The Complete Guide to Giving Better Family Tech Support

Did You Know? In ancient China, some soldiers wore armor constructed of layered paper and cloth that, much like the layers of Kevlar in a modern bulletproof vest, offered incredibly good protection against enemy weapons. Geek Trivia Long Before It Was A Dietary Supplement, Spirulina Was A Food Staple For? Hawaiians → Eskimos → Egyptians → Aztecs → Advertisement Download Windows 10 Simplified ($17 Value) FREE For a Limited Time Fully updated to cover Windows 10, this highly visual guide covers all the new features in addition to the basics, giving you a one-stop resource for complete Windows 10 mastery. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Install Software from Third-Party PPAs in Ubuntu How to Add a Tilt-Shift Effect to Make Your Photos Look Like Tiny Models in Photoshop The Complete Guide to Giving Better Family Tech Support How to Enable (or Disable) Google Search in Android’s Gboard Keyboard How to Change the Login Screen Background In macOS Sierra, Yosemite, and El Capitan How to Hide NVIDIA GeForce Experience’s In-Game Overlay Icons and Alt+Z Notification How to Modify the Icon of an EXE File How to Add Events to Your Google Calendar Using the Address Bar in Chrome Forget the Facebook App: Use the Mobile Site for a Less Annoying Experience How to Install Mods for the Skyrim Special Edition on the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 How to Migrate Your Windows Installation to a Solid-State Drive Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Chad Chad is the term for the confetti-like pieces of paper that are punched out of punch cards, paper tapes, and the borders of continuous forms. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It Amazon's personal assistant is about to stretch beyond the Echo, and get downright chatty with everyone. [Back Channel] Op-ed: Why I'm not giving up on PGP Key discovery is an issue, but Signal can't replace PGP. [ArsTechnica] The story behind The New York Times' largest and most ambitious crossword puzzle A 50 x 50, 728-clue monstrosity called the Super Mega [The Verge] Building Jarvis (Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Personal Account of Building his own AI) "My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home -- like Jarvis in Iron Man." [Facebook] How to Install Software from Third-Party PPAs in Ubuntu PPAs, or “Personal Package Archives”, offer software that isn’t available in Ubuntu’s software repositories. Some PPAs offer newer versions of software packages that hasn’t made it to Ubuntu’s repositories yet. Installing software from a PPA is easier than compiling the software from its source code, so it’s good to know how to do it. Read This Article → How to Add a Tilt-Shift Effect to Make Your Photos Look Like Tiny Models in Photoshop The tilt-shift effect is a weird optical illusion where a regular photo looks like a photo of a toy model. By creatively blurring different parts of the image, you trick people's eyes into interpreting everything in it as really tiny. Read This Article → The Complete Guide to Giving Better Family Tech Support It’s that holiday time of year again, and that means it’s over the river and through the woods to…well, fix your family’s Wi-Fi and other tech problems. Read This Article → How to Enable (or Disable) Google Search in Android’s Gboard Keyboard Google Keyboard for Android has a new name: Gboard. This puts it in line with the iOS keyboard of the same name, bringing many of its features (and more) to Android. One of Gboard’s best new features is built-in Google Search from anywhere a keyboard can be accessed (think of it as a “portable” Google Assistant). In our experience, it seems to be enabled on some phones, but not others, by default. Read This Article → How to Change the Login Screen Background In macOS Sierra, Yosemite, and El Capitan When you turn your Mac on, do you notice the blurred image behind the login screen? By default it’s a blurred version of Sierra’s iconic wallpaper, or a blurred version of your current wallpaper. Read This Article → How to Hide NVIDIA GeForce Experience’s In-Game Overlay Icons and Alt+Z Notification The latest version of NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software brings a new in-game “Share” overlay that replaces the old “ShadowPlay” feature. Install GeForce Experience 3.0, sign in, and you’ll see a “Press Alt+Z to share your gameplay” popup and icons at the bottom right corner of your screen every time you launch a game. Read This Article → How to Modify the Icon of an EXE File Let's face it: some apps have really ugly icons. Sure, you could always create a shortcut to your EXE file and then change the icon for the shortcut, but what fun would that be? Here's how to change the icon for the EXE file itself. Read This Article → How to Add Events to Your Google Calendar Using the Address Bar in Chrome Say you’re browsing the web in Chrome and you remember you need to add a meeting to your calendar. Instead of opening a new tab and accessing your calendar, or using the Google Calendar Chrome app, you can add an event to your calendar right from Chrome's address bar with this trick. Read This Article → Forget the Facebook App: Use the Mobile Site for a Less Annoying Experience Facebook's Android and iPhone apps aren't great. The iPhone app has had bugs that cause it to drain battery in the background, and it could be using up to 20% of your battery on Android. What’s more, Facebook once even reportedly made its Android app crash on purpose once. Read This Article → How to Install Mods for the Skyrim Special Edition on the Xbox One or PlayStation 4 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is now available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and for the first time, "mods" are available to console gamers. Read This Article → How to Migrate Your Windows Installation to a Solid-State Drive Many older (or cheaper) Windows laptops come with traditional mechanical hard drives—which these days, are pretty outdated and slow. Upgrading to a new, super fast solid state drive (or SSD) is the surest way to speed up an old computer. There’s one problem: moving your Windows installation can be tricky, especially since SSDs are often smaller than their traditional hard drive counterparts. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Windows 10 Simplified ($17 Value) FREE For a Limited Time Fully updated to cover Windows 10, this highly visual guide covers all the new features in addition to the basics, giving you a one-stop resource for complete Windows 10 mastery. Click here to download