Increased Efficiency Search Results

How To: This Is What Happens to Your iPhone Every Time You Turn On Low Power Mode

When you enable Low Power Mode on your iPhone, it's not always clear what measures it's taking to reduce battery drain and conserve power. Changes to energy-hungry features you use daily may be immediately noticeable, but some things you frequently use may be disabled or reduced without any apparent indicators.

How To: Make Your iPhone's Camera Remember Your Last Used Exposure Compensation Value for Later

Your ability to control exposure in the Camera app is much better in iOS 14. Instead of setting the exposure for a single shot, you can also lock an exposure compensation value for an entire session while you take photos and videos. A session ends as soon as you exit the app, but you can also remind your iPhone to use your last used ECV the next time you open Camera.

How To: All the Video Apps Compatible with Dolby Vision HDR on iPhone 12 & 12 Pro

There's one big drawback when it comes to shooting video in HDR with Dolby Vision on the iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max — it's not compatible with many apps and services. That means your video will be downgraded to SDR when sharing. That said, there are options to shoot, view, and edit iPhone-created Dolby Vision HDR videos that are available to use right now.

How To: Use Portrait Lighting in Google Photos to Add an Adjustable Key Light to Pictures You've Already Taken

Google's Pixel smartphones have earned a reputation for taking great photos without relying on top-of-the-line camera sensors. Instead, Google leans on the software side to squeeze super images out of its camera. This also enables them to roll out new features out to previous-generation devices.

How To: Curb Your Daily Instagram Usage with Daily Reminders on iPhone or Android

Instagram is addicting — and that's done on purpose. To stop your Instagram habits, your smartphone likely has a built-in feature to curb the daily usage of a particular app, like Apple's Screen Time for iOS and Google's Digital Wellbeing for Android. But you don't need to mess with those complicated settings when Instagram itself can help you get some of your life back.

How To: Bring Back the 9-Tile Grid in Android 11's Quick Settings

Android 11 has plenty of new features as you'd expect, including a fancy new embedded media player. Rather than a constant notification, your audio controls now get pushed up into the Quick Settings panel when playing music. However, to make way for this new media player functionality, your total number of quick settings tiles had to be cut from nine down to six.

How To: Netflix Caps Video Quality Based on Your Phone's Widevine DRM Level — Here's How to Check for HDR & FHD Support

Just because your phone has a high-resolution screen doesn't mean it will play videos at their highest resolution. Most streaming services, including Netflix, use a DRM system known as Widevine for media in their Android apps. But even if your phone has Widevine support, content will be limited to non-HD if your specific model hasn't been whitelisted by Netflix.

How To: Find Temporarily Free Apps & Games on the Google Play Store

Software takes time to create, and time is money, so a lot of great apps aren't free. But to generate interest, some developers will make their paid apps free for a limited time. The potential for a long-term increase in daily active users more than offsets the short-term lost revenue. So for us end users, the trick is knowing when these sales are going on.

How To: Keep Law Enforcement Out of Your Android Device

With protests springing up across America, there's a chance you may have your first interaction with law enforcement. Many demonstrators will have their phones in-hand to film the action, which, sadly, could prompt an officer to demand the device and any self-incriminating data it may contain. Before this happens, you should know there are tools at your disposal to protect your data in such situations.

How To: Change a Phone's Coordinates by Spoofing Wi-Fi Geolocation Hotspots

In many urban areas, GPS doesn't work well. Buildings reflect GPS signals on themselves to create a confusing mess for phones to sort out. As a result, most modern devices determine their location using a blend of techniques, including nearby Wi-Fi networks. By using SkyLift to create fake networks known to be in other areas, we can manipulate where a device thinks it is with an ESP8266 microcontroller.

News: 37 New Features Coming to iPhone in iOS 14 That We Can't Wait For

It feels like just yesterday Apple unveiled iOS 13 to the world, introducing game-changing features like system-wide dark mode and enhanced editing tools in Photos. But WWDC 2020 is rapidly approaching, which means iOS 14 is as well. As it turns out, we don't need to wait for an official announcement to get an idea of what new features and changes are coming to iPhone this year.

News: 27 Best Productivity Apps to Make Working from Home Less Stressful

In the last decade, the number of people working remotely in the US has increased dramatically, and so has their need for technology and software to supplement that remote work. Whether you work from home or a coworking office space, the requirement for highly compatible and helpful productivity apps is a must if you want to get things done successfully.

How to Hack with Arduino: Building MacOS Payloads for Inserting a Wi-Fi Backdoor

Arduino is a language that's easy to learn and supported on many incredibly low-cost devices, two of which are the $2 Digispark and a $3 ESP8266-based board. We can program these devices in Arduino to hijack the Wi-Fi data connection of any unlocked macOS computer in seconds, and we can even have it send data from the target device to our low-cost evil access point.

News: This Is Why All Augmented Reality Startups Suck

People fundamentally distrust magicians. And they should. The illusions they proffer are just that, illusions meant to astound rather than tangible interactions and results that have weight and meaning in our real world. Our lizard brains know this, and, no matter what the outstanding feat of "magic" presented, we nevertheless hold fast to our survival-based grip on the truth: we just saw simply "can't be real."

How To: Create Your Own Augmented Reality Filter for Instagram Stories Using Spark AR on Mac or Windows

There's a new trend on Instagram Stories: People are making viral AR filters where images of popular characters from TV shows, movies, and other mediums shuffle above your head until one sticks. The filters range from Disney and Pokémon characters to Harry Potter and Friends, but you're not limited to just that because you can create your own "which are you?" filter.