vision Summit event in Los Angeles, California, and said there would be a lot more information at Build. Fortunately for us, he was right.
Hands-On: Occipital's Bridge Headset for iPhones Has Magical Spatial Mapping Abilities
In the tech world, when you're a small startup going up against the Goliaths and their massive marketing budgets, you're forced to find and produce something almost magical to help your product stand apart from the rest. And that's exactly what Occipital Inc. has done with their Bridge headset.