Technology - Google News

The Morning After: LG quits the smartphone race - Engadget
Five Windows 10 features you really should be using - ZDNet
Apple Adjusts Trade-In Value of iPad Pro, iPhone 11, and Select Mac Models - MacRumors

The Morning After: LG quits the smartphone race - Engadget

Posted: 05 Apr 2021 04:37 AM PDT

The early reports were right: LG is bowing out of the phone business. With long-running losses and occasionally esoteric devices never quite selling, it makes business sense. LG's dual-screen phones (and the promise of rollable displays, which we'll never see now) were not enough to lure consumers away from the likes of Apple and Samsung.

By the end of 2020, its stake in the global phone market was estimated to be around 1.7 percent, and LG announced it would outsource the designs of more of its low- and mid-range handsets to third parties.

The company won't announce any new smartphones but it will sell through all its remaining phone inventory, so if you're looking for an LG Wing, keep an eye out for fire-sale prices.

— Mat Smith

It could help understand airborne diseases and solve crimes.

Researchers at the Queen Mary University of London have shown you can collect "environmental DNA" (eDNA) from the air, using a peristaltic pump and pressure filters to grab samples of naked mole rat DNA. The method not only pinpointed the mole rats' DNA (both in their housing and in the room at large), but also even caught some human DNA at the same time.

While the method was built for conservation and ecological study, it could be used for much more, with enough development. Forensics units could pluck DNA from the air to determine if a suspect had been present at the scene of a crime. It could also be useful in medicine, to better understand how airborne viruses (like the one behind COVID-19) spread. Continue reading.

Sorry, but I still have time for drone shows.

The Hyundai-owned car brand Genesis marked its entrance into China by launching 3,281 drones into the sky, breaking the Guinness World Record for the most unmanned aerial vehicles in the air at the same time. The show itself was back on 29th March, but Guinness has to check these kinds of things. Expect to see the record broken again, though.

Shenzhen Damoda Intelligent Control Technology flew 'just' 3,051 drones in September 2020, which smashed a record set by a 2,200-drone performance in Russia just days earlier. If you're looking to smash this record, you might want to stock up on drone batteries now. Continue reading.

Ingenuity is poised to make history in a matter of days.

NASA has confirmed that its Perseverance rover deployed its UAV, called Ingenuity, on Mars after a final four-inch drop to the Red Planet's soil on April 3rd. The only challenge now is to make it to the flight itself, which could take place as soon as April 11th. For now, Ingenuity needs to charge itself using its own solar cells, ready for its first trip — a 30-second hover. Continue reading.

Data has been circulating privately since January.

Hackers have reportedly been sharing a massive amount of personal Facebook data since January. Security researcher Alon Gal has discovered that a user on a hacking forum has made the entire dataset public, exposing details for about 533 million Facebook members. The data includes phone numbers, birth dates, email addresses and locations, among other revealing info. About 32 million of the users are in the US, while 11 million are from the UK and another 6 million come from India. Continue reading.

But wait, there's more...

Pornhub's first transparency report details how it addresses illegal content

You still can't buy the base OnePlus 9 Pro

The best projectors you can buy in 2021 and how to choose one

Extreme E's first race ends with a small amount of drama

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Five Windows 10 features you really should be using - ZDNet

Posted: 05 Apr 2021 05:00 AM PDT

If you've spent a few years with Windows 10, you've probably mastered the basic actions, which means you're reasonably productive. But some of the most interesting productivity boosters are not immediately obvious. That's especially true for new features that Microsoft adds as part of a feature update. If you're not paying attention to the release notes, you might not notice the new stuff.

That's the point of this post, where I've assembled five well-hidden Windows 10 features that I guarantee will save you time and help you avoid unnecessary clicks.

Snip & Sketch

Capture, mark up, and share any part of your screen

If you're old enough to remember those early releases of Windows 10 from 2015 through 2018, you might have missed this feature, which didn't arrive for the masses until more than three years after the debut of Windows 10. (In version 1809, to be specific.) And it's improved steadily since that first version.

You'd be amazed at how often the ability to capture and share all or part of your screen comes in handy. Share a screenshot on Twitter? Check. Copy part of a map to help friends find you? Absolutely. Document something horrible posted by someone on social media? Sadly, yes.

Unlike MacOS, which hides this feature under some truly obscure keyboard shortcuts, everything's in one place in Windows 10. Press Windows key + Shift + S to shift into screenshot mode. Choose your preferred capture option (full screen, window, rectangle, or freeform) from the toolbar, and then press Enter. After you're done, you can open the app to crop, edit, annotate, paste, print, save, or share your capture.

You don't even have to remember that keyboard shortcut. You can click to open Action Center and then click or tap the Screen Snip option. Even easier? Use the Snip & Sketch Settings menu to redefine PrtScrn as the hotkey that opens Snip & Sketch.

Clipboard History

This essential Windows feature is no longer a one-trick pony

Ctrl + C, Ctrl+ V. Even if you don't know any other keyboard shortcuts, you've certainly memorized these two, which copy a selection to the Windows Clipboard and paste it into a target app, respectively.

For years, the Clipboard was stubbornly dumb, with the ability to remember one and only one thing. Whatever you copied in most recently displaced the previous Clipboard contents, making for some maddening window-switching gymnastics to copy a group of items from one place to another.

That's all changed, with the addition of the Clipboard History feature in version 1809. This tool keeps the most recent 25 items on the Clipboard so you can reuse a copied item even if it's not the most recent. You can pin items to the list (boilerplate text or a logo, for example) and even sync clipboard contents between Windows devices.

To open Clipboard History, press Windows key + V. That's a keyboard shortcut worth remembering.

Bonus: Insider previews show a version (coming soon to a Windows 10 near you) that allows you to paste a Clipboard item as plain text and a new design that makes the Clipboard History part of the same picker you use to insert symbols and emoji.

Battery Report

Get the lowdown on your laptop battery

How long does your laptop run on battery power when you're on the go? I'm not talking about the ever-shifting estimates of remaining battery life that you get as you're working, but actual observed usage.

ed bott's windows 10 tips

And as long as we're on the subject of battery power, do you know how much capacity your battery has right now? How does that current value compare to the original design specs for your laptop?

It's astonishing to think that all of these crucial bits of information are so well hidden. Thankfully, Windows 10 allows you to get answers to both questions in an extremely readable report. The only downside is that you need to use a slightly obscure command-line option to generate the report.

Right-click Start, click Command Prompt (Admin), and say yes to the User Account Control prompt. (If you see a PowerShell menu item where Command Prompt normally appears, open a PowerShell [Admin] session and then type cmd and press Enter.)
At the command line, type cd %userprofile%\Documents and press Enter to change to your personal Documents folder.
Type powercfg /batteryreport and press Enter. A status report will confirm you've saved the report to the current folder as an HTML file.

Now open File Explorer and double-click the saved Battery-report.html file in your Documents folder. It's packed with detailed historical information about battery usage, including a comparison of the design capacity for your battery versus the current capacity. The Battery Life Estimates table at the bottom lets you see the range of battery life you can expect from each charge based on historical performance.

Free OneDrive storage

You get 5 GB of cloud storage for no cost; use it for backup

When you sign in to OneDrive for the first time, you get the option to back up these system folders to the cloud.

Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service is built into Windows 10. Sign in to the OneDrive client using a Microsoft account and you get 5 GB of storage for free. (If you have a Microsoft 365 account, that allocation goes up to one full terabyte.) If you don't have a Microsoft account, you can create one for free.

What can you do with those five gigabytes? The best option, as far as we're concerned, is to allocate that space to cloud backup. Windows 10 makes it easy to do that. When you sign in for the first time, you're given the option to redirect three core system folders -- Documents, Downloads, and Photos -- to OneDrive. Click OK, and all three of those folders are automatically copied to the cloud and synced automatically.

As we've recommended before, you can combine this cloud backup strategy with a local backup to create a nearly foolproof system for protecting the files you care about most. (For details, see "PC and Mac backup: How to protect your data from disaster.")

Connect a USB drive or removable storage and turn on File History (Settings > Update & Security > Backup) to build a comprehensive backup strategy.

Touchpad shortcuts

If you have a Precision Touchpad, you can do much more than point and click

These gestures are fully customizable so you can change the four-finger swipe to control audio and volume if you prefer

How can I put this delicately? Trackpads on Windows PC used to, um, suck. They sucked like the world's most powerful bilge pump.

And then along came the Precision Touchpad and, holy moley, these pointing devices became downright sophisticated. Today, if a laptop doesn't have a Precision Touchpad, it's off my "OK to buy" list.

Fortunately, most modern Windows 10 PCs have gotten with the program. To see whether your Windows 10 laptop has a Precision Touchpad, go to Settings > Devices > Touchpad and look at the top of the page. If you see the message "Your PC has a precision touchpad," you're good to go.

On that same page you can see and edit all the shortcuts built into Windows 10. The default settings include three- and four-finger gestures that let you switch between apps and desktops easily. It's worth spending some time on these shortcuts. You'll be repaid impressively in the long run.

My favorite is the three-finger swipe, which lets you switch into and out of Task View with a swipe up or down (the same as if you press Alt+Tab). You can use a two-finger tap to right-click, and redefine gestures to suit your preferences. If you don't use multiple desktops, for example, you might want to redefine those gestures to control your audio source and volume.

Windows 10

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Apple Adjusts Trade-In Value of iPad Pro, iPhone 11, and Select Mac Models - MacRumors

Posted: 05 Apr 2021 01:54 AM PDT

Apple has adjusted the trade-in values of a number of its products, including the majority of the iPad and Mac lineup, while also making some changes to iPhone.

Apple's trade-in program allows customers to trade-in older devices, and receive a certain amount of value for them, to use towards a purchase of a new device. The exact trade-in value a device has is measured by its condition, when it was released, and its manufacturer. Apple last notably updated its trade-in prices in December, and furthermore, it has made some more changes over the weekend.

It's important to note that the value shown on Apple's website reflects the maximum possible trade-in value for a product.

On the ‌iPad‌ lineup, the iPad Pro has had its value go up by $45 to $580, versus the previous $535. The standard ‌iPad‌ trade-in value has gone down by $15 to $235. In the Mac family, the MacBook Air is now valued at $530, down from $600. The discontinued MacBook is down by $40 to $340, and the discontinued iMac Pro is valued at $2,940, down $100. iMac value has had a reduction by $130 to $1,050, and the Mac mini down $60, to a value of $770.

With the ‌iPhone‌, Apple has also made some changes. The maximum trade-in value of the iPhone 11 Pro Max is up by $15 to $515, the iPhone 11 Pro up by $5 to $465, and the ‌iPhone 11‌ up by $20 to a maximum value of $380. The ‌iPhone‌ 6S Plus value has gone up to $65, versus $60.

Recently Apple also expanded the list of Android devices eligible for trade-in, adding the Google Pixel 4a, Pixel 5, and Samsung Galaxy Note 20. More information about Apple's trade-in options can be found on its website.

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