Computer crashes, fried hard drives, red rings of death, delinquent memory cards... nothing is worse than dysfunctional technology. In just a minute, your favorite and most used device has become the biggest headache of your life, frustrating you to the brink of madness. But what's worse than your electronics just giving up on you?
Previously, losing an AirTag or Find My network accessory meant relying on tech-savvy strangers to contact you via phone or email if they found it. With a new Find My update, you can ditch the passive approach and be more proactive about recovering your tracker by sharing its information with trusted contacts and even airlines, allowing them to track your tracker for you.
Apple Maps keeps getting better and better for all the hikers in the world. The latest update gives you access to thousands of detailed trail maps within U.S. national parks and topographic views, but it also lets you create your own walking and hiking routes.
Some websites require you to perform a verification task so they know you're human and not a bot. It helps websites curb spam, abuse, unauthorized access, and cyberattacks but also adds an obstacle for anyone trying to visit their content. If you find it more of a nuisance than a necessary evil, there's an easy way to reduce the number of human verification prompts you receive on your iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac.
Apple's upcoming iOS 17 is expected to include many new features first seen on Android, but there are also some exciting, unique features that Android needs to steal pronto.
You can view and hide iCloud contact groups on your iPhone, but Apple won't let you create or delete groups or add or delete contacts from any groups unless you're on a tablet or computer. Why Apple refuses to add a group management tool to Contacts on iOS is anybody's guess, but there is a workaround you can use instead.
Over the past week, practically every major tech company working on augmented reality has held their quarterly earnings calls with investors, and each addressed or at least mentioned the role of AR during their prepared remarks. However, Facebook's earnings call had some of the spicier commentary on the technology.
Magic Leap has had a rough couple of years, highlighted by high-profile executive departures, lawsuits, troublesome patent shuffles, and massive layoffs.
We're still basking in the afterglow of the HUGE Snap Partner Summit last week, where Snap made Snapchat a much stronger augmented reality platform while also unveiling the AR smartglasses version of Spectacles. This week, we got a peek at how Spectacles AR started and got our hands on Lenses from Lego and Disney featured during the keynote.
The tech world was taken by surprise this week with the unexpected unveiling of Snap's augmented reality Spectacles smartglasses.
There's already some fierce competition between Snap and Facebook in the AR space, but it's about to heat up even more, with Snap snatching up a 3D mapping startup that could add some new AR capabilities to its arsenal.
If you rely on Apple Maps to get around over other navigation apps, there's a lot you can do. Look Around lets you tour cities up close, restaurant reservations make dining less frustrating, and 3D view gives a new perspective of a neighborhood. While there are many more where that came from, iOS 14.5 just added six new features and changes you need to know about.
It's Earth Day, which means that nonprofits, individuals, and brands are making a concerted effort to raise awareness of environmental issues and how to change behaviors to reverse impacts of pollution, deforestation, and suburban sprawl, among others.
When Microsoft unveiled Mesh a couple of weeks ago, the move revealed a major part of Microsoft's next steps toward dominating the augmented reality space, particularly with regard to enterprise customers.
Malevolent hackers can divert your incoming calls and texts to any number they want, and they don't need to be a criminal mastermind to do it. Even friends and family members can reroute your incoming calls and messages so that they know exactly who's trying to reach you, and all it takes is seconds of access to your iPhone or wireless account. These secret codes can help uncover them.
Among the various components of the emerging augmented reality space, the most lucrative is the advertising market. The prospect of turning every object, every location, ever signpost in the real world into a discount code or virtual transaction interface is why AR will ultimately be more profitable than VR.
The Lens Studio creators have published more than 1.5 million AR effects to Snapchat. One of them is Audrey Spencer, who shared her story with us and provided her insights into Lens Studio as a storytelling device. Meanwhile, Snap has added new capabilities to the platform to stoke more creativity from its creators.
UPDATE: Entries are now closed. Thank you for participating! Next Reality is where we help you literally 'see' into the future of augmented reality, and to help with that mission we're offering three free pairs of Snap Spectacles 3 to three lucky readers who sign up for the Next Reality daily AR email newsletter.
This holiday season, give yourself a gift that will keep on giving: a new web development skill. Whether it's to secure lucrative freelance work in the new year, bolster your résumé, or have fun with some frankly outrageous discounts on online course bundles right now (up to 99% off), there's nothing better you can do with your free time. Your future (pro coder) self will thank you.
There's a variety of brilliant colors in the iPhone 12 lineup, including the elegant Gold and show-stealing Pacific Blue finishes on the Pro models. It's difficult enough to choose an iPhone color as a customer, but deciding on accessories can make things even worse. Which color case looks best with what iPhone color? What about a MagSafe wallet attachment? Well, Apple has a tool to help you figure that all out.
It is safe to say 2020 sucks. With the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest, things haven't been great. But beyond impacting your emotional state, that upcoming phone you've been waiting for has likely had its release date pushed back.
"What's your Wi-Fi password?" That's usually the first thing guests ask for when you have them over. You tell them the network name, then try to explain your complicated hacker-resistant password, which becomes a whole ordeal. But there's a better way to do it, which doesn't rely on using the same mobile OS as your guests.
You may be wondering what exactly makes the Pixel 4a's camera so great. Compared to its predecessor, it has the same Sony IMX363 sensor and no additional hardware. Well, beyond stellar image processing, it also has several great new features that Google has added since they released the Pixel 3a last year.
Back in the Nexus days, Google's approach to hardware was very different from most OEMs. You could say OnePlus swooped in with a similar mantra a few years later, focusing on great hardware at an affordable price tag. There were compromises, of course, but even then, it resulted in true treasures such as the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 5.
Many apps on your iPhone want to use your location, most of which are for valid reasons. But some apps can function perfectly fine without location permissions, while others have no business even requesting it. If you want to be more selective about which apps and services you give away your coordinates to, the best thing you could do is start from scratch.
Smartphones are inherently bad for privacy. You've basically got a tracking device in your pocket, pinging off cell towers and locking onto GPS satellites. All the while, tracking cookies, advertising IDs, and usage stats follow you around the internet.
The top five apps of the 2010s were all social media apps of some kind, and the fact that's not surprising to you says a lot. We may use them for other reasons here and there, but our phones are social media machines at their cores. The thing is, some make better machines than others.
It's finally out. After months of testing, iOS 13 is available to install on your iPhone, which means over 200+ new features you can use right now. The update, released on Sept. 19, can be installed over the air or from a restore image using iTunes in macOS Mojave and older or Finder in macOS Catalina. Ditto for the 13.1 update issued on Sept. 24.
The $35 Raspberry Pi is an amazingly useful single-board computer (SBC) with a good balance of price, performance, and connectivity options. But for some projects, it just isn't enough. Whether you need more computing power, a smaller size, or better machine-learning capabilities, there are other options available.
While hackers know and love the Raspberry Pi, many don't know of its cheaper cousin, the microcontroller. Unlike a Pi, which can be used more or less like a regular computer, microcontrollers like the Wi-Fi connected ESP8266 require some necessary programming skill to master. In this guide, we'll build an Arduino program from scratch and explain the code structure in a way anyone can understand.
These days, it's easy to cut the cord. Thanks to a new crop of streaming TV apps, you can get the same service offered by a traditional cable subscription at a fraction of the price. After some extensive testing, we believe we've found the absolute best apps for cord cutting.
Smartphones and laptops are constantly sending Wi-Fi radio signals, and many of these signals can be used to track us. In this guide, we'll program a cheap IoT device in Arduino to create hundreds of fake networks with common names; This will cause nearby devices to reveal their real trackable MAC address, and it can even let an attacker take over the phone's data connection with no warning.
Give an 18-month-old a shoe, check back 10 minutes later, and it's a very big maybe he will have it on his foot. But give him your smartphone, and in a mere five minutes, he can take 100 pictures of the carpet, send weird messages, and delete essential apps. Imagine what your child could do if they were able to harness this technical aptitude and put it to good use — and they can, with learning apps.
There are nearly 100,000 unique onion service addresses online with over two million people using Tor every single day. Join me as I explore a small fraction of what the Tor network has to offer.
Defcon is the largest hacker conference with something for everyone, whether it be the talks, parties, villages, or any of the hundreds of events. In this guide, we'll take a holistic view at everything that goes into attending the con for the first time, from securing your electronics and making the most of your time to the logistics of getting there and finding the right place to stay.
A burner number isn't just for criminals and cheating spouses. In this digital world, with many of our interactions being conducted online, a throwaway phone number acts as a buffer — it lets you enjoy the web without having to give out your personal information, such as real name or phone number.
Hello, budding augmented reality developers! My name is Ambuj, and I'll be introducing all of you Next Reality readers to the world ARKit, as I'm developing an ARKit 101 series on using ARKit to create augmented reality apps for iPad and iPhone. My background is in software engineering, and I've been working on iOS apps for the past three years.
The most significant customization aspect of the iPhone is most definitely the home screen. Before iOS 14, Apple only threw in a feature here and there to appease those who like a more personal touch on the most visible part of the operating system. Now, there are great customizability options to give you a real personalized touch, and that includes app icons.
Hackers often rely on lazy system admins and unpatched vulnerabilities to get access to a host. Keeping intruders off of our machines requires us to update daily, only run the services we need, and read the code, among other things, but we can still make mistakes. Luckily for us, we can limit the damage caused by those mistakes by running SELinux.
In the previous article, we learned how to set up our VPS, configure our PHP server, and developed an in-depth understanding of how the payload works. With all that taken care of, we can get into disguising our payload to appear as an image and crafting the note in the greeting card being delivered to our intended target.
