Technology

1. A Boss Key
2. A Disco Drop
3. An Escape Hatch
4. A Panic Button

Think you know the answer?

There are many reasons to live within Apple’s walled garden, and Apple Pay is one of them. Here we’re going to run through the steps that must be taken to set up, and then use, Apple Pay on an iPhone.

Apple Pay is Apple’s way of making it easier for its users to spend money, and even though that doesn’t necessarily sound like a great thing, it can be a real life changer. With Apple Pay in tow, depending on your location, leaving home without a wallet is possible, and if you’re particularly forgetful, that can be huge. Contactless payment via Apple Pay and other such technologies is ubiquitous in many parts of the world, and the United States is starting to catch up, too. That means that Apple Pay is more helpful than ever.

Setting up Apple Pay is one of the first things you should do when getting a new iPhone, though making payments has changed slightly with some of Apple’s most recent iPhone releases. Fear not though—we’re going to hold your hand the whole way through. Let’s get started.

To get the ball rolling, open the Wallet app and then tap the “Plus” icon in the top-right corner.

The next screen will tell you a little bit about Apple Pay and what it can do. Tap the “Continue” button to move on.

Now, you’ll need the physical card that you want to add to Apple Pay. You can either scan the card by placing it inside the frame and using your iPhone’s camera or tap the “Enter Card Details Manually” button. If you follow the latter route, you will be asked to enter all pertinent information—card number, your name, expiration date, and security code.

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Fortnite is the biggest game of 2018, so if you know someone who games regularly, there’s a good chance they’re playing it. The game itself is free, but players need to use in-game V-Bucks to buy customizations.

While you can’t directly gift V-Bucks to another player, you have a couple of options to help them get their Fortnite fix: buy them a gift card for their platform of choice, or buy a bundle with specific content.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what platform your gamer usually plays on. Since there’s no such thing as a “Fortnite gift card,” you have to buy a card for the specific platform. For example:

• PlayStation: If they play on PlayStation, a PlayStation Store gift card will do the trick.
• Xbox: Xbox players will need, you guessed it, an Xbox Gift Card.
• Switch: For Switch players, you’ll need to grab a Nintendo eShop gift card.
• PC: There isn’t a specific store for PC gamers to buy Fornite stuff from, but you can get them a generic pre-paid Visa to use towards in-game currency.
• Android: The same goes for Android players—since the game uses Epic’s own launcher (like the PC version), a pre-paid debit card is the way to go.
• iOS: Since Fortnite is available from the iOS App Store, an iTunes gift card is the best answer here.

Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and other retailers usually carry physical versions of platform-specific gift cards, which you can stick inside an envelope for your gamer to unwrap on their Winter Solstice holiday of practice. 

The player will need to redeem the gift or debit card on their own once they get back to their system, but after that, they can use that money to buy anything from those digital stores. That means they can buy another game, downloadable content, or Fortnite’s V-Bucks. What the player chooses to use the gift card for will be up to them—you have no way to “force” them to use it on V-Bucks.

If you want to make sure they get something they can use in-game, Fortnite also offers specific outfits as downloadable content (these are digital items you purchase in stores). For example, your gamer can get The Summit Striker Pack, which unlocks the Summit Striker outfit, the Top Notch Bling Pack and 600 V-Bucks.

Another option is the Deep Freeze Bundle. This costs $30 and unlocks the winter-themed Frostbite Outfit, Cold Front Glider, Chill-Axe Pickaxe, and 1,000 V-Bucks. If your gamer already has any of those cosmetic items, they will instead receive a comparable amount of V-Bucks. This bundle is available digitally, or in stores like Best Buy, so you still have something for your gamer to unwrap on the holidays.

What’s the most annoying thing about Windows Update? If you said the reboots, Microsoft has got you covered. Soon, Windows Update may be able to reboot your PC immediately after updates rather than waiting for a convenient time—wait, what?

It sounds ridiculous, but that’s one of the latest features reported by Albacore (@thebookisclosed) on Twitter. He’s found various other new Windows features before Microsoft has officially announced them, including the Windows Sandbox recently. We imagine Microsoft is at least testing this feature, even if it never makes it into the stable version of Windows.

Here’s the good news: This feature is optional. If you like, you can “stay up to date with a new setting that automatically restarts your device to install updates as soon as they’re ready.” Windows Update promises it will always notify you and give you the opportunity to postpone the reboot. But, if you’ve stepped away from your PC for a few minutes, you might return only to see that your PC has suddenly rebooted and you missed the countdown.

If you happen to be some sort of die-hard Windows Update fan, Microsoft has got you covered. New feature that restarts ASAP is in the works. pic.twitter.com/KUnwNGf3jq

— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) December 19, 2018

This feature just boggles our minds. Who asked for this? Windows can already reboot fairly quickly after updates, using features like Active Hours to restart when you’re not using your PC. Recent versions even use machine learning to detect whether you’re using your PC before restarting. Who asked for Windows Update’s reboots to be even more aggressive? Even Apple’s iPads don’t have an option to reboot this aggressively for automatic updates.

Windows 10’s next big update already includes a new system tray icon that can alert you when you need to restart, too. So there’s even less need for this feature!

If this “restart ASAP” feature ever does arrive, it will likely be part of the next version of Windows, codenamed 19H1 and scheduled for release around April 2019. It’s an optional feature, so it doesn’t really matter—but who would use this feature, and why?

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It’s the year-end holiday shopping season. You are supposed to be brimming with rewards, rebates and gifts not only from brick-and-mortar stores. Especially as a fan of How-to Geek, you should have spent your Christmas and New Year more cozily. Joking aside, you are here to be treated with an exclusive giveaway of WinX DVD Ripper Platinum V8.9.0 (the very latest version that just got updated on Dec. 13) sponsored by Digiarty Software generously. Cheers!

The biggest benefit? Well, ripping DVDs with the software that is available free (in limited time) is conducive to more comfy and flexible enjoyment of movies during holidays yourself or with your families and guests. For example, you can have the movie copies prepared on your NAS, USB flash drive or external flash drive in advance, to enjoy full movies on TV while sitting on the big living room with next to no sifting through the best movie result from the online streaming apps.

How-to Geek readers can receive the FULL licensed copy for free >>

In parallel, the also-on-page Lifetime License and huge software pack for family video processing offered by Digiarty are at astonishing discounts. For some people, the 75% off cover-all multimedia software pack may be more appealing.

Visit the page to get 75% off coupon for complete software pack >>

What can you do with WinX DVD Ripper Platinum

Here’ an official introduction on its features and functions:

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Controlling the lights in your house using your voice is a great way to dip your toes into the smarthome world. And if you already have a Google Home, here are some of the best smart light switches to buy that are compatible with the smart speaker.

You could go with smart bulbs instead, but smart light switches are already a familiar format—no smart home lesson necessary for houseguests—and they work with your existing light bulbs. So if you know how to change out a light switch (or know someone who can help), then smart light switches can be a great way to go.

With that said, here are the best smart light switches that work with your Google Home.

Honestly, the best option no matter what the circumstances are is the Lutron’s Caseta line, and a starter kit comes with the necessary hub, one smart dimmer switch, and one Pico remote, which lets you control the light switch from across the room without getting up from the couch.

Lutron invented the dimmer switch and has perfected it over the years. And now you can get one in smart form. The company’s Caseta line of smart light products uses its own proprietary RF wireless protocol instead of Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, or ZigBee, so it won’t interfere with any of your other smarthome devices.

These switches can be put on a schedule or a timer, and you can even create different scenes where you can set specific brightnesses for specific switches in your house. And obviously, you can control them with your voice using your Google Home.

Perhaps the best feature, though, is that the switches don’t require a neutral wire, which isn’t always present inside of a light switch box, especially in older houses. So this makes Caseta switches a recommended buy for just about any setup.

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Steam offers a generous refund system. You can refund any game you purchase through Steam, for any reason—whether it isn’t working properly on your PC or you just don’t find it fun.

This feature encourages you to try games you’re not sure about. If you don’t like a game, you can always refund it and get your money back. It’s particularly useful now that so few games offer free demos.

There are two basic requirements for when you can get a refund: You must have purchased the game in the last 14 days, and you must have played the game for less than two hours.

If you meet these requirements, Valve promises it will refund you for any reason. You can ask for a refund on a game even if you don’t meet these requirements—Valve will take a look at your request, but won’t guarantee a refund.

You can’t refund games that you purchased outside of Steam and added to Steam with a product key (at least, not through Steam—you’d have to request a refund through the original retailer). While you can sometimes save money on Steam games by purchasing Steam keys from third-party game stores, this feature encourages you to buy games through Steam if you think you might want to refund them.

If you refund a lot of games, Valve may consider this “abuse” and stop offering refunds to you. “Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games,” according to Valve’s policy. Valve doesn’t specify exactly what they consider “abuse”, but you should probably be fine as long as you’re not regularly buying a large number of games and refunding most of them.

Valve notes that refunding a game purchased before a sale and buying it at the lower sale price isn’t considered abuse. So, if you purchase a $60 game and it goes on sale for $30 a few days later, you can refund the game and purchase it at the lower price—as long as you’ve played it for less than two hours.

Your refund can be returned to the same payment method you purchased the game with, or to Steam Wallet credit you can spend on Steam. Read Valve’s Steam refund policy for more specific details about how the policy works.

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The last thing you want on Christmas Day is for your kids to be unable to play the game console they’ve waited so long to enjoy. Read on as we highlight why you need to pre-game your console gift giving experience.

If you’re not a gamer yourself, you might be curious as to why we’d recommend unpacking your child’s game console and setting it up just to turn right back around and repack it for them to open on Christmas Day.

RELATED: How Your PC Could Replace the Gaming Console in Your Living Room

Unlike the game consoles of today the consoles of yesteryear, ranging from the early first-generation game consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey right up to fifth-generation consoles like the Sony PlayStation, had hard-coded firmware that rarely (if ever) received any update.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System you bought back in the 1990s is still running the same operating code that it shipped with (and most likely still plugging along just fine despite 20 years of no updates). Game consoles were simply designed differently back then because there was no easy mechanism by which they could be updated.

Starting with the sixth-generation of game consoles and the introduction of over-the-network updates for the original Xbox game console suddenly updating your game console became a thing. That thing has proved to be persistent element of modern gaming and the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, and Switch all feature over-the-network updates as do many handheld gaming platforms like newer versions of the Nintendo DS product line (so, in fact, the tips in this PSA also apply to portable game devices too).

Not only do the game consoles themselves need updates but the games we play on them need updates (and often need to be downloaded in the first place before we can even begin to update and play them).

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Ice cube molds don’t have to be the same old tried and tested format to be worth purchasing. We’ve checked out the best quirky novelty ice cube molds out there for the perfect Christmas gift.

We already looked at the best practical ice molds available for those that take their drinks super seriously, but how about if you just want something fun for the holidays? Or to form molds for your own homemade chocolate or ice cream? There’s a whole wealth of great options out there, so we’ve picked out some of our favorites. Sure a perfect sphere might be the best way to scientifically cool your drink without watering it down… but it lacks the character of a bunch of Darth Vader heads or U

Don’t forget to pop them out of the tray carefully so their unique shape doesn’t get damaged along the way. Running a little warm water across the back of the mold goes a long way towards wiggling them free with the more delicate features intact.

Who doesn’t love Star Wars? This set of 8 Star Wars Silicone Ice Trays has shapes resembling the Millennium Falcon, R2-D2, a Stormtrooper, Darth Vader, and the Death Star. My personal favorite? Han Solo in ice form rather than carbonite.

Nothing says festive cheer like an ice cube shaped like a skull. Ok, so this 3D Skull Flexible Silicone Ice Cube Mold Tray might suit Halloween more so than Christmas but if your loved one likes something a little different and less cutesy to their ice cubes, then this is the ideal solution.

The tray forms four giant ice skulls of 2.36 inches in size, so they’ll melt good and slow in your drink. They look pretty impressive too.

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Photography isn’t just a technical pastime; it’s an art. While it’s important to understand how to control your camera, it should be so you can capture the kind of photos you want, rather than so you can take boring, if technically correct, photos.

Here is a technically perfect, awful photo. It’s well exposed, there are good shadow and highlight details, the colors are accurate, and it’s thoroughly and completely boring.

And here is one of my favorite photos that I’ve taken this year. It was shot with an old film camera, so the quality isn’t perfect. There are a few development artifacts, and it’s a little soft. But it’s a much more interesting image than the photo of my light switch.

Now, this is an extreme example, but it’s a point that holds across all areas of photography. There is something more to photography than just technical perfection. It’s more than just taking photos of pretty places or people, and it’s what separates art from snapshots and good photos from bad. The word for that something more is composition.

Composition, at its most basic, is how you place your subject (and everything else) in your image. While it’s rare that you’ll be able to physically position buildings and trees where you want them to be, your choice of focal length, aperture, and where you stand all drastically change how different things will appear in the frame.

RELATED: What Focal Length Should I Use For My Photos?

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Microsoft just announced Project Mu, promising “firmware as a service” on supported hardware. Every PC manufacturer should take note. PCs need security updates to their UEFI firmware, and PC manufacturers have done a poor job of delivering them.

Modern PCs use UEFI firmware instead of a traditional BIOS. The UEFI firmware is the low-level software that starts when you boot your PC. It tests and initializes your hardware, does some low-level system configuration, and then boots an operating system from your computer’s internal drive or another boot device.

However, UEFI is a little more complicated than the older BIOS software. For example, computers with Intel processors have something called the Intel Management Engine, which is basically a tiny operating system. It runs in parallel to Windows, Linux, or whatever operating system you’re running on your computer. On corporate networks, system administrators can use features in the Intel ME to remotely manage their computers.

UEFI also contains processor “microcode,” which is kind of like firmware for your processor. When your computer boots, it loads microcode from the UEFI firmware. Think of it like an interpreter that translates software instructions to hardware instructions performed on the CPU.

RELATED: What Is UEFI, and How Is It Different from BIOS?

The last few years have shown over and over why UEFI firmware needs timely security updates.

We all learned about Spectre in 2018, showing the serious architectural problems with modern CPUs. Problems with something called “speculative execution” meant programs could escape standard security restrictions and read secure areas of memory. Fixes to Spectre required CPU microcode updates to function correctly. That means PC manufacturers had to update all their laptop and desktop PCs—and motherboard manufacturers had to update all their motherboards—with new UEFI firmware containing the updated microcode. Your PC isn’t adequately protected against Spectre unless you’ve installed a UEFI firmware update. AMD also released microcode updates to protect systems with AMD processors from Spectre attacks, so this isn’t just an Intel thing.

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Chromebooks have always been great if you can do your work with web apps (and now Android and Linux apps). But most people still find themselves keeping a separate Windows machine for specific tasks. That might change soon. 

The “AltOS” feature first started appearing in Chrome OS commits back in April. Those first commits revealed Windows support, leading us to believe that Google intended to let users boot both Windows and Chrome OS on the same machine. All of the commits so far reference “Eve”, the codename for the Pixelbook’s motherboard.

The next round of commits showed up in September. This gave us the icon that may be used when the Chromebook boots to a different OS, as well as some of the keyboard combinations users will have to press to boot to the alternate OS. There’s no telling if these key combos are just for Google’s internal testing, or if it will survive until the feature is on consumer devices.

That brings us to today. Google appears to be continuing its work on letting Chromebook users install Windows 10 right alongside Chrome OS. There appear to be some caveats, of course, the main one being storage. About Chromebooks’ Kevin Tofel states that Chromebooks will likely need at least 40 GB of free storage to dual boot Windows, because Windows needs room for the OS itself and space to download updates. This excludes most Chromebooks under $500 since the machine will need to ship with 64 GB or more of internal storage at the very least.

The latest round of commits also mentions how the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) will handle multiple operating systems without compromising security, though there isn’t any real user-facing information just yet. This isn’t something the end user really needs to care about anyway, but they’re critical steps in making sure Dual-Boot will work properly and securely.

Right now, it appears Google is still only testing this feature—codenamed “Campfire” and likely to be officially named “Dual-Boot”—on the Pixelbook. There’s a precedent for new features coming to Google’s own devices first. Google has offered other features like Google Assistant integration on the Pixelbook before making it available to other Chromebooks.

Of course, you may have been able to dual-boot Windows and Chrome OS in the past, but it was hacky at best and involved installing custom firmware. This newer method will presumably just require a toggle in the Settings menu.

While we should see dual-booting with Windows come to the Pixelbook soon, there’s no telling when (or if) the feature will come to other Chromebooks. When Android and Linux app support rolled out, some reasonably modern Chromebooks didn’t get those because they used an old kernel version. There’s a chance the same thing will happen when it comes to Windows support.

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1. Angry Birds
2. StarCraft II
3. Draw Something
4. Diablo III

Think you know the answer?

You’ve undoubtedly bought music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks off of iTunes before, but it was likely for yourself. If you’re wanting to buy something from the iTunes Store and gift it to someone else, here’s how to do it.

RELATED: How to Remove DRM From iTunes Movies and TV Shows

The process for gifting digital content in iTunes is surprisingly complicated, mostly because it’s not intuitive how to get there.

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up the iTunes Store app.

From there, either browse and find the piece of digital content you’re looking for or hit the “Search” tab at the bottom of the screen.

At the top of the screen, type in the title of the movie, song, album, or whatever it is you’re looking for. In my case, I’m looking for a specific audiobook by Dale Earnhardt Jr. to give to my mom.

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When you need a gift for the book lover in your life, it’s tempting to buy them a bunch of books, but there are plenty of more original ideas that you can also pursue. Here are some of the best gift ideas for avid readers.

Like any hobby, it’s nice to have other gifts than simply get the obvious choice. Sure, you can buy a games lover an extra game, but it’s nice to have related and supplemental gifts that compliment your hobbies. That’s what we’ve focused on here, with a variety of differently priced ideas so they’ll suit every budget. Plus, there’s room for one very key gift idea.

Here’s our pick of the bunch when it comes to gifts for the avid reader in your life. If you get to the end of the list and you want even more great gift ideas for readers, check out our favorite 8 products for book lovers (that aren’t books).

If, somehow, your loved one doesn’t already own a Kindle Paperwhite, then this is the perfect opportunity to buy them one. It’s the thinnest and lightest Kindle yet, so it’s easy for everyone to hold and take with them. The 300 ppi glare-free display reads like real paper, even when you use it in bright sunlight. A built-in light means there’s no time of day where you can’t enjoy reading something on this device. It’s waterproof too so you won’t have to worry about using it on the beach or in the bath. This Kindle works with Audible, so it’s ideal if you want to dip into audiobooks.

There’s the choice of 8gb storage or 32gb but we’d stick with 8gb. It’s good for most people, and still offers enough room for you to store audiobooks as well as traditional tomes too. The book lover in your life is going to adore this.

For the book lover who prefers a physical copy than a Kindle version, light can be an issue. After all, it’s useful to be able to see what you’re reading! The Energizer Clip Book Light is an inexpensive solution. Simply clip it onto a nearby surface and it recreates natural reading conditions for your eyes. It has a compact design, as well as a collapsible neck, so you can easily store it in your bag when traveling.

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Steam’s Winter Sale is finally here with thousands of PC games on sale. It’s practically a holiday tradition at this point. The sale lasts two weeks, ending on January 3, 2019.

What is there to even say about Steam’s sales at this point? If you’re a PC gamer, you know how awesome they are. If you’re new to the whole PC gaming scene, you’ll find thousands of games on sale—from big-budget AAA blockbusters to awesome indie games you might not find anywhere else.

The sales should stay the same for the whole two-week period, so you can buy games whenever you like without waiting for a bigger sale. Steam advertises different sales on its front page every day, with some of today’s front-and-center deals being the Assassin’s Creed franchise for up to 67% off and zombie parkour simulator Dying Light for 60% off.

As usual, some of the sales on older games are especially huge. For just $2.99, you can own Valve’s Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Portal. That’s about 75 cents per game.

There’s also an “extremely cozy cottage” you can visit once per day for some free digital items. Steam’s website says these are “of varying usefulness,” and they include normal Steam items you can keep forever and other “knick-knacks.” Any knick-knacks will expire on February 2, 2019.

If you’re buying games from Steam, remember Steam’s awesome refund policy. If you don’t like a game or it doesn’t run on your system, you can get all your money back as long as you’ve played the game for less than two hours. You have to initiate a refund within the first two weeks after purchasing a game, however.

RELATED: How to Get Refunds for Steam Games

Other sites are competing with Steam’s winter sale, too. If you have Amazon Prime, Twitch Prime is giving away a bunch of free games, including Hotline Miami and its sequel. The Humble Store is giving away LEGO Lord of the Rings until December 22. And GOG has its own big sale, if you like your PC games DRM-free.

Windows 10’s default Start menu is a cluttered mess, but it’s about to get better in the Windows 10’s next version. That release is codenamed 19H1, and will be released sometime around April 2019.

Just look at that new Start menu in Insider build 18305! Sure, it’s not perfect—you can still see Candy Crush Saga and other similar mobile games if you squint—but at least they’re buried in a tile folder. The Start menu now has a simple one column layout with much fewer tiles pinned by default and much less junk. You can also uninstall many of these apps completely in the new update.

This is just for new Windows 10 PCs, new user accounts on existing PCs, and fresh installs of Windows 10. Microsoft will leave your current Start menu layout alone “because [they] want everything to be exactly as you left it before you did the update.”

If you’re wondering whether the new layout is really that much more simplified—well yes, yes it is. Here’s the default Start menu layout for a new user back in the April 2018 Update:

Yikes. Bring on the update!

This isn’t the only new feature in the latest insider build, which is packed with cool stuff. We love the new Windows Sandbox feature, which will let you safely run Windows applications without worrying about malware or junk files that will get scattered across your system.

RELATED: How to Use Windows 10’s New Sandbox (to Safely Test Apps)

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What do you buy an avid retro gamer? So glad you asked! Read on to find out more about the best gifts for the retro gamer in your life.

It’s often tough to know what to buy a loved one so it stands to reason that you focus on one of their key interests. For retro gamers, you can’t really easily hop onto eBay and buy them a bunch of old games. For one thing, it’s pretty expensive but also you might end up buying the wrong titles or for the wrong platform. Instead, buy these retro gaming related items—you won’t wipe out your bank account, and they’ll still appreciate the effort you’ve put into thinking of them.

Here are the best gifts for retro gamers.

Ok, so the Super NES Classic is the most expensive thing we’ve included here, but wow, does it offer value for money. The device offers 21 classic SNES games including Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Zelda: A Link To The Past, Super Metroid, and basically everything you loved from your childhood. It also tosses in Star Fox 2 which was never released for the SNES.

It’s fun for all the family but especially for retro game lovers. It comes with two wired controllers and it’s powered by USB, so it’s pretty convenient to set up. Want more options for retro game consoles? Check out our treatment of the topic here.

Nostalgia is an understandable driving force behind retro gaming. The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech is a great book for bringing all those lovely old memories back to the forefront of your mind. It looks back at the arrival of home computers as well as games consoles, with a plethora of screenshots to make you feel nostalgic.

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If you receive an email that contains linked images, Outlook does not download those images automatically by default. You can change this behavior if you want, but there risks to doing so. Let’s take a look.

To be clear here, we’re not talking about messages that contain images as attachments or about message into which the sender has inserted images (since those work pretty much like attachments). We’re talking about images that contain URL links to images that are hosted online.

When you get a message that contains images, Outlook prevents the download of those images and shows you a message at the top of the mail.

The reason for this is that Outlook has to download these images from an external server, which means that the server (and therefore the sender) will know that your email address is “live” and being monitored.

This isn’t a problem for legitimate senders like friends, or businesses for which you need a live email address (like PayPal, Amazon, and so on), because it’s fine for them to know your email works. Even here at How-To Geek, we include a tracking pixel in our newsletter so we can remove people who never open or look at our messages because we actively try to make sure we don’t spam people.

But for real spammers, it’s a different story. If they know your email address is active, then you’ll become a bigger target for spam and phishing emails. After all, an account that is known to have a human looking at it is much more valuable for a scammer than an address that might never have a human look at it.

However, even worse than spammers knowing your email address is monitored by a human is the possibility that the images contain a virus or malware. It’s a well-known attack vector, and it relies on people downloading the image to their computer.

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It’s that time of year when the fall directions come down, and the festive Christmas decorations go up. If you’ll be hanging a bunch of Christmas lights around your house, here are several different methods for automating them, so that you never have to worry about turning them on and off manually.

RELATED: Smart Light Switches vs. Smart Light Bulbs: Which One Should You Buy?

Keep in mind that you don’t need to have the fanciest smarthome products to make this happen, but you’ll have a bit more flexibility as far as what you can do if you already have a smarthome hub. With that said, let’s get started.

If you just want your lights to turn on and off at a certain time every day, you can’t go wrong with some basic outlet timers. They’re cheap, and you can buy them pretty much anywhere. This two-pack is just $11 and is great for low-power, two-pronged appliances like Christmas lights and lamps.

They’re the simplest solution for Christmas light automation, as you just set the times you want the lights to turn on and off, plug it in, and you’re off to the races.

If you want to do anything more than what an outlet timer provides, you should get a smart plug instead. You can program your lights to turn on and off at specific times, but unlike some outlet timers, you can also choose certain days to control your lights at different times. For example, on the weekends, you may want your Christmas lights on for longer than during the week.

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