What Is “Health Connect by Android”? Health Connect was announced at Google IO in May 2022. Following Google and Samsung’s collaboration on Wear OS 3 for the Galaxy Watch 4, the two companies teamed up to work on Health Connect as well. The idea behind Health Connect is to make it easier to sync health and fitness data between Android apps. Multiple apps can be hooked up to Health Connect, and then they can share your health data (with your permission) between each other....

AMP is a framework for making fast mobile sites, and it currently powers over 43% of search results. Switching your site over to AMP can give you a huge boost in traffic. How does it work? What Is AMP? If you’ve ever opened a news article from Google search results on your phone, you’ve likely encountered AMP before. It’s cached by Google, so the URL bar starts “www.google.com/amp” and has a header with the actual website name, and a link to the non-AMP page:...

The spreadsheet you are probably most familiar with is Microsoft Excel. But have you ever wondered why Excel looks and acts the way that it does? Why does Excel arrange data in a grid of cells? Why are columns identified by letters, and rows by numbers? The answer, like most things in IT, is because of compatibility. VisiCalc The first “computer spreadsheet” as we recognize it was VisiCalc, by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979....

But you may have noticed you can now schedule a text on Android or iPhone. A text! That casual blue bubble filled with bad grammar and dumb emojis and slang that’s gradually murdering the English language. Why would someone need to schedule a text? If someone regularly texts as part of their professional life, then they likely schedule texts for the same reason we all schedule emails. It’s the people who use this feature for social reasons that I’m interested in....

Phishing has been the main driver behind most big security breaches over the past few weeks, including LastPass, Uber, and Rockstar Games. While steering safe from phishing involves a lot of common sense, there are ways for tech to help you, such as a new feature in Windows SmartScreen. Microsoft has announced a new feature for Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, called “Enhanced Phishing Protection,” which warns people if they are entering a known password into an unsecured application or file....

What Does HTTP/2 Do? If you’re not on HTTP/2, you’re likely using HTTP/1.1, which was released in 1999 when webpages were just a single HTML file. Nowadays, webpages make multiple requests for images, CSS, and JS, and while you should try to cut down as much as possible on extra requests, it isn’t feasible to set your tech back to 1999. HTTP/1.1 has a problem though, in that it can only transfer one data stream per connection....

WindowBlinds is a popular application for customizing the look and feel of Windows, which has been developed by Stardock since 1998. Now there’s finally a release for Windows 11. Stardock has released a beta version of WindowBlinds 11, the first version to fully support Windows 11. Just like previous versions, you can apply custom skins to the entire operating system, easily change system fonts, and design your own skins if you don’t like the existing library....

Valve has announced that it’s finally removing its virtual reservation system. That means that the company has finally ramped up its production enough to let everyone just place an order at any time. If you want a Steam Deck, and you can pay for it now, you can just go to Steam’s website and get one ordered. The device is available in 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB — we definitely recommend you get one of the more expensive options if you can afford it, since PC games can get heavy....

The rsync Tool The rsync tool copies files and directories between two computers. It uses a sophisticated algorithm that scans directory trees to find files on the source computer that don’t exist on the destination computer. These files are transmitted to the destination computer. What makes rync so clever is it can figure out which pieces of existing files have been modified, and it only sends the changed portions. You can use rsync to copy files to a different location on your hard drive, to a different hard drive in the same computer, to an externally connected USB drive, or any other network-accessible location....

What’s the Deal With Frames? To ensure everyone’s on the same page, the frame rate of a video game is the number of unique sequential images displayed on-screen. These frames are “rendered” by the game’s device and sent to the display. There are two main reasons that higher frame rates can improve the experience and presentation of video games. First, more frames equate to smoother motion on the screen. The lower the frame rate, the greater the gap in visible motion....

The idea is that instead of using the mouse or flipping through a set of windows in the Alt+Tab switcher, you can quickly assign a hotkey to your most important windows and switch to them with a single keystroke, saving yourself a lot of time. To accomplish this task on Linux, we’ll use the excellent AutoKey utility. Note: if you want the Windows way to do this, you can accomplish the task with AutoHotkey easily....

Creating a bootable USB flash drive is surprisingly easy with a small self-contained application called UNetbootin. It will even download Ubuntu for you! Note: Ubuntu will take up approximately 700 MB on your flash drive, so choose a flash drive with at least 1 GB of free space, formatted as FAT32. This process should not remove any existing files on the flash drive, but to be safe you should backup the files on your flash drive....

App Tabs in Action You can see how much room three tabs are taking up in the “Tab Bar” and if we want these tabs to reopen the next time we start Firefox then we would have to set them as “Homepages”. They could also be saved to a folder on the “Bookmarks Bar” and reopened manually. But if they only need to be “saved back” for a short time both methods can be kind of inconvenient....

Customize Live Writer’s Dictionary Adding an individual word to the Windows Live Writer dictionary works as you would expect. Right-click on a word and select Add to dictionary. And changing the default spell check settings is easy too. In the menu, click Tools, then Options, and select the Spelling tab in this dialog. Here you can choose your dictionary language and turn on/off real-time spell checking and other settings....

Microsoft has been exploring new user interface styles in many of its newer applications, including the Ribbon in Office and the new typography and 2D animation interface in Zune for PC as well as the Zune and Windows Phone 7 devices. This latter style, codenamed Metro, has been adopted by several Windows programmers who have made nice, modern applications that look great on Windows 7. Bend is a beautiful new text editor that incorporates this new style great with the latest WPF technologies....

Note: Greasemonkey extension required (link at bottom of article). Using Greasefire Here is what the “Right Click Menu” looks like with just Greasemonkey installed… Once you have installed Greasefire you will be able to easily see if there are any scripts available or not for your favorite websites. Here you can see the results for a website that had no scripts available. Now for a website that does have scripts available…you will be able to see an immediate difference in the “Status Bar Icon”....

The problem is most likely because ClearType is not enabled by default when you setup Windows in a virtual machine. For example, take a look at these two shots: Without ClearType (notice the jaggy fonts) With ClearType: The second screenshot is a lot more readable, especially on an LCD screen. Enable ClearType in XP Head into the Display Properties via the desktop context menu, open up the Appearance tab and click the Effects button....

Requirements Windows 7 or Vista Microsoft . Net 3. 5 Framework Preparing your Media Files For Media Browser to be able to automatically download images and metadata for your media libraries, your files will have to be correctly named. For example, if you have an mp4 file of the movie Batman Begins, it needs to be named Batman Begins.mp4. It cannot be Batmanbegins.mp4 or Batman-begins.mp4. Otherwise, it’s unlikely that Media Browser will display images and metadata....

Electromigration: It’s Atomic! A CPU works thanks to the flow of electricity through microscopic electronic components made from semiconductor materials. As electricity moves through the CPU’s circuits, heat is generated. If the current generates enough heat, this will actually move atoms of the metal from one part of the circuit to another part of the circuit further down the line. If this happens long enough, it can cause that circuit to fail....

Our Old Friend, the Password The humble password is still the most common method of authenticating yourself to gain access to a computer or online account. Other systems exist and will continue to appear and evolve but right now, the password is ubiquitous. The password is a child of the sixties. During the development of the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), computer scientists realized the files belonging to each user needed to be isolated and protected....