Huge improv theater

The Apple Watch should have enough charge to last you a full day with moderate-to-heavy use. If you don’t use it a ton, you might even get more than a day out of it! But what do you do when your Watch battery just doesn’t last long enough? Here are some tips for making your Apple wearable last longer. Disable Always-On Display (Series 5 and Later) The Apple Watch Series 5 and later (except the SE) boasts an always-on display. This means there’s no need to flick your wrist or tap the screen to see the time. Apple uses some clever tricks to reduce power consumption to make this possible, including lowering the display’s refresh rate from 60Hz (60 refreshes per second) to just 1Hz. You can save even more power by simply turning off the always-on display, and then just raising the Watch to wake it. To do so, open the Watch app on your iPhone, tap General > Display & Brightness, and then uncheck “Always On.” Use a Dark Watch Face and Reduce Brightness The display in … [Read more...] about How to Improve Your Apple Watch’s Battery Life: 12 Tips

Computational photography is responsible for most of the amazing strides our smartphone cameras have taken in the last decade. Here’s how it works, and how it makes our photos so much better. The Magic of Computational Photography Computational photography uses digital software to enhance the photos taken by a camera. It’s most prominently used in smartphones. In fact, computational photography does the heavy lifting to create the great-looking images you see in your smartphone photo gallery. The rapid improvement in smartphone cameras over the last few years can largely be attributed to improving software, rather than changes to the physical camera sensor. Some smartphone manufacturers, like Apple and Google, continuously improve the photo-taking capabilities of their devices year after year without ever drastically changing the physical camera sensors. Why Does Computational Photography Matter? How a camera digitally captures a photo can be roughly divided into two … [Read more...] about What Is Computational Photography?

On February 1, 1991, John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack officially founded id Software. The group went on to revolutionize the game industry with franchises such as Wolfenstein , Doom , and Quake . Here’s a look back at id Software over the last 30 years, with a little help from those legendary developers. id Software: The House That Keen Built The story of id Software began in the late 1980s, when John Carmack, John Romero, Adrian Carmack (no relation to John), and Tom Hall developed games for a mail-order disk magazine company called Softdisk , located in Shreveport, Louisiana. After John Carmack devised a breakthrough scrolling technique for PC games in mid-1990, Hall, Romero, and Carmack created a new platform game— Commander Keen —based on the technology while secretly moonlighting at Softdisk. Soon the talented group began communicating with Scott Miller of Apogee Software , a pioneering shareware publisher. After some … [Read more...] about From Keen to Doom: id Software’s Founders Talk 30 Years of Gaming History

Outlook data files can get very large over time, especially if you get a lot of attachments. Even if you delete old messages, the size of your Outlook data file is not reduced accordingly. Your Outlook data files ( .pst and .ost files ) include all your emails (in all your folders, including sent emails), contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, and notes, as well as their associated file attachments. As you send and receive more emails and attachments, add more appointments to your calendar, and create more tasks and notes, your Outlook data files can easily grow to several gigabytes in size. Mine is one gigabyte, but that’s still pretty large. RELATED: How to Automatically Empty the Deleted Items Folder When Exiting Outlook Even if you empty the Deleted Items folder, or have it automatically emptied when you exit Outlook , the space occupied in the data file is not released. You can, however, reclaim that space by compacting your Outlook data file. Here’s … [Read more...] about How to Reduce the Size of Your Outlook Data File

Telegram and Signal are widely popular privacy-focused messaging apps. However, the two apps have some big differences : While all messages sent via Signal are always end-to-end encrypted by default, Telegram messages aren’t. End-to-end encryption is an optional feature in Telegram. Why End-to-End Encryption Matters End-to-end encryption means that only the sender and the receiver of a message can see its contents. Not even the company running the server in the middle of the conversations can see the contents of the communications. With Signal, all conversations are always end-to-end encrypted: The Signal Foundation can’t see the contents of the messages. With Telegram, the company in charge of Telegram is technically capable of seeing the contents of the messages on its servers. There is still some encryption in Telegram, of course: Encryption is used to transmit messages between your Telegram app, Telegram’s servers, and the other person’s Telegram app. Your … [Read more...] about PSA: Telegram Chats Aren’t End-to-End Encrypted by Default