Articles about How To

At the WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple demoed iOS 9. New features include updates to Apple Pay, a News app, improved Notes, a more intelligent Siri, updated keyboard, split screen on iPad, and a new low power mode that promises to deliver up to three more hours of battery life.

If you’re an iOS user, it looks like a great update, and you’ll be able to try out the public beta when it is released in July (the finished version will be released in the fall). But hold on, you don’t want to wait that long? Well the good news is there’s a developer preview already available, and it’s possible to install this with or without a dev account. A word of warning though, don't skip the backup step as according to Apple, "Devices updated to iOS 9 beta cannot be restored to earlier versions of iOS".

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Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicks off today, Monday 8 June, in San Francisco, with the big keynote speech scheduled for 10am PST/6pm BST.

As WWDC is for software developers, Apple doesn’t usually reveal major new hardware -- typically it’s just updated versions of existing products. You can certainly expect news on iOS 9 and OS X 10.11, as well as Apple Watch.

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Microsoft has just released ISO files for Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10130. This build is currently only available to Insiders on the Fast ring due to the presence of a couple of major bugs that Microsoft is looking to squash before making the release available to testers on the Slow ring. The ISOs have been released to allow people who are having problems upgrading through the usual Windows Update route to install the build.

As with the previous releases, Build 10130 is still an early version of the OS, so you wouldn’t be advised to run it as your main operating system, especially with those unresolved bugs, and while you could set it to dual boot, running it in a virtualized environment is a much more sensible idea.

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As we saw in a recent Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) survey (conducted by PwC), the number of security breaches inflicted on UK businesses has increased considerably this year.

The report showed that the cost of a breach rose to an average of £1.46 million, up from £600,000 the previous year. It also revealed that 90 percent of major British organizations, and 74 percent of small to medium-sized businesses were hit by security breaches.

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LG's Android handsets are not the best choices for enthusiasts. Bootloaders are tightly locked, so loading a different kernel or installing another distribution is next to impossible. And there is no official tool that lifts the restrictions, even if that would mean having the warranty voided. Without getting a Nexus 4 or Nexus 5, you are out of luck. Heck, even iPhones are friendlier to the modders.

Fortunately, LG is well aware of the enthusiasts' interest in its devices, so it has finally taken the first step towards embracing the community's ways by allowing G4 users to unlock the bootloader. Here is how it can be done.

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Tracking business costs can be a murky job, especially when it comes to driving. With so many variables and potential accidents on and off the road, it is hard to see where and how money can be saved.

A recent study by Nestle highlights this. The chocolate maker calculated that it needed to sell 235 million KitKats just to cover the costs incurred through road accidents across Europe.

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Many times we are required to scan a document (an image file, basically) and edit it. This could be relatively easy if it were a small document or it could be tedious and time consuming if the document were long.

Therefore, we need a software of some kind that can convert images into editable text files. This would allow us to avoid the lengthy process of having to type out the entire document and then edit it. In this article, we will discuss how to edit a scanned document. Optical Character Recognition is a technology that allows us to convert image files into Word files. This technology has been around for quite some time now and only gets better day by day. The name itself implies that the technology is used to recognize characters from a document. Let’s explore how this is done.

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On Friday Microsoft surprised us by releasing a new build of Windows 10 to Insiders on the Fast ring. This build includes new and updated icons, improvements to the Microsoft Edge browser (still called Spartan, unbelievably), Jump List tweaks and more.

Microsoft has also introduced additional options for customizing Windows 10. In particular, you can now easily choose what appears on the Start menu. It’s very easy to make changes to the OS's appearance, so let’s take a look at the options.

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At its developer conference I/O 2015, Google today unveiled Android M, the latest iteration to its mobile operating system. The update brings with it a handful of interesting features and other improvements. The full-fledged version of Android M will roll-out sometime later this year, but for those who want a sneak peek a developer preview version of Android M for select Nexus devices is out now. Here’s how you can install it on your smartphone or tablet.

Android M comes with a number of interesting features including Chrome custom view, built-in fingerprint scanning feature, and permission manager. The company says that with the new update it is going back to the basics -- offering bug fixes and performance improvements to the users. For instance, Android M-powered devices will have twice as much battery life compared to Lollipop-powered devices, the company claims.

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If you like the idea of trying out the next version of Windows before it is officially launched, Microsoft has made the Windows 10 Technical Preview available for everyone to use. There are various ways to get the preview installed on your computer, but since the release of build 9926, it is possible to upgrade your current Windows 7 or Windows 8 installation to Windows 10 using Windows Update.

This is a much simpler option than downloading the ISO image, but it is an upgrade route that almost encourages people to install the preview build on their everyday computer -- don’t forget that this is not a finished product! We've already looked at how to install Windows 10 in a virtual machine, but if you have a spare machine running Windows 7 or 8, using it as a test bed for Windows 10 just got a whole lot easier.

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Gmail might be the most popular email service in the world, but even the biggest players fall sometimes, and once that happens, the little guys will be there to cheer.

Server outages and crashes have happened before, and even though Gmail is generally seen as a solid, well-built and stable product, it too can crash, leaving you without all those precious emails you’ve been saving.

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A newly released app enables iPad owners to use their tablet as a second monitor for their desktop PC.

Duet Display uses the iPad’s charging cord to connect to your PC and is now compatible with both Mac and Windows devices.

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The "Internet of Things" is a buzzword which is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s society. This is mostly due to the rise of crowd funding schemes and an insurgence of low power, highly capable microcontroller platforms such as Arduino.

The Equity Kicker expects 33 billion devices connected by 2020 with a large portion of them falling under the IoT umbrella term and Forbes are predicting some pretty mind-bending revenue estimates over the next few years. Many of these devices are greatly enhanced by increased connectivity to the internet where they have access to large amounts of cloud based computing power.

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Even though my Internet connection is fast and my computer is up to the task, whenever I play 4K videos in Google Chrome -- usually on YouTube -- playback stutters heavily, forcing me to opt for a lesser quality for a seamless experience. Switching to another browser, like Safari, will solve the problem, but this is hardly a fix that I can live with.

Fortunately, Google is working on a solution, introducing an experimental option in Chrome that will make 4K videos finally run as they should -- smoothly, that is. Here is what you need to know.

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Scripts and batch files are great for automating complex tasks, but they’re not so good at keeping you informed about their progress. Typically you’re forced to Alt+Tab back to the command prompt window to try and figure out what’s going on.

ToastNotification is a tiny console tool which offers an alternative, at least for Windows 8 users. It allows you to display toast notifications -- pop-up status messages which disappear after a few seconds -- from your own scripts.

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