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Summary Pixel phone owners love it when Google releases one of its feature-drop updates, enabling new features and fixing bugs on their phones. But if you haven’t updated to the latest one yet, it might be a good idea to wait a few days. The latestMarch Pixel dropoffers a lot, including new scam message detection, improvements to Find My, and other goodies, but it’s not all good news. Unfortunately, countless Pixel owners with phones from the Pixel 6 to the latest Pixel 9 are experiencing odd problems....

Summary Google spent a long while marketing RCS as an SMS killer, and passively-aggressively pressuring Apple into adopting it too as an SMS replacement under its own iMessage app. It seems like efforts have paid off, because RCS seems to be really popular. Google has just announced an interesting statistic—about a billionRCSmessages are sent within the US alone every single day. This includes group chats as well as regular, one-on-one chats, and it means RCS is being used widely by users out there as their default messaging option....

Google has been secretly delisting articles from its search results, and a journalist only found out by complete accident. This was used maliciously already, but Google says the program has now been addressed. This SEO trick lets someone delist specific web pages from the search engine usingGoogle’s Refresh Outdated Contenttool. This lets a site submit pages to be recrawled and relisted after an update. The whole issue was tied to capitalizing different letters in the URL within this tool, which ultimately caused the delisting....

You’ve probably watched recordings or videos of presentations, which are usually screen recordings with a mismatched aspect ratio, random popups from other applications, and other issues that are distracting. Google Slides is now rolling out the ability to record and save a presentation as a high quality video, all in the web browser. Google announced the feature today in its Google Workspace Updates blog. The company said, “We’re introducing slides recordings, a new Google Slides feature that lets you easily record yourself presenting, and then share the presentation with others to view when it works for them....

This week, Googleannouncedits AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot tool, “Bard,” to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It hopes to revolutionize search, but Google’s AI tool is off to a terrible start and already making mistakes. Google is racing totake on Microsoft and Bing, and this new technology will certainly face several hurdles. As we all already know, ChatGPT isn’t all that reliable yet,can’t stop lying, and isn’t intelligent the way we want AI to be....

Summary Half-Life 3is once again making the rounds online, with rumors suggesting that it’s in a fully playable state and could be announced or even released this year. If you ask me, Valve should take a page from Bethesda’s playbook withOblivion Remasteredand just shadow drop it. Half-Life 3Will Inevitably Fall Short of Our Expectations Back whenHalf-Life 2andEpisodes 1and2were released, Valve was a well-respected video game developer, and they continued to be viewed as such into the early 2010s....

Summary UsingHDMI portsmay sometimes be not very straightforward. If you have a different number of image sources and outputs, you might end up looking for HDMI switches and splitters to solve your needs. But are they the same? The answer is simple: they’re very different devices. Below, we explain what an HDMI switch is good for, and what can be done with an HDMI splitter. What’s an HDMI Switch? An HDMI switch is a device that connects multiple image sources, like gaming consoles and computers, to a single HDMI port on a TV or monitor....

Tech devices that may still be in working order often become obsolete once they stop being able to run the latest operating systems. My old second-generation iPad, for example, still works perfectly, but it’s impossible to install most current apps on it as the version of iOS that it runs is so out of date. However, with a little bit of effort, I managed to get it working as a smart home control panel running my Home Assistant dashboard....

Quick Links Summary To disable Fast Startup on Windows 10, open the Power Options menu and go to Additional Power Settings > Choose What the Power Buttons Do. Click “Change Settings That Are Currently Unavailable” and uncheck “Turn On Fast Startup”, then save your changes. Windows 10’s Fast Startup featurehelps turn on your computer faster, but there are times when you may want to disable Fast Startup. We’ll show you what those occasions are and how to turn the feature off....

Quick Links Summary Use the Insert > Chart menu in Google Docs to isnert a chart. you may choose a variety of chart types: Bar, Column, Line, and Pie. The chart will appear with sample data and you can edit the chart’s data in the connected Google Sheet. If you want a graph in your report, proposal, or research paper, you can create one directly in Google Docs. There’s no need to worry about making one elsewhere and embedding it....

Quick Links We were at MWC 2025, the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona this week, where manufacturers were showing off their newest gadgets for mobile connectivity. Here are our favorites from what was announced. Best Concept: Lenovo Yoga Solar PC Concept Lenovo showed off a bunch of concept products at MWC 2025, including the first solar-powered ultraslim laptop—theYoga Solar PC. Measuring just 15mm thin, the laptop is equipped with a Back Contact Cell solar panel that boasts an impressive 24% solar energy conversion rate....

The last time I used a Samsung phone, it was the Galaxy Grand 2—and the TouchWiz UI put me off Samsung for years. Since then, I’ve stuck with cleaner, minimal Android experiences. But lately, Samsung has been showing up on my radar. I’d been hearing good things about One UI 7, and before long, the YouTube algorithm caught on. Soon, my feed was flooded with videos about the new One UI 8 beta....

Summary iPadOS 18 introduces the ability to format external drives using Apple’s tablet, a feature previously reserved for “real” operating systems like macOS and Windows. As iPads become more capable, they seem more viable as full-blown computer replacements. Unfortunately, the iPad still lags behind the Mac in some very important areas. System-Level Customization Desktop operating systems are incredibly customizable. With usefulsystem tweaks to macOS available, as well as downloadable applications and utilities, you can easily tailor your computing experience to meet your needs....