The TechGroove Show Notes Fortune Brainstorm Tech ConferenceEric Schmidt and Peter Thiel DebateMicrosoft Office 2013: Or The New Office?Increase the Time Cached Documents in Office 2013Apple Removing Products from EPEAT Rating a MistakeYahoo Gets a New CEOFind Out If Your Yahoo Account was HackedWhat if iPhone 5 Isn’t Called iPhone at allHow To Instantly Check if Your Phone’s ESN is Clean What is This Service and Why is it Running? What is MMC....

Configure Alexa’s Flash Briefing One of the more touted features of the first generation echo was Alexa’s Flash Briefing. At the time, it featured the latest news headlines from NPR as well as your local weather forecast. Over the past two years, it has gained a ton of new sources for all sorts of topics. For more on getting your news fix read our article on how to setup and customize Alexa Flash Briefings....

Disable Startup Programs After having your computer for a few years, you’ve probably installed a lot of different apps and desktop programs. Most of these are automatically set to run when starting up your PC. To disable startup programs in Windows 8.1, right-click the task bar and select Task Manager. Then select the Startup tab. Then go through each program and right-click it to disable the program or service. If you’re still rocking Windows 7, check out this post: Disable Startup Programs in Windows 7...

Also, be sure to check out all of our Black Friday 2020 posts, which will be updated through Cyber Monday! Phones For Black Friday sales on smartphones, AT&T is concentrating on four handsets, the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 11, and Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G: For iPhone buyers, new and existing AT&T customers can get a free iPhone 12 mini or up to $700 in credits on an iPhone 12 Max with an eligible trade-in....

A simple solution exists, in the form of GIF YouTube. This service allows you to create GIFs up to 10 seconds long, with good results. Here’s how it works. GIF YouTube With the video open in a browser tab, type: gif after www. and before youtube in the address bar and hit Enter as shown below. You’ll be taken to the GIF YouTube website where you’ll get a few options for your future GIF....

Another cool thing you can do is play a song you don’t know the name of, but only the lyrics. For example, you can say “Alexa, play the song that goes: and you give yourself away” and Alexa will play With or Without You from U2. Owners of an Echo device have already had this option, and results will vary based on the song you’re looking for. Still, it’s nice to see consistency with Alexa among all platforms and device form factors....

The first thing you need to do is get the exact URL address of your online image. To do this you can usually Right-Click an image from your browser and get an option for this from the context menu. In Firefox it is called “Copy Image Location,” in Chrome it is “Copy Image URL.” You get the idea… To double-check you have the right URL, you can paste it into your address bar....

Does Your Plan Support It? While your iPhone and iOS may support the feature, your carrier and plan determine if the feature is turned on or not. You’ll need to check with your carrier to see if it’s supported. You might have to change plans. For example, those on the original AT&T iPhone unlimited plan can’t tether. That’s one of the reasons I switched off that plan a few years ago....

For me, there was good news. I can go out and buy a TV in the $500 range today and it’ll be a vast upgrade to the TV that I bought years ago. In the interceding years since I bought my first HDTV, there have been a number of technological improvements, including 4K Ultra HD, built-in streaming apps and a host of other picture-enhancing features. And that’s what I would’ve done, except I got even luckier: Vizio offered to provide me one of their new SmartCast M-Series TV to review for groovyPost....

The new series moves the franchise forward with a 10-episode season. It features cameos from popular Trek characters: Seven of Nine (played by Jeri Ryan), Commander Riker (played by Jonathan Frakes, and Data (played by Brent Spiner), among others. The first episode is up now and new episodes should be dropped weekly. Free Month of CBS All Access To get your free month sign up at the CBS All Access site and click the Try it Free button....

For at least the past few years, you and I and over 6 billion other people on this planet have been living in a new age, the age of malware warfare — let’s call it MalWar for short. Today, the New York Times revealed — through a report citing anonymous sources involved in the program — that two White House administrations and Israel collaborated to create the Stuxnet worm and deployed it to attack an Iranian nuclear facility....

Apple’s Focus Feature As previously noted, the Focus feature was built upon Apple’s previous Do Not Disturb feature on mobile devices. It allows you to adjust notifications based on the Time of day or what you’re doing. The tool is intended to help you stay in the moment to either concentrate or spend Time away from your devices. By design, you can adjust the settings and choose which apps and people you’ll receive alerts from — and which ones will get saved for later....

The Deep Web Back in 1994, author Jill Ellsworth coined the term invisible web to reference web sites not registered with the search engines of the time. Two years later, the name was against used by Bruce Mount and Matthew B. Koll of the defunct Personal Library Software. The term invisible web evolved into the deep web in 2001 by computer scientist Michael K. Bergman, who coined it as a search-indexing term....

Is a Phone a Necessity? The human race got to the 21st century without children having phones. Kids got lost in a mall or got lonely at camp, and they survived. I don’t mean to make light of these real problems, but it does need some perspective. Not every child needs a phone, no matter how much they protest. Each parent has their opinion, but I think most parents get their child a phone for three reasons: A dumbphone is the smarter choice if your goal is primarily emergency contact or general connection....

Instead, as Gabe Aul notes, “This update prepares devices to receive the next cumulative updates, as well as improvements to the client-side update experience.” Here’s a look at the series of tweets that Gabe posted late this afternoon: — Gabriel Aul (@GabeAul) January 29, 2016 Windows 10 Mobile Configuration Update You should get this automatically if you’re an Insider in the Fast ring. But if you don’t see it yet or want to get on top of the situation, you can grab it by heading to Settings > Update & Security > Phone Update....

Original 2015 Article… Microsoft is deeply integrating its virtual assistant, Cortana, into Windows 10. This gives you a customized experience by tracking your calendar appointments, typing patterns, flights, search terms, and similar items. But if you’re concerned about privacy and the amount of information that you’re giving to Microsoft, via Cortana, you can turn the feature off, and erase the collected content. Windows 10 Cortana Privacy On a tablet or PC running Windows 10, head to Settings > Privacy and select Speech, inking & typing from the left column....

Burn ISO Image on Windows 7 or 8.1 A default feature available in Windows 7 and the Windows 8 Developer Preview now in pre-beta is its Windows Disc Image Burner. It lets you easily create boot discs. You burn ISO images to disc without having to rely on any third-party software. Here’s how to do it. First, pop a blank CD, DVD, or Blu-ray Disc into your drive. Then right-click on the ISO image you want to burn....

I’ll be grabbing a copy and letting you know my first thoughts either way. If any of your groovyReaders download a copy and play around, be sure to post your feedback here so we can get a thread going on the discussion in the forum. Here are few things Microsoft is saying they included in the new SP1 Keep your PCs supported and up-to-dateGet ongoing updates to the Windows 7 platformEasily deploy cumulative updates at a single timeMeet your users’ demands for greater business mobilityProvide a comprehensive set of virtualization innovations...

Find Apps by First Letter in Windows 8.1 Pull up the Apps list by clicking the arrow at the bottom of the screen. Or if you have a touch screen swipe from the bottom up. There you’ll see that you can sort apps by name which will put them all in alphabetical order. If you have a lot of apps installed, you can have some long lists and that means a lot more scrolling....

Windows VP Tami Reller announced onstage at Microsoft’s worldwide partner conference in Toronto this morning that manufacturers should see it the first week of August, and the public will get a chance to make those $39 upgrades by late October 2012. You might say it’s a bit of a shotgun marriage, but Microsoft has no one but itself to blame. After birthing its own Windows 8 (and Windows RT – it’s unclear that’s also set for October release) tablet / laptop hybrid in the Surface last month, the pressure to tie the knot is on....