Gadgetory

hello and welcome to see that's the fix the show about do-it-yourself tech and how T's I'm Sharon Profis and I'm Eric Franke it is time to get back to school and there is so much to keep track of in the new school year that starting off on the right track can really make all the difference that's right you want to optimize your experience while using your computer we've got some tips for you there are so many ways to set up your new Macs but if you're just getting started here are 5 of the most essential settings first let's get something really important out of the way keeping track of your Mac if it ever falls out of your grasp or you leave it in the library and/or some drunken fatigue there is an easy setting that'll let you find out exactly where you left it it's a good idea to enable find my Mac like Find My iPhone the free service lets you locate your missing Mac from any other device by default it's disabled so to turn it on ahead to System Preferences then iCloud and check the box next to find my Mac give it permission and you're good to go now if you ever need to find your computer just log into iCloud on another browser or use the app on another iOS device once you log in a map will show up pinpointing the last tracked location of your Mac okay with that safeguard in place let's enable a few small but important features that will make getting around your Mac a lot easier for starters enable tap to drag go to preferences then accessibility settings then head over to Mouse and trackpad then trackpad options and enable dragging you might also want to customize what shows up on your desktop for instance you can put your hard drive directly on your desktop for quick access to do this go to the finder menu and choose preferences then to the general tab and use these checkboxes to pick the items that will appear on your top and one more setting you'll be much more relaxed enabling battery percentage there is no use trying to figure out how much battery is left based on this symbol so instead click the battery symbol and head down to show percentage select it and from now on you'll see exactly how much power you have loved now if you want to be really productive on your Mac get to know the gestures Apple calls the trackpad the Magic Trackpad for a reason it can do a lot more than just Mouse around so for instance you can use two fingers up or down to scroll on any page to zoom double tap with two fingers or use the familiar pinch to zoom to navigate swipe left or right with two fingers and to view all open apps swipe down with three fingers and pinch out with your thumb and three fingers to reveal the desktop at any point finally if you have spaces or full screen apps open use three fingers to navigate between them now that you have those essential tips down you're one step closer to mastering your Mac you know I've been using Mac for like several years now and I didn't even know about some of those gestures there you go yeah all right it's time for a quick break and when we come back we're going to show you how to Google search like a pro you welcome back the Internet is an amazing tool for digging up information for just about anything but how many times have you done a search and you've gotten just way too much irrelevant information or just not the right thing yeah that happens to me every single day thank you seriously what the solution might be advanced search filters and search operators especially when you're searching on Google we got some tips for you being smart isn't just about memorizing information it's also about being able to find the information you need for most of us that first point of information retrieval is Google but not every Google search is created equal I'm gonna show you some advanced features of Google search that will help you pinpoint exactly what you're looking for the first thing to know is that Google actually has an advanced search page that they kind of hide over at google.com slash advanced underscore search now using that you can search for exact phrases you can define subjects that are gonna be excluded from search you can even filter the results by language or region or even filter out explicit content for example let's say we're looking for some Star Wars fan fiction that's written in German and available as a PDF and doesn't mention Jar Jar Binks and for the sake of this video is not pornographic I'll put in fan fiction as the general search term and then Star Wars as a specific search term and I'll say excluding Jar Jar and I'm gonna filter this by the German language turn safe search on and then select PDF as the file type boom it's a lot of German star wars fan fiction that doesn't have Jar Jar Binks doing horrible things the great thing about searching this way is that you already have a template for how to structure your search it's great also if you're looking for something pretty complicated and you really want to be able to define the parameters for your search now you can perform a pretty similar search right from the Google homepage if you use some choice punctuation Google calls these search operators and there's dozens of them out there but I'm gonna talk about the ones that are the most useful now let's say you're looking for a specific phrase put in quotation marks google will acknowledge the entire phrase instead of each individual word for example if I want to search for people who are talking about the best doughnut they've ever had I'll type the phrase this is the best doughnut I've ever had inside quotation marks and Google will filter just the results to have those exact words in that exact order I see results here from Twitter if I want to filter those out I can adjust the search by adding a dash or a minus sign in front of the word Twitter or let's say I want my results only from Twitter I could adjust the search by adding site colon twitter.com and then I've only got results with that phrase from Twitter finally a few quick tips now Google is not only the most famous search engine in the world it's also a great calculator it can even handle scientific calculations can also handle unit conversions if you want to know how many Ounces are in a gallon just type it in and you got the answer if you want to define a word you can just type in define colon and the word you're looking for and for an easy way to pad your term paper with some impressive citations you can go to scholar.google.com and you're gonna get a searchable index of articles and abstracts and books all from academic publishers so that's it that's how to take your Google search skills up to the next level the one I use every single day has got to be quotations because you can make sure that Google gets it right quick question for you yes how many languages do you speak I'll go with three all right well if you're like me you only speak one language and you got some free time between classes whatever it is you're doing there's an easy and entertaining way to learn the basics of a new language it's available for all of your tech devices plus it's free there are plenty of tools out there that can help you learn a new language but by far my favorite has to be duolingo duolingo is a free app available for both Android and iOS that's effective in increasing your vocabulary and improve your grammar in a number of languages such as Spanish French Italian and German so here's our works duolingo starts you off with the basics in this case I'm learning Spanish and it's asking me to select a boy it's give me for pictures to choose from in this case I'm gonna select the boy which is El Nino you go and then click check and I get a nice little chime there confirming that I got it right and continue and in this case is asking me to select the girl Lani Mia there you go what's great about this is that you can go through the lessons multiple times and each time the app is gonna select different words for you to learn so you can increase your vocabulary the more times you go through it the other thing you're gonna learn with duolingo is how to translate sentences in this case it's a very simple sentence for Nino so I have to do is select a and then boy then check and I'm correct very easy to do Illume break okay this is a little bit more complex for me so la mujer de l'ombre a the woman and the man alright that was a long shot for me because I'm not very good at Spanish but I actually got it correct nobody so now is asking me to type in Spanish so after remember how words are spelled so I have to think back to the lessons I previously learned and apply them in this one so well nobody I can repeat the audio Oh nobody I can even slow it down mmm Oh buddy I'm pretty sure I know how to spell that all right yeah yeah so I'm gonna translate the girl or something to choose la and then type in Spanish what girl is the pretty sure it's you yeah it's correct so the further along you go on your lessons the more complicated things get okay this is a little bit more complex here so now I have to select the missing word ah it's mujer is a feminine word so I have to select the feminine version of ah basically pretty sure it's not and correct El Nino La Nina okay in this case it's going to test my pronunciation of Spanish which honestly isn't that good but i'ma try it anyway so I'm gonna tap to start recording El Nino La Nina yeah yeah I got it it's pretty close alright alright cool you know the last few months I've learned a lot using duolingo but you know I'm not fluent in a new language but that's really not what these apps are about but they are is a really fun and entertaining way to help you learn a new language yeah call me muy bueno ah yeah that's it for this week's show thank you so much to Mills College in Oakland California for letting us hang out on your beautiful campus and guys if you want to send us your feedback your comments your suggestions you can reach me at need opal on Twitter and I'm at Sharon Profis Plus email us we've got a new email address it's the fix at cnet.com see you next time guys right here on the fix you