The concept and structure of Christmas hasn't changed much since its inception. In its infancy, Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn (also held in December). The pagans had long worshiped trees (as did other historical cultures) and would bring them into their homes and decorate them, something that influenced our modern holiday decorations. While certain things such as gifts and ornaments have b...
When it comes to milk, my family consumes anywhere between two and four gallons every two weeks. That's about four to eight gallons every month. That's a lot of milk—and a lot of empty milk jugs! Instead of simply tossing them in the recycling bin, why not get creative and make something useful out of them yourself?
Recognizing the signs of schizophrenia is the fist step toward getting help and proper treat for a loved one with this serious mental health affliction. With proper medication and therapy schizophrenia can be controlled so check for and understand what to look for.
If you’ve got a minor cut or nasty sunburn you may reach for the aloe vera for the soothing and healing qualities. You don’t have to buy aloe, it is easy to extract the aloe from the inside of the leaf of a living aloe vera plant.
Everyone floats in the Dead Sea because the amount of salt in water effects the density. Do a hands-on experiment and practice checking density. Here’s a good science experiment to do in class or at home, if you have access to an electronic balance.
The trick in this how-to video works with any carbonated beverage (never use beer). Take your beverage and cool it down to a temperature around 20F or -7C. Either the freezer or outside if it is cold enough. When opened it will freeze instantly.
Check out this three-part series on how to play Super Smash Bros. Melee (advanced). This is not a beginning tutorial for all you newbie gamers, it's more detailed and advanced for pros, or semi-pros.
In a previous post, I wrote about how controversy changed SCRABBLE, about how the SCRABBLE Dictionary evolved thanks to Judith Grad and her crusade to rid the world of derogatory and racist words. She won, at least in some manner, but the fact still remains, racist or not—words are words, and they're here to stay.
mIQ? What is it exactly? It's a handy web service that helps you manage your mobile life, with free and easy online access to all of the content and information stored on your mobile device. How does it work? Best Buy has answers. The Best Buy Mobile team explains how simple it is to use mIQ to backup all the data on your cell phone, including messages, photos and contacts.
No matter what age you are or what kind of life you've lived you can put your story out there by writing an autobiography. Every life can be interesting if written about in a well formulated, and honest manner.
Bid Whist can be a fun game for family or friends. It's challenging enough for adults, but enjoyable for kids too. Bidding and predicting wins are what make playing Bid Whist fun and exciting, whether you win or lose.
Another name for jumper's knee is patellar tendinitis. Jumper's knee is an injury that affects the tendon connecting your kneecap (patella) to your shinbone. The patellar tendon plays a pivotal role in the way you use your legs. It helps your muscles extend your lower leg so that you can kick a ball, push the pedals on your bicycle, and jump up in the air. Learn about the different causes of, symptoms of, and treatments for jumper's knee in this video.
Hallmark Christmas ornaments are a great collectible item for the whole family to enjoy. Learn how to maintain, store, repair, and buy Hallmark ornaments in this free video series about Christmas collectibles.
Cats and kittens make great family pets. Learn how to care for a new kitten or adopted cat with tips from a veterinarian in this free pet care video series.
These days, you can FaceTime with family and friends whether you're at home connected to Wi-Fi or on-the-go with mobile data. You may have noticed, however, that your iPhone will sometimes drop Wi-Fi and rely on cellular instead — whether you're placing or receiving a FaceTime call. While that's not an expected result, there is a workaround to get your FaceTime calls back on track.
Apple makes it simple to share your location with your family and friends using tools built into the "info" page for each conversation thread in Messages. With those tools, you can send your current location or share trackable real-time coordinates. But iOS always has a few hidden tricks to make things easier than they seem, and that's precisely the case if all you need to do is share your current location.
When you post a photo or video on Instagram, it's always nice to see positive comments from friends, family, and even fans. On the other hand, it's never fun to see spam or hate messages underneath your posts. Before, you'd have to delete these comments one by one, but now you can delete comments in bulk.
When using Group FaceTime with more than a handful of people, all of those participants in one chat can be difficult to follow. That's why Apple automatically enlarges the tiles for people who are currently speaking, bringing them into the forefront. However, all of that zooming in and out can get pretty distracting, and now there's a way to disable it whenever you need to.
Google's G Suite collection of premium cloud services and apps have become popular with business customers, with more than six million subscribers now.
So far, iOS 13's major point updates have all been pretty exciting for iPhone. We've seen iOS 13.1, 13.2, and 13.3 come and go, offering more than 60 new features and changes combined to that very first version of iOS 13. While iOS 13.3.1 was a minor update, its successor, iOS 13.4, is a return to form.
Group chats in Facebook Messenger can devolve into outright noise pollution as people chit chat randomly and bombard you with distracting notifications. Unfortunately, leaving the group outright alerts everyone inside, so if you want to get out of the thread unnoticed, what exactly can you do?
Screen recording on your iPhone is one of the easiest ways to share what's happening on your screen with family and friends. The problem is, everyone knows it's a screen recording when you pull open Control Center to tap the record button. What if we told you there's a better way to end a recording, so what you're left with is a clean video?
There's a direct correlation between the proliferation of augmented reality apps and the demand for 3D content, and PTC just quantified that in dollars.
Live Photos capture the seconds before and after you take a photo, creating a fuller and also unique moment to share with friends and family. Unfortunately, it has been nearly impossible to share Live Photos with non-iPhone users — until now. Thanks to iOS 13, you can easily convert a Live Photo into a video, and even stitch multiple Live Photos together to create one long video.
Scanning pictures and uploading them to Google Photos is a great way to digitize your collection. With unlimited high-quality storage and text recognition capabilities, it's hard to pass up. And for your older family pictures, Google Photos will soon even colorize black and white images.
The triple camera system on the OnePlus 7 Pro is the best setup they've ever done so far, but it could always be better. The primary sensor packs a whopping 48 megapixels, but as history has taught us, megapixels don't equal better photos by default. In fact, with where we are in terms of hardware right now, it's the software that determines a phone's camera performance.
Dark mode is everywhere. Both Android 10 and iOS 13 added the feature natively, and many of your favorite apps now include the option. So far, Google has been on a mission to add it to all of its apps, and Google Photos is no exception.
Google Lens can perform many different tasks with your smartphone's camera thanks to advanced machine learning, such as foreign text translations, landmark identification, and business cards to contacts conversion, to name a few. With this year's Google I/O conference, we have another cool Lens feature to look forward to — receipt calculations.
Smartphones and dark mode go hand in hand. Screens can be bright, causing eye strain and battery drain, and dark mode can take the edge off both. It's perfect for nighttime browsing, but also for general use, especially on OLED displays with inky blacks. Dark mode, aka night mode, is particularly great for tweeting, and Twitter makes it easy to switch.
It's confession time. Through a couple of sources, I managed to get an early look at the HoloLens 2. But I was sworn to secrecy, and I take my tech oaths seriously (shame on you, leakers).
Intel's RealSense family of depth tracking cameras has a new addition with a different set of sensory capabilities.
Unless you want to make your TikTok account totally private, anyone that uses the app — with or without an account — can view your profile and all the videos of you performing new dance moves, singing along to popular songs, and recreating your favorite TV show scenes. Even worse — they can download those videos.
Can you trust every user you come across on TikTok? The answer to that may depend on how use the service, but the real question is — can you trust every user that sees your content? Not everyone on TikTok is someone you want viewing or interacting with your content, and there's a way to prevent them from doing so.
When Google finally gave us a dark theme for YouTube, it was a bit disappointing. They didn't use a pure black background, reducing some of the battery savings you'd get with an OLED panel. But with the help of another app, we can fix this, and not only get a real dark mode, but other colors as well.
Things that are supposed to make life easier for developers and users are often easy targets for exploitation by hackers. Like many situations in the tech world, there is usually a trade-off between convenience and security. One such trade-off is found in a system known as Distributed Ruby, which can be compromised easily with Metasploit.
When driving, you can get directions hands-free by asking Siri. You can also make general map searches, show a location's details, call a query's phone number, and view traffic details. However, Siri defaults to Apple Maps for all those. If you prefer Google Maps, Waze, or another third-party navigation app, the map-based Siri commands won't work. But that doesn't mean you can't still use Siri.
First, there was SnapCat. Now, we have DogChat! Or SnapBark? In October, Snapchat took social media by storm with its Lenses for cats. But the latest addition to the camera app has given dog lovers an augmented reality Christmas gift they won't want to return.
In the latest example of non-tech companies taking on augmented reality marketing, online travel site Travelocity has added an AR version of its Roaming Gnome mascot to its mobile app.
The thrill and excitement of great tourism generally requires visitors to take part in the country's local fare in person. But Air New Zealand's new augmented reality experience for the Magic Leap One gives visitors an immersive taste of what the country has to offer without ever setting foot in the country.
Two companies armed with web-based augmented reality tools, Vertebrae and Shopify, are ready to help online retailers boost their sales.
