Guides

Zoom has been a popular meeting tool for businesses for a while now, and with social distancing becoming modus operandi for most of us, it has become commonplace in popular culture as well. If you have been using it to meet up with friends and family, perhaps you've become tired of having the same old background - your bedroom, living room or wherever. Maybe you have noticed some of your friends have exotic backgrounds and you've been wondering how to change yours.

Despite today's wide use of computers, tablets and smartphones, handwritten notes, memos and letters are still commonplace. While taking photos of them or scanning them is a great way to document and keep track of such items, actually converting them to digital text files makes them much easier to edit and search through. There are several apps like Pen to Print and Evernote that can accomplish this using OCR (optical character recognition) technology, but they aren't free.

FaceTime can support up to 32 callers at once, which is a lot to handle on an iPhone screen. If you want a bigger screen you can always use your Mac or iPad. Here's how to make FaceTime calls from your Mac:

The Shortcuts app for iOS lets you program a several step routine that uses multiple apps into a "shortcut" that requires just a tap or two. For instance, you could use the pre-written shortcut Home ETA to send your ETA to your significant other when you are on your way home, reducing to a single tap a process that would normally take finding your ETA with Maps, then composing a text message.

It's pretty commonplace that people share their Netflix accounts with family, friends, roommates, etc., so Netflix lets you have up to five profiles so everybody can have their own playlists, viewing history and suggested titles. But anybody can go into your profile and see what you've been watching and mess up your suggestions by watching things you wouldn't ordinarily watch.