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Quick Links Recently, Google announced that it would incorporate AI into Search, making it easier for you to find the information you need without wading through a pile of garbage search results first. However, there are a couple of reasons why that won’t work. Google’s Vision for the Future of Search Is AI-Powered At Google I/O 2024, the company introduced “Search in its Gemini era”—its way of saying that it is integrating AI into Search....

Quick Links Summary Note-taking on a Mac can be deeply personal, and the experience is heavily defined by the app you use. Both Apple and Google have strong contenders, and both are free to use. So how do these compare against each other, and what should you use? Apple Notes Is Native, Google Keep Is a Web App With Apple’s Notes, you have access to a native app that fits in perfectly with the rest of your Mac apps....

Summary It’s not always clear when fancy gadgets are just luxury items or actually tools of the trade. In this case, theBelkin Auto-Tracking Stand Pro with DockKitmight look like an overpriced, motorized, tripod, but it could be just the thing content creators and people live streaming from their phones have been waiting for. Belkin Auto-Tracking Stand Pro with DockKit The easiest way to FaceTime, create action-packed videos, and go hands-free for live streaming and video conferencing is here....

Quick Links CyberGhostis a VPN provider that’s been around for a while and has gone through several incarnations. Currently, it seems mainly focused on being a streaming-friendly VPN that offers long-term plans for decent money. I took it for a spin to see how it fares. Overall, there’s a lot to like about CyberGhost, though it lacks the oomph to be on our selection of thebest VPN services. Still, it has enough gumption to make it onto our list of thebest VPNs for Netflix, thanks to its ability to get through to that streaming service....

GNOME serves as the default desktop environment for countless Linux distributions, such asUbuntuandFedora. GNOME 44 has now been released, with changes that will show up in upcoming Linux distro updates. GNOME 44 has been under development for the past six months, and most of the work has gone into the Settings app. It’s no easy task to organize all of the options, toggles, and links needed for a desktop PC – as we’ve learned from Windows 10/11 andmacOS Ventura....

Google has improved its ability to detect scam messages in Google Messages, the default texting app on most Android phones. It now stops billions of suspicious messages every month, and uses on-device processing to protect user privacy. This upgrade is a big step forward for Android security, as it tackles the increase in scams that start out seeming harmless but end up causing financial loss or stolen data. Before, Google Messages' Scam Detection mainly focused on package delivery and job-seeking scams....

They won’t be winning Olympic gold medals any time soon, but a team of researchers from Google’s DeepMind have developed an AI-driven robotic system. It matches the capabilities of an amateur-level human tennis player and which can handily outperform beginner-level players. “Achieving human-level speed and performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics research community,” the team wrote in a study titled, “Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis,” published Thursday....

In early 2022, Google and Valve announced that Steam would be coming to Chrome OS. This instantly made Chromebooks much more capable gaming devices. It took a long time for this to happen, so how does it work? Technically, there are two ways to play Steam on a Chromebook. You can download theSteam Link Android app, which streams games from your PC to the app, or the newer method that lets the games actually be played on your Chromebook....

Summary Video game review scores are meant to give you a good way to quickly judge if a game is worth looking into further, but thanks to grade inflation or “gradeflation” video game scores don’t really help that much anymore. This is the same sort of thing that’s happened with ratings of all kinds. If you’ve ever used a service like Uber, you know that giving a driver five out of five stars is the right score for a perfectly average job....

Quick Links Summary You can automatically delete or archive old emails in Gmail by creating a filter. Enter your filter’s search criteria, complete with timeframe, into the Search box. Click the “Show Search Options” button and then “Create filter.” Choose Archive or Delete and then click “Create Filter” to save and apply it. Keeping your Gmail inbox clean can be quite a task these days. Instead of manually looking forold emails you want to deleteor archive, you can set up a filter to do this automatically based on a selected timeframe....

Quick Links Summary You can view your Word document’s character count on your desktop and mobile devices by accessing the app’s “Review” tab and selecting the “Word Count” option. In Word for Windows and Mac, you can also add the character counter to the app’s status bar. Microsoft Word makes it super easy to count the number of characters in your documents. You can use the status bar or the dedicated Word Count option to view that information....

Quick Links Summary As ofiOS 17 and iPadOS 17, your iPhone and iPad can alert you when you’re holding your devices too close to your face. Here’s how the Screen Distance feature works and how to enable it. What Is Screen Distance (And Who Should Use It)? Screen Distance uses the TrueDepth camera (that powers FaceID on iPhones and iPads) to assess the distance between your eyes and the screen continually....

Summary It’s practically impossible to avoid uploading files to the cloud these days: even if you avoid cloud sync tools like OneDrive, you’re eventually going to need to share something with someone. Here are some tips to reduce the risk of that data being used for unintended purposes. Why You Need To Secure Your Cloud Uploads “The cloud” has become a catch-all term for any online storage—and it’s never been as secure as we’d like to believe....