Tips

The tech podcast for technophobes is back with news of the Amazon Kindle for kids, how to maximise gaming on a Mac, and tips for booting your Windows 10 PC into Safe Mode. Plus we take a look at some cash back apps, text adventures you can play in your browser, and Google Maps’ new

There are several virtualization tools available to Windows 10 users. But three tools dominate the market: VirtualBox, VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V. But which of these virtual machine tools is best? Moreover, aren’t they all the same? Choosing between VirtualBox, VMware Workstation Player, and Windows 10 integrated Hyper-V is difficult. Here’s how the three virtual machine

Apple has streamlined its portable Mac offerings into two distinct laptops: the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. For a few years, Apple attempted to replace the outdated MacBook Air with the generically-titled MacBook. This never quite took off, so Apple returned the MacBook Air to its former glory with new models. Both the Air

If you’re new to PC gaming, you might not have ever explored video game graphics settings. Most people know that higher settings are better, but what do all those game settings actually do? We’re here to explain the most common video game graphics settings. We’ll see how they work and how they affect your system

The term “social media bot” is no longer just associated with chatbots or customer service AI. Rather, social media bots have a far more unseemly reputation nowadays due to malicious misinformation campaigns. But what exactly are these malicious social bots? How do you spot the different types? And are there tools that can help you

Christian Cawley and Megan Ellis bring you this week’s collection of techy tips and tricks for technophobes. This week: Instagram’s restrict feature, router speed tips, how to upgrade your smartphone, the vital new Google password check feature, how to add podcasts to Spotify playlists, and find your favorite old cartoons online. We’ll also show you

RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory, is a short-term storage location your computer uses for running processes. You might not think much about RAM besides the amount of it when buying a new computer. But not all RAM is created equal. Different generations of RAM provide different speeds and are only compatible with certain

When you create your own file server or network-attached storage, you might be surprised how much thought you need to give to moving your files around. To the human eye, each approach looks the same (as in invisible), but on the technical level, your computers are talking in very different ways. Which approach you take

If you’ve ever downloaded a torrent, you will have undoubtedly come across terms like “magnet” and “info hash.” Most people think they’ll never need to worry about what the terms refer to or how they relate to the downloading process. But sometimes it’s beneficial to know. Today, we’re going to look at what magnet and

This week Gavin Philips joins Christian Cawley to mull over some of the important tech news of the past week in the tech podcast for technophobes—the Really Useful Podcast! Tune in for news about YouTube Music, how a Chinese fugitive was found by a drone, as well as tips for recovering data from a scratched

A good router can make a massive difference to the speed of your internet connection. But if you don’t have the money to fork out on a top-of-the-range model, what other avenues are open to you? If you want to know how to optimize router settings for speed or how to establish the best router

With companies vying for consumer interest and a crowded smartphone release cycle, you’ll likely feel the pressure to upgrade to a new smartphone sooner than expected. After all, within six months manufacturers are already promoting the latest and greatest release. But do you really need to upgrade your device? Here are five questions you should

India has a huge spam call problem and anyone who has a SIM card in India probably gets a few unsolicited calls from people trying to sell credit cards, offering personal loans, or even promising outlandish returns if you invest in the stock market. If you’ve faced this issue, you’ll be happy to know about

Your compact disc (CD) is scratched and won’t play. Perhaps it is an album of music, maybe you have photos on the disc. Or perhaps it’s a DVD that is scratched, with your favorite movie on it, or even a game disc. Want to get that scratched disc working again? Amazingly, you can! Here’s how

Many of the world’s most popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp allow people to set their display name and a profile picture. This feature was missing on iMessage until the arrival of iOS 13. If you’d been missing this feature on iMessage, here’s your chance to set a custom name and profile photo. The latest iOS

If you’re eyeing a new iPhone 11, or hoping to pick up a Pixel 4, you might find they have a feature you don’t know much about: the eSIM. An eSIM is a smaller, built-in version of the traditional SIM card, and it’s coming to a phone or other smart device near you soon. But

Ever wanted to take a screenshot of a long article on any website? Until iOS 12, your best bet was to take multiple screenshots and stitch them together using another app. With iOS 13, you can screenshot an entire webpage easily as long as you’re using Safari. We’ve already seen long screenshots on some flavours

Optical media is fragile. A few scratches here and there and your CDs and DVDs can easily become coasters on your table. I have had plenty of them myself. Let’s look at some of the ways to repair damaged CDs and DVDs and recover data from those scratched discs. These tips will also work on

Megan Ellis and Christian Cawley catch up to bring you the latest tech news that matters in the Really Useful Podcast, the tech podcast for technophobes. This week, Megan has details about the launch of the Huawei Mate 30, an Android phone that significantly ships without Google apps. We also find out if your iPhone

iOS 13 is loaded with a tonne of new features, and one of those new features is now available for the stock iOS keyboard. Apple calls this feature QuickPath and it allows you to swipe across the iPhone keyboard to type. While certain keyboard apps for iOS, such as Gboard and Swiftkey, already support this

There have been some big gaming-related updates to iOS 13. Apple Arcade is the most prominent of these changes, but that’s not the only one. Now the Dualshock 4 controller for PS4 and some official Xbox controllers are also supported on iOS 13. Controller support has been available on iOS for a few years now, but

iOS 13 adds a few much-needed features to the Files app and one of these is the ability to open ZIP and other compressed files, as well as the ability to create such files on your device. Now that this feature is baked into Files app on iOS 13, it is much closer to how

One of the prime areas of focus with every iOS release is better security and privacy. And with the release of iOS 13, Apple wants to take this a step further and give users the option to disable Bluetooth access for apps if necessary via a new permission setting. This will present itself in the

With the introduction of iOS 13, Apple has added a new feature to the Safari browser that now lets you automatically close inactive tabs after a set duration. So, if you are the type of person who opens up a dozen tabs, but never closes them, this feature will be really useful. You can choose to

First announced at WWDC in June, iOS 13 is the next big update of Apple’s mobile operating system, and it’s now out for compatible iPhone models. For the first time, iPad users will not get this update, as Apple has announced iPadOS, a new operating system for iPads. While iOS 13 is out now, iPadOS

James Frew joins Christian Cawley to assess the latest tech news that matters in the Really Useful Podcast, the tech podcast for technophobes. This week’s slightly longer show features a mini debriefing on IFA and what products impressed, and we also look at whether you can trust Huawei products, the Google Photos Memories feature, how

With the implementation of the new Motor Vehicles Act earlier this month, the vehicle owners are not only  rushing to get their documents renewed or get the Pollution Under Control (PUC) certification, they are also looking for official ways to store their documents online to show it to the Traffic Police or ways to pay

Linux is everywhere these days. For the ultimate proof, look no further than Windows. With the release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel with its operating system. Not that long ago, that would have seemed like an April Fools’ joke. While Linux may provide the backbone for a

There are many online tools, browser extensions, and desktop plugins to turn a webpage into a PDF. If you regularly use these tools, you might come across a situation when you need to convert multiple links in one go. Doing them one-by-one is a waste of time and tedious. You can automate this task through

Ever wondered what happens at tech trade shows like IFA? Want to block Google Calendar spam? In this week’s Really Useful Podcast you can! PLUS: obligatory retro games talk, and a look at some ridiculous EULA clauses you might have inadvertently signed up to… Really Useful Podcast Season 4 Episode 2 Shownotes In this week’s