Podcasts are different from what you typically hear on the radio, similar to how YouTube videos are different from what you watch on television. How Podcasts Work A podcast is a series of episodes that are stored in the same type of audio files that we use to store music on our laptop or smartphone. Similar to a television or talk radio show, a podcast is generally centered around a theme such as politics, sports, entertainment, horror, or gaming....

Smart washers and dryers are different from merely digital appliances. They can send notifications to your phone when a cycle finishes, download new wash and dry cycles, diagnose problems, and adjust settings with the control of a smartphone or voice command. What Can a Smart Washing Machine Do? A smart washing machine gives you more control over your laundry than a standard washing machine while offering a few convenient extra features....

What Is a Sound Bar? A sound bar is a product that creates a wider sound field from a single speaker cabinet. Minimally, a sound bar will house speakers for left and right channels, or may also include a dedicated center channel. Some also include woofers, side, or vertically firing speakers. Sound bars complement LCD, Plasma, and OLED TVs. You can mount it on a shelf or table just below the TV, although you’ll usually see them placed just in front of the screen....

Sub-Field Drive Rate vs. Screen Refresh Rate Many consumers falsely believe that the sub-field drive rate is comparable to the screen refresh rate, like the screen refresh rates commonly stated for LCD televisions. However, the sub-field drive rate on a plasma TV refers to something different. The screen refresh rate is how many times each frame repeats within a specific time period, such as 1/60th of a second. Although plasma TVs have a 60 Hz screen refresh rate, these TVs do something, in addition, to smooth out the motion response further....

How DHCP Works A DHCP server issues unique IP addresses and automatically configures other network information. In most homes and small businesses, the router acts as the DHCP server. In large networks, a single computer might take on that role. To make this work, a device (the client) requests an IP address from a router (the host). Then, the host assigns an available IP address so that the client can communicate on the network....

How Fiber Optic Cables Work A fiber optic cable consists of one or more strands of glass, each only slightly thicker than a human hair. The center of each strand is called the core, which provides the pathway for light to travel. The core is surrounded by a layer of glass called cladding that reflects light inward to avoid loss of signal and allow the light to pass through bends in the cable....

What Is Hi-Res Audio? To fit music into a format that can be easily streamed, as much as 80 percent of the information in the original recording may be lost. The same is true when you convert an original recording from a CD to an MP3 file. The goal of hi-res audio is lossless audio. This means that a music file retains all the information provided in the original studio recording process....

Users can implement and analyze marketing campaigns across all social profiles without signing in to each social network individually. With premium accounts, users get advanced social analytics, audience engagement, team collaboration, and security features. Why Use HootSuite? Although HootSuite is largely known as a business tool, many individuals use it for personal purposes. If you’re posting the same thing across multiple profiles, you can post it once through HootSuite and select the profiles where you want it published, and it will publish it on all five profiles at once....

What Is LinkedIn? Whether you’re a marketing executive at a major company, a business owner who runs a small local shop or even a first-year college student looking for their first job after graduating, LinkedIn is for anybody and everybody who’s interested in taking their professional life more seriously by looking for new opportunities to grow their careers and to connect with other professionals. You can think of LinkedIn as the high-tech equivalent of going to a traditional networking event where you go and meet other professionals in person, talk a little bit about what you do, and exchange business cards....

One way to think of a RAID 10 array is as a RAID 0 with an online backup of each RAID element ready to go, should a drive fail. RAID 10 Requirements RAID 10 requires a minimum of four drives and can be expanded in pairs; you can have a RAID 10 array with 4, 6, 8, 10, or more drives. RAID 10 should be composed of equal-size drives....

Locked, Limited, Restricted, and Suspended Twitter Accounts The Twitter social network has a range of ways to restrict access to user accounts, each with varying degrees of severity. Here are the most-common restrictions Twitter uses and what causes them to activate. Locked Twitter account: When an account is locked, Twitter forcefully logs you out on all of your devices due to suspicious behavior or security concerns. This can be caused by repeated attempts to log in with the incorrect password, too many third-party services connected to your account, or account activity that’s higher than usual....

Flash Was Everywhere So what was Adobe Flash anyway? Adobe Flash, sometimes called Shockwave Flash or Macromedia Flash, was a platform that many websites used to use to play video. It was common to find Flash content on video streaming platforms and websites offering online games. If you’re not very computer savvy, you may have gone years without ever really knowing what it was. Maybe you saw a few update reminders here and there, but otherwise, everything you needed online worked without any hiccups....

While rate plans for individuals, families, and businesses used to be based on the number of calling minutes allotted, companies eventually changed to make the amount of data shared between devices on a family plan the major cost with unlimited calling and texting included for all plans. Now, they have changed again, and each of the big four cellular providers offers a least one unlimited talk, text, and data plan....

Thanks to 5G, the pandemic, and internet preferences in developing countries, mobile internet use is growing faster than ever, according to a new Mobility Report from Ericsson. Right now, the US is lagging behind Europe and North East Asia, but by 2026 it will have the biggest share of 5G coverage worldwide. In the end, 5G might be a bigger deal than anyone realizes. “On paper, 5G is 100 times faster than 4G....

HDTV: It Doesn’t Always Look Better One reason to make the change from analog to HDTV is to access a better quality viewing experience. However, having an HDTV doesn’t always improve things, especially when viewing non-HD analog content. Analog video sources, such as VHS and analog cable, in most cases, look worse on an HDTV than on a standard analog television. The reason for this situation is that HDTVs can display more detail than an analog TV, which you would normally think is a good thing....

Satellite navigation is a fantastic tool for city cyclists. Instead of stopping at every confusing corner to check the map, you can cruise through intersections, line up into the correct traffic lane before you get there, and focus on not getting knocked off your bike. But bike navigation usually has been either exactly the same as car GPS or has followed the same paradigm, only bike lanes included. Google’s new “lite” navigation mode takes things in a different direction....

In December 2020, Google quietly acquired Dysonics, a 3D audio startup. Before its acquisition, Dysonics successfully created the Rondo Motion, a device that allows users to add spatial awareness to audio-wearables without built-in support—like those old headphones you’ve had for five years. Now that Google has acquired the company, many believe it could mean a real push towards the next evolution of audio immersion in headphones, 3D audio—often referred to as spatial audio....

Talk about Valve’s Steam Deck as a “Switch killer” began almost immediately after it was revealed, which I do understand. People contextualize new ideas by comparing them to what they already know, and handheld/big screen hybrids are few and far between. However, there’s no reason two video game consoles can’t exist (or even thrive) at the same time. Yes, I adore my Switch and will continue to do so. I also can make room for a Steam Deck....

There are more than 200 streaming services available today, and many have prioritized these platforms over cable. But too many options and too much content could make us feel too weighed down to keep up with streaming services. “I think people are really starting to get burned out,” Daniel Hess, a filmmaker at To Tony Productions, told Lifewire over the phone. “When [streaming services] have so much content, I think they become an overwhelming sort of beast....

This program doesn’t just show you what’s occupying all the space—it also lets you set up cleanup commands and manually delete data, all from within the program. Thoughts on WinDirStat It can be frustrating to have a hard drive with little remaining disk space, but WinDirStat truly makes it a breeze to understand which folders and files are taking up all that storage. Not only does it show you this information, but it lets you act on it by removing the large (or small) files and folders to clear up space....