How to Lock Down Your iPad or iPhone For Kids

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iPads and iPhones give you control over how your kids can use your devices. You can quickly lock your device to a certain app before handing it over or lock down an entire device with comprehensive parental controls.

These features are named Guided Access and Restrictions, respectively. Guided Access is ideal for temporarily handing your iPad or iPhone to a kid, while Restrictions are ideal for locking down a device your kids use all the time.

Guided Access

Guided Access allows you to lock your device to a single app. For example, you could lock your device to only run a specific educational app or game and then hand it to your kid. They’d only be able to use that specific app. When they’re done, you can unlock the device with a PIN you set, allowing you to use it normally.

To set up Guided Access, open the Settings app and navigate to General > Accessibility > Guided Access. From here, you can ensure guided access is enabled and set a passcode.

To enable Guided Access, open the app you want to lock the device to — for example, whatever educational app or game you want your kid to use. Quickly press the Home button three times and the Guided Access screen will appear.

From here, you can further lock down the app. For example, you could disable touch events completely, disable touch in certain areas of the app, disable motion, or disable hardware buttons.

You don’t have to configure any of these settings, however. To start a Guided Access session, just tap the Start option at the top-right corner of the screen.

If you try to tap the Home button to leave the app, you’ll see a “Guided Access is enabled” message at the top of the screen. Press the Home button three times again and you’ll see a PIN prompt. Enter the PIN you provided earlier to leave Guided Access mode.

That’s it — whenever you want to enable Guided Access, just open the app you want to lock the device to and “triple-click” the Home button.

Restrictions

Restrictions allow you to set device-wide restrictions that will always be enforced. For example, you could prevent your kids from ever using certain apps, prevent them from installing new apps, disable in-app purchases, only allow them to install apps with appropriate ratings, prevent access to certain websites, and lock down other settings. Settings you select here can’t be changed without the PIN you provide.

To set up Restrictions, open the Settings app and navigate to General > Restrictions. Enable Restrictions and you’ll be prompted to create a PIN that you’ll need whenever you change your Restrictions settings.

From here, you can scroll down through the list and customize the types of apps, content, and settings you want your kids to have access to.

For example, to enforce content ratings, scroll down to the Allowed Content section. Tap the Apps section and you can choose which types of apps your kids can install. For example, you could prevent them from installing apps with the “17+” age rating.

Tap the Websites option and you’ll be able to block the Safari browser from loading certain types of websites. You can limit access to certain types of adult content or choose to only allow access to specific websites. You can customize which exact websites are and are not allowed, too.

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If you wanted to block access to the web entirely, you could disable access to the Safari browser and disable the Installing Apps feature, which would prevent your kids from using the installed Safari browser or installing any other browsers.

Other settings allow you to lock certain privacy and system settings, preventing them from being changed. For example, you could prevent your kids from changing the Mail and Calendar accounts on the device. Near the bottom, you’ll also find options for Game Center — you can prevent your kids from playing multiplayer games or adding friends in Apple’s Game Center app.

The settings you choose will always be enforced until you enter the Restrictions screen in the settings, tap the Disable Restrictions option, and provide the PIN you created.

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iOS still doesn’t provide multiple user accounts, but these features go a long way to letting you control what your kids can do on an iPad, whether the iPad is primarily yours or primarily theirs.

Guided Access and Restrictions will work on an iPod Touch, too. If you purchased an iPod Touch for your kid, you can lock it down in the same way.

Source: how to geek

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Wii U Gaming Lounges in Airports This Month

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Southwest Airlines has partnered with Nintendo to provide Wii U gaming lounges for the busy holiday season at six major US airports. 

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Now Southwest passengers at Dallas Love Field, Chicago Midway, Atlanta, Denver, Tampa Bay, and Saint Louis airports have a new way to pass the time between getting through the security line and waiting to board. Southwest Airlines spokesman Dan Landson said, "These are some of the busiest places for holiday travelers and we want to make sure they are having fun while at the airport." Not just fun, but free fun! The lounges are open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and are free to use. Each lounge has several kiosks which feature games like Super Mario 3-D World and other new and popular games. Each kiosk can hold up to four gamers. At each lounge there are attendants on site to assist gamers and answer questions. Another bonus is that there is no time limit for game players at the lounges, but passengers ought to be mindful of the time so they don't miss their flight because they were distracted by the games. 


These lounges were installed just before the Thanksgiving travel weekend and will stay at the six airports until December 22nd. On November 26th, more than 100 passengers on Southwest Airlines Flight 1883 from New Orleans to Dallas received a Wii U console as a gift to kick off the promotional period. Southwest is offering a sweepstakes that will end on Christmas Day. The sweepstakes will award 30 prizes, each consisting of two round-trip tickets on Southwest Airlines and one Wii U Deluxe Gaming System. The idea for a gaming lounge is not new, numerous airports worldwide offer year-round gaming options. 

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Sony Patents "SmartWig"

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Sony has filed a patent application for a new piece of wearable technology, the "SmartWig." 

Sony's SmartWig can be worn "in addition to natural hair" and be able to process data and communicate wirelessly with other devices such as smartphones. According to patent application, the SmartWig can be used as navigation for the blind and can also collect health information such as blood pressure. Wearable technology, from the smartwatch to Google Glass, is seen as a key growth area for tech companies and Sony does not want to be left behind. Google and Samsung have been the leaders in this sector up to this point. According to Andrew Milroy, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, "Wearable gadgets are definitely going to be one of the big areas of growth over the next two years." 

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The SmartWig could be made with a variety of materials including; horse hair, human hair, wool, feathers, or any synthetic material. The communication interface and sensors in the wig would be covered, or mostly covered, by parts of the wig so that they would be hidden during use. As a result, Sony explained, the device has the potential to be a "very popular" wearable tech item since it could be both a "technically intelligent item and fashion item." Although Sony has said that the SmartWig can be used in a variety of fields such the gaming industry, healthcare, and the business sector, the company has not yet decided on any plans for commercial production of the device. 

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How To Create animated gifs out of your pictures

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GIFyourself allows you to create funny animated gifs out of your pictures. The principle of use is quite simple:

• Select your GIF.
• Upload a photo of yourself.
• Crop your face and it will be automatically added to the GIF.

Click Here To Continue........

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How To Check Your Feedburner Email List

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• Go to> www.feedburner.com

• Log in your> Id and Password

• Go to>  my feed

• Go to my feed title> click on your feed title name

Click Here To continue....

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How To Make “Reply-all” my default response in Outlook.com

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• Sign-in to Outlook.com.
• Click on Settings > More Mail settings.

. Click here to continue....

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Yahoo New Security Measures

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Yahoo is working on protecting its users' online activity by encrypting all communications and other information travelling into the company's data centers and promises to have encryption for personal data soon. 

Marissa Mayer, who has been very open about her dislike of the recent events with the National Security Agency, announced Yahoo's commitment to protecting its customers from any and all prying eyes on Monday. This announcement follows a recent report that the NSA had managed to hack into the communications lines of data centers run by Yahoo and Google. By doing so, the NSA was able to intercept and access information about what people are doing or saying online. Yahoo had previously promised to encrypt its email service by January of 2014 but has changed the timeline on that plan. Now, Yahoo promises to have all data encrypted by the end of March of 2014. 

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Google has been encrypting its Gmail service since 2010 and has added several security measures since then. Google promised to encrypt the links to its data centers as well, adding yet another barrier to keep out prying eyes. This process is still underway, at least officially, though one engineer said that this task has already been completed earlier this month. Faceboo is also joining in on encrypting users' data but has not yet said when this will be put in place. Yahoo, Google, and other Internet companies fear the government spying scandal will drive users away, especially those from outside the United States. These new security measures are one step the companies are taking to ensure that their customers feel safe and stick around. 

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Facebook's failed $3 billion acquisition bid of Snapchat.

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Facebook's $3 billion acquisition bid was reportedly shot down by photo messaging company Snapchat. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is not Snapchat's only potential acquirer; the company is being courted by several investors. Snapchat's co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel is protective of his company and will not likely consider any offers until at least early next year.

Spiegel believes that Facebook's bid undercut what the company is really worth. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings already offered to lead an investment that would value the company at $4 billion, $1 billion over Facebook's acquisition bid. Spiegel hopes that by waiting, the company's user numbers will grow enough to justify an even higher valuation of the company. 

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Snapchat was founded in 2011 by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy as a project for one of Spiegel's classes at Stanford University. The app, which is very popular amongst teens, allows the user to take a photo or video, add text and drawings, and send it to a friend for a limited period of time. After a few seconds, the image or video is deleted from the friend's phone and they can never see it again, unless they grabbed a screenshot prior to the image expiring. The service has yet to generate revenue but has a large following of teens and young adults. Due to the limited amount of time the image or video is available, the app has been associated with sexting; teens and young adults are more willing to send sexually explicit images or videos with the knowledge that they will not be stored on the recipient's phone. 

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Lenovo Is Now World's Third Biggest Smartphone Maker Title

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Lenovo pushed LG aside in the third quarter to become the number three global smartphone maker for the first time. 

Lenovo's smartphone sales grew to 12.9 million units, up a whopping 84.5 percent year over year, thanks to a surge in sales from the Chinese market. In the same period last year, Lenovo had 4.1 percent of the global market but in 2013, the company brought down 5.1 percent of the market. "Lenovo continues to rely heavily on its home market, which represents more than 95 percent of its overall mobile phone sales. This could limit its growth after 2014, when the Chinese market is expected to decelerate," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Earlier this year, Lenovo expressed interest in broadening its mobile sector by looking into acquiring BlackBerry. The Canadian government stepped in and stopped that bid before it even started citing security concerns over handing over BlackBerry to a Chinese company. 

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In the top two spots for smartphones were, unsurprisingly, Samsung and Apple in first and second respectively. In the third quarter, Samsung has 32.1 percent of the market, the same share it had last year, selling a whopping 80.3 million devices. Apple's share declined slightly from last year from 14.3 percent of the market to 12.1 percent but still shipped 30.3 million iPhones in the quarter. Other companies in the top ten were LG, Huawei, and Nokia at four, five, and eight respectively. In the overall mobile phone market, meaning more than just smartphones, Lenono ranked seventh. 

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Firefox OS - Enable the Passcode lock

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To enable this option under Firefox OS, follow the below procedure:

• From the homescreen go to Settings.

• Scroll to Privacy & Security > Phone lock.

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• Turn on Passcode lock
• Enter a 4-digit passcode , confirm it and click on the Create button:

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Facebook Shares Leap After Mobile Advertising Boosts Earnings

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According to quarterly reports released on Wednesday, mobile advertising now accounts for just under half of Facebook's revenues, 

This announcement sent shares for the social media giant soaring in after-hours trading. According to its quarterly report, mobile advertising represents about 49 percent of Facebook's $1.8 billion ad revenue made in the third quarter of 2013. Last year, many thought Facebook would have greater difficulty adapting to the growing mobile market which impacted the company's share sale. It took the company nearly a year to surpass the $38 per share price its shares initially sold for. After Wednesday's announcement, Facebook shares leapt even higher. Shares jumped 10 percent to $53.88 in after-hours trading. Facebook is projected to account for a 15.8 percent share of global mobile ad spending in 2013, up from 5.35 percent last year. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing advertising category today with the overall global mobile ad market expected to grow a whopping 89 percent to $16.65 billion in 2013, up from $8.8 billion in 2012. 

Facebook saw more success in its quarterly findings than just mobile ad revenue. Facebook's overall revenues were over $2 billion for the third quarter, up from $1.26 billion for the same period in 2012. The social media giant's net income was $425 million; this is much improved from last year's loss of $59 million. Facebook founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said, "The strong results we achieved this quarter show that we're prepared for the next phase of our company, as we work to bring the next five billion people online and into the knowledge economy." 


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Microsoft Forms Chinese Game Venture Ending

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Microsoft Co and BesTV New Media Co, a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, have joined together to for a video game venture to capitalize on proposed free-trade rules that would end the 13-year ban on imported consoles in China. 

The $79 million gaming venture was announced by BesTV New Media Co on September 23rd to Shanghai's stock exchange. BesTV will invest $40.29 million for a 51 percent stake in the venture while Microsoft will invest the remaining $38.71 million. After the announcement, BesTV surged past the 10 percent limit to 51.11 yuan in trading. With the ban in place, consoles such as Microsoft's Xbox systems, Nintendo's Wii consoles, and the PlayStation systems were banned in China in 2000. The ban was put in place to protect Chinese youth from the perceived corrupting influence of video games. The youths instead turned to online gaming like "League of Legends" to get their fill of video games. The ban will end when Shanghai's free-trade zone opens on September 29th, allowing systems to be liberalized. 

Though the venture was quoted at $79 million, the investment from both BesTV and Microsoft will most likely reach $237 million. Joanna Li, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for Microsoft said, "This is the first step of many to come for Microsoft and BesTV and we look forward to exploring new opportunities for bringing entertainment offerings to China." Some of these offerings will include new games and gaming-related products in addition to entertainment-related software and technical assistance services for the consoles. 

Source:  Tech-mee.com

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Windows: How to Create a Separate Data Partition

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Windows normally installs itself to a single partition on your hard drive. However, you can split your hard drive into several different partitions and store your data files separately from your system files.

This can be particularly useful when it comes time to upgrade or reinstall Windows — you canperform a clean install, wiping away your personal files from the main drive and leaving the secondary drive as-is with your personal files.

When Installing Windows

To create a separate data partition while installing Windows 7 or Windows 8, you’ll need to select the Custom installation option. Go through the installation process normally until you reach the “Which type of installation do you want?” screen and click the Custom option.

On the next screen, click the Drive options (advanced) link.

Create several partitions by clicking the New button and entering a size for each partition.

When you’re happy with your partition sizes, select the partition you want to install Windows to and click the Next button. Windows will install to that partition. The space on the other partition will be available as its own separate drive letter in Windows.

After Installing Windows

There’s a good chance you already have Windows installed to a single partition on your hard drive. If so, you can resize your existing system partition to make free space and create a new partition in that free space. You can do all of this from within Windows.

You’ll need to access the Disk Management tool from within Windows to do this. On Windows 8, press Windows Key + X or right-click in the bottom-left corner of your screen and select Disk Management. On Windows 7, press the Start button on your keyboard, type manage disks into the Start menu’s search box, and press Enter.

In the Disk Management window, right-click your C: partition and select Shrink Volume.

Warning: Before messing with your partitions, you should always ensure you have backups of your important files. You shouldn’t encounter any problems while doing this, but data loss is always a potential threat when modifying your partitions.

Enter the amount of space you want to shrink the partition by, in MB. For example, if you want a 100 GB data partition, enter 102400 into the box and click the Shrink button.

Of course, you must have enough free space on the partition to shrink it. If you only have 20 GB of free space, you won’t be able to shrink the partition by more than 20 GB. If you need to free up space but don’t want to delete any files, you may want to temporarily copy them to an external hard drive, delete the originals, and copy the files back over to your data partition afterwards.

After the process completes, right-click inside the Unallocated space and select New Simple Volume to create a new partition from the unpartitioned space.

Follow the wizard, assigning your desired drive letter to the new partition. When the process is complete, you’ll have a separate data partition.

Using Your Separate Data Partition

To make the most of your separate data partition, store your personal data files on it. To make this easier, you can move your user data folders — your Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos directories, for example — to your external hard drive by right-clicking each folder in Windows Explorer (or File Explorer on Windows 8) and using the options on the Location tab.

There’s no point in installing most programs to the data partition, as they’ll have to be reinstalled if you ever reinstall Windows. However, some programs can be placed on the data partition and used even after you reinstall Windows. For example, Valve’s Steam service and Blizzard’s games all allow you to run their games from a folder without having to download and install them after reinstalling Windows. Just run the .exe file from the folder and you’re good to go.

When you reinstall Windows, you’ll be able to format your system drive cleanly and have all the files on your data partition in the same place. If you’re dual-booting several versions of Windows, each of them can use the data on the separate data partition without accessing each other’s system partitions.Of course, you can always get a separate data partition by adding a second hard drive to your computer. A second hard drive will appear just like a second partition in Windows Explorer or File Explorer, with its own drive letter.

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How to Recover a Deleted File

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It’s happened to most of us. You delete a file and realize you need it back. This guide will explain when you can get that file back and how to go about it.

We’ve covered a variety of tools for recovering deleted files in the past, but this guide goes more in-depth. We’ll cover everything you need to know if you want to successfully recover deleted files.

Is it Really Deleted?

If you’re not sure whether you permanently deleted a file, be sure to look around for it first. In Windows, you’ll want to open the Recycle Bin and look for the file. You can search the Recycle Bin using the search box at the top-right corner of the window, which may help if you have a lot of files in your Recycle Bin. You can also right-click in the window, point to Sort By, and select Date Deleted to view files that were recently deleted.

Note that programs like CCleaner empty your Recycle Bin when you run them, so having CCleaner or a similar program automatically run in the background can prevent you from recovering files from the Recycle Bin.

If the file was stored in a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, be sure to log into your account on the service’s website and check your trash there — you may find the file is still recoverable. This is the cloud storage version of the Recycle Bin.



If you’re not sure whether you deleted the file, perform a search for it using the search box in the Windows Explorer or File Explorer window. Hopefully the file was accidentally moved elsewhere and you can find it again.

Check Your Backups

You should be making regular backups of your most important files so you won’t lose too much critical data if they ever vanish on you. If you do have a backup, now’s the time to check it for a copy of the file you deleted.

Windows has built-in backup tools, so they may be able to help. Windows 7′s Previous Versions tool may have created a backup of your file, even if you haven’t set anything up. To check previous versions, navigate to the folder that contained your file, right-click it, and select Restore previous versions. You can view backups that have been created and click the Open button to browse them — you may find a backup copy of your important file.

Windows 8′s File History feature isn’t enabled by default, so you’re out of luck if you never enabled it manually. If you have enabled File History, you can visit a folder and click the History button on the ribbon to browse backup copies of files that were once stored in that folder.

Magnetic Hard Drives vs. Solid-state Drives

If you’ve made it this far and haven’t managed to restore your file yet, the only way you’re getting that file back is with file-recovery software. However, there’s some bad news: This may be impossible on some computers.

Traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives work differently. When you delete a file on a magnetic hard drive, its data isn’t immediately erased from the disk. Instead, the pointer that points at the data is removed. The data can then be overwritten. It may be possible to scan the hard drive for leftover data and restore deleted files that haven’t yet been overwritten.

When a file is deleted from a solid-state drive, that file’s is immediately erased with the TRIM command to free up the space and ensure the SSD can be quickly written to in the future. That means that you can’t recover data deleted from solid-state drives — once it’s gone, it’s gone. Very old solid-state drives and old operating systems like Windows Vista don’t support TRIM, but modern solid-state drives and Windows 7 and 8 all support TRIM.

The Safest Way to Recover a Deleted File

If you deleted a file on a magnetic hard drive and you’re still using that computer, the safest thing to do is shut down the computer immediately. If you continue using the computer — even if you’re just installing file-recovery software — it’s possible that a program on your computer could write to the disk and that data could overwrite the deleted file’s data on your hard drive.

With the computer shut down, you should boot from a file-recovery live CD or USB drive or remove the hard drive from the computer entirely and place it in another computer as a secondary drive. The key is to avoid writing to the drive entirely. Use file-recovery software to scan the drive, and hopefully you’ll find the deleted file. If you deleted the file recently and haven’t written to the drive much, you have fairly good odds of recovering it. If you deleted the file two weeks ago and have written to the drive quite a bit, it’s very unlikely that the file will be recoverable.

We’ve covered using the ntfsundelete and photorec tools to do this from a Ubuntu live CD or USB drive.

The Quicker, Riskier Way to Recover a Deleted File

If you’d like to get a deleted file back but it isn’t extremely important and you don’t want to go to much additional effort, you can do it the easier, riskier way. Just install a file-recovery tool like Recuva, from the makers of the popular CCleaner application. Use that application to scan your hard drive for deleted files and restore the one you want back, if you can find it.

This is riskier because it involves writing to the drive. When you install a tool like Recuva on the drive, it’s possible that you could overwrite the deleted file’s data with the Recuva program data. It’s also possible that other programs running in the background could write to disk and overwrite the data. All it takes is for a portion of the file to be overwritten, and the file may become completely corrupt.

Professional Data Recovery

If the data was particularly business-critical, you don’t have any backups, and you failed to recover it, you may want to consider a professional data recovery service. First things first: Power off the computer immediately if it’s not already off. The longer the computer runs, the more data will be written to its hard drive and the less chance you’ll have of recovering it.

Professional data recovery services deal with everything from dying hard drives that need to be disassembled to recover data to deleted and overwritten files. These services can be extremely pricy and will cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, so they’re not the ideal solution. However, if you have extremely important data that you can’t recover or replace and you’re willing to pay up, this is an option available to you. Of course, these services can’t guarantee anything — they may be unable to recover your data. They’ll also probably charge you for their work even if they ultimately can’t recover your data.

Avoiding Deleted File Scares

The best way to ensure you’ll never have to recover a deleted file is to perform regular backups. Even just enabling the File History or Windows Backup functionality in your version of Windows will give you some peace of mind. If you store your documents in Dropbox or a similar service or have them backed up to an online location, you’ll also have a backup. All these backup options also allow you to restore previous versions of files.

It’s still possible for a file to be deleted, but if you’re performing regular backups, you won’t lose much data. You’ll have much more luck restoring backups than recovering deleted files. Backup services are cheaper than professional data recovery services, too.

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Deleted files aren’t necessarily gone forever, but they’re not always easy to recover. As solid-state drives are used in more and more new computers, proper backup procedures are becoming even more important.

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Bill Gates Invests in Genetically Engineered Food Products

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin is in the headlines for his investment in the development of the world's first lab-grown burger, but he is not the only tech billionaire to fund genetically engineered food products. 

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates are also funding efforts to find alternatives to livestock-sourced meat. Gates invested in Hampton Creek Foods, a startup company working on plant protein based egg substitutes, and has praised Beyond Meat, a meat substitute company. Thiel gave a grant to Modern Meadow, a company using animal stem cells in what it calls "tissue engineering" to create meat and leather via 3D printing. Brin invested in Mark Post, a professor out of Maastricht University, who used stem cells and a fetal serum to grow meat in his lab. 

These tech giants believe that meat alternative, lab-grown foods like these could be the future of food. Brin's reasoning for investing in the products was dual-pronged. One reason is animal welfare; he is "not comfortable" with the reality of the meat industry. The other is that he finds synthetic meat to be "transformative" technology on the "cusp of viability" despite the general public's perception that is sounds like something out of science fiction. Gate's reasoning for backing the product is different, but simple: "Put simply, there's no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people. Yet we can't ask everyone to become vegetarians. We need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources." Worldwide demand for meat is not decreasing, only rising, and livestock is a substantial factor in the decline of the planet's health. Luckily, these tech giants see the meat problem as an opportunity and are well on their way to developing a solution. 

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Microsoft buys Nokia's mobile phone business for €5.44bn (£4.6bn/US$7.2bn)

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Nokia's Lumia 625 smartphone, which runs Windows Phone software. Microsoft will buy the Finnish company's mobile phone business. Photograph: Reuters

Microsoft is to buy Nokia's mobile phone business for €5.44bn (£4.6bn/US$7.2bn) and the Finnish firm has said its CEO, Stephen Elop, will join the software company as part of the deal.

Both Nokia, once the undisputed leader in mobile phones, and Microsoft have been struggling to respond to the challenge from smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung.

Analysts say Elop's decision in 2011 to adopt Microsoft's untested Windows Phone software has yet to pay off.

The deal is expected to be finalised in the first quarter of 2014 and is subject to approval by Nokia's shareholders and regulatory approvals. Nokia partnered in 2011 with Microsoft and uses Microsoft's Windows software to run its mobile phones.

"It's a bold step into the future – a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies," said Microsoft's outgoing chief executive, Steve Ballmer.

"Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft's share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services."

Nokia said in a statement it expected that Elop, along with senior executives Jo Harlow, Juha Putkiranta, Timo Toikkanen, and Chris Weber, would transfer to Microsoft when the deal was concluded. It did not say what roles they would take at Microsoft.

Elop, a Canadian hired by Nokia in 2010 from Microsoft, has been one of the favourites to take over as Microsoft chief when Ballmer steps down.

Nokia said its board chairman, Risto Siilasmaa, would take over CEO duties while the firm looked for a new CEO.

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