15 New Articles on MakeUseOf

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• Facebook Lets You Rest In Peace, Testing Windows 10 For Phones [Tech News Digest]
• 5 Online Sources for Disposable Email Addresses
• Get Ready For Valentine’s Day: Learn to Say ‘I Love You’ Around The World
• No, Low Gas Prices Are Not the End of the Electric Car
• Banish Your Number Phobia With a Bit of Everyday Math
• Future Video Game AIs Will Seriously Freak You Out
• Can A Video Game Jump Start Your Next Rewarding Creative Hobby?
• Free Cloud Storage Upgrades: Grab 100GB of OneDrive & 2GB of Google Drive
• 7 Useful Tricks for Mastering a New Programming Language
• Samsung’s Latest Smart TVs Are Straight Out Of George Orwell’s 1984
• 5 Brilliant Ways Tech-Savvy People Worked Around Censorship
• 5+ Cross Platform Excel Alternatives for When You’re out of Office
• How & Why You Need To Install That Security Patch
• 13 Essential Firefox Addons To Begin 2015 Right
• Buy & Sell through Facebook, Discover Apps through Pinterest [Tech News Digest]

Facebook Lets You Rest In Peace, Testing Windows 10 For Phones [Tech News Digest] Posted: 13 Feb 2015 03:30 AM PST Facebook deals with death, Windows 10 for Phones, Phorm’s tactile tablet, Saturday Night Live on iOS, Spotify’s Sweet Spot, and possibly the worst retail training video of all time. Facebook Introduces Legacy Contacts What happens to your Facebook when you die…? I wonder how many deceased profiles there are… … Goto sleep brain — 2t0ne (@2t0neDJ) February 13, 2015 Facebook is changing the way it deals with the user accounts of those that have died. Until now, Facebook memorialized the account held by the deceased, making it viewable but not editable in any way. Now, users have two distinct options... Read the full article: Facebook Lets You Rest In Peace, Testing Windows 10 For Phones [Tech News Digest]

5 Online Sources for Disposable Email Addresses Posted: 12 Feb 2015 08:30 PM PST Privacy is the buzzword on today’s Internet, and signing up for dodgy online services using your real email address is one way to have that privacy instantly violated. Whether it is spam offering you a totally fantastic sex life, or your desire to email sensitive information without being identified, you always need to create a buffer between the spammer and the “real you”. That buffer is a disposable email address. Addresses which are instantly generated by a site for a one-time purpose and then discarded. Some forward the email(s) to your real address, while others have a continually refreshing inbox... Read the full article: 5 Online Sources for Disposable Email Addresses

Get Ready For Valentine’s Day: Learn to Say ‘I Love You’ Around The World Posted: 12 Feb 2015 06:30 PM PST Valentine’s Day, whether it’s a day that you think of just a “Hallmark Holliday” or a real day worth celebrating, is almost here! Restaurants around the world are being booked solid with reservations as people prepare for one of the biggest date nights of the year. The theme of Valentine’s Day is love, so why not have a little fun this year and learn to say “I Love You” in all different languages? After taking a look at this inforgraphic, you’ll be able to travel all over the world and tell anyone that you love them. Of course, that’s all you’ll... Read the full article: Get Ready For Valentine’s Day: Learn to Say ‘I Love You’ Around The World

No, Low Gas Prices Are Not the End of the Electric Car Posted: 12 Feb 2015 12:00 PM PST If you’ve been to a gas station in the last couple of weeks, you already know the big news: gas prices are down, hard. Prices are expected to drop below $2.00 per gallon before the end of the month. The reason for falling oil prices is complicated — a number of factors, including growth of non-petroleum fuels like natural gas, have conspired to drive down demand while increasing supply. As a result, fuel is cheap, at least for now. For most people, this is good news — gas is used by everyone, and making it cheaper is good for the economy.... Read the full article: No, Low Gas Prices Are Not the End of the Electric Car

Banish Your Number Phobia With a Bit of Everyday Math Posted: 12 Feb 2015 11:00 AM PST If you have ever followed a recipe, you have used algebra. Sat down to plan the layout of the living room? There is geometry in angles and corners. Remember the bar argument over NFL player averages? Statistics got you a round of beer. We are all mathematicians. Even then we ask — what is the role of math in everyday life? It’s a common question, and we still don’t see the answers. Math isn’t only the nightmare of homework from childhood. One-touch smartphone calculators and personal digital assistants bring us the answers, but mathematics remains a life skill. But how enjoyable is it?... Read the full article: Banish Your Number Phobia With a Bit of Everyday Math

Future Video Game AIs Will Seriously Freak You Out Posted: 12 Feb 2015 10:00 AM PST Let’s be honest: video game AI (artificial intelligence) isn’t all that great.  It’s functional (most of the time), but it lacks the flexibility and common sense of real people.  You can see this in the enormous popularity of  online multiplayer games — most computer-generated characters fall flat in complex situations, so we turn to other people to pick up the slack. Consider the first five seconds of this video: While it’s amusing to see a cop nonchalantly drive over another cop in GTA, it also instantly breaks the illusion that the characters are thinking beings. However, that sad reality is beginning to shift, thanks to... Read the full article: Future Video Game AIs Will Seriously Freak You Out

Can A Video Game Jump Start Your Next Rewarding Creative Hobby? Posted: 12 Feb 2015 09:00 AM PST Do you regret never finding time to pick up a creative hobby? There are lots of reasons you might fail to make headway in picking up your desired skill, from lack of discipline to just being too busy. One reason you might not have considered is that you weren’t learning from a resource that’s as fun as it is educational. Video games can teach and motivate you where other learning tools fall flat. Really? Video Games? Skeptical? Consider the possibilities for a moment. Let’s say you wanted to learn to play the guitar. You could purchase or borrow a guitar,... Read the full article: Can A Video Game Jump Start Your Next Rewarding Creative Hobby?

Free Cloud Storage Upgrades: Grab 100GB of OneDrive & 2GB of Google Drive Posted: 12 Feb 2015 08:30 AM PST Cloud storage is getting cheaper by the day, but nothing beats downright free. Some of the top services have come up with a few schemes that will raise your online gigabytes without spending a dime. Get 100GB of Microsoft’s OneDrive for Free Microsoft has the best offer of the lot, giving away 100GB of space for two years on its cloud storage service OneDrive. Here’s what you need to do: Sign up for or log in to Bing Rewards. Bing Rewards is a promotional program from Microsoft with which you get paid to search with Bing, among other things. Click... Read the full article: Free Cloud Storage Upgrades: Grab 100GB of OneDrive & 2GB of Google Drive

7 Useful Tricks for Mastering a New Programming Language Posted: 12 Feb 2015 08:00 AM PST Programming is hard. The only folks who say otherwise are the ones who have years of coding experience under their belts. It’s okay to be overwhelmed! There’s a lot to learn and you’ll probably forget things as quickly as you learn them. Trust me: that’s normal. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean that it isn’t frustrating. Truth be told, learning how to code can be extremely stressful if you don’t approach it with the right mindset and attitude. You want to learn that new language or library or framework as soon as possible, right? That’s understandable. Fortunately, there are... Read the full article: 7 Useful Tricks for Mastering a New Programming Language

Samsung’s Latest Smart TVs Are Straight Out Of George Orwell’s 1984 Posted: 12 Feb 2015 07:30 AM PST The trend for ‘smart’ devices hasn’t stopped at phones, thermostats and smoke detectors. Even your TV is ‘smart’ now, boasting all kinds of functionality that hasn’t been seen before, including third-party applications and Internet TV. But a feature in the latest Samsung TVs has put the Korean giant in a bit of hot water. It turns out they’ve been listening to everything you’ve been saying in front of them, and people are rightly furious. Watching Me, Watching You It’s worth stressing that not every Samsung TV is affected; only the ones which can support voice commands. If your Idiot Box has... Read the full article: Samsung’s Latest Smart TVs Are Straight Out Of George Orwell’s 1984

5 Brilliant Ways Tech-Savvy People Worked Around Censorship Posted: 12 Feb 2015 07:00 AM PST An ad-hoc mesh network, spreading across Havana, connects people without Internet access. Hot air balloons carry news  of the outside world, and American TV shows, to the people of North Korea. When it comes to protesting oppressive regimes, brutal anti-demonstration tactics, and widespread censorship, the Internet is an invaluable tool. But what happens when you can’t rely on the Internet? What if the stranglehold of censorship is too tight, physical access is restricted, or the threat of repercussions is too great? Here are five stories of overcoming adversity to share information in the most difficult of situations. Havana’s Wi-Fi Network... Read the full article: 5 Brilliant Ways Tech-Savvy People Worked Around Censorship

5+ Cross Platform Excel Alternatives for When You’re out of Office Posted: 12 Feb 2015 06:00 AM PST Worried about making the switch from Windows to an alternative operating system? People will try to scare you. They’ll tell you it won’t be the same. They’ll say your carefully worked Excel spreadsheets will never function anywhere else. Those people are wrong. Excel is an amazing piece of software, but we live in a prosperous, software laden world where you can choose from many Office alternatives. We’ll explore some cross-platform Excel alternatives, as well as some of the online applications you can use to “bridge” your documents between software now available to us. LibreOffice – Calc & OpenOffice – Calc Topping the list... Read the full article: 5+ Cross Platform Excel Alternatives for When You’re out of Office

How & Why You Need To Install That Security Patch Posted: 12 Feb 2015 05:00 AM PST Updates can be infuriating. They’re also necessary – and putting them off can put you and your personal information at risk. Yes, it’s annoying when Windows or OS X insists on updating – especially when you were starting to get some work done. But these and other updates don’t exist just to bug you: they protect you. And putting them off makes the job of anyone who wants to compromise your system that much easier. What Do Patches And Hotfixes Do? Security patches are designed to fix vulnerabilities in the software you use. What are vulnerabilities? Basically, they’re mistakes that... Read the full article: How & Why You Need To Install That Security Patch

13 Essential Firefox Addons To Begin 2015 Right Posted: 12 Feb 2015 04:00 AM PST Mozilla’s Firefox was the browser that really brought the idea of extensions to the front, enabling users to customize their web browser to the hilt. There are already some fantastic Firefox Add-ons and meanwhile, Firefox itself got a lot better with Firefox 35, which introduced the new video chat Firefox Hello, as well as Firefox Share and Marketplace. But as always, the spotlight is on what developers did with the open-source browser’s flexibility. The list of Firefox add-ons just got bigger and better over the past year. Imagus: Hover Over Images To Zoom Popular Chrome extension Imagus was recently ported... Read the full article: 13 Essential Firefox Addons To Begin 2015 Right

Buy & Sell through Facebook, Discover Apps through Pinterest [Tech News Digest] Posted: 12 Feb 2015 03:30 AM PST Facebook channels Craigslist, Pinterest discovers apps, LookFor is dumb, House of Cards leaks, play with a First Person Lover, and the Hitman: Agent 47 trailer kills YouTube stars. Facebook Improves For Sale Groups People on facebook you had one job. pic.twitter.com/FWSmhzUoAG — You had one job (@_youhadonejob) February 11, 2015 Facebook is actively making it easier to buy and sell items in Facebook Groups. Members who belong to a For Sale group will now have access to a new Sell feature, which makes the whole process of listing an item for sale much easier than it was previously. According to... Read the full article: Buy & Sell through Facebook, Discover Apps through Pinterest [Tech News Digest]

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