Retro fit: Cassette Tape Coffee Tables give your apartment an ’80s vibe

Why it matters to you

We all occasionally long for tech from yesteryear. Here’s one way to satisfy that desire without breaking the bank.

If you yearn for the ’80s — for the sounds of gated reverb blasting through the boombox — but you’re a sucker for digital conveniences, a new Kickstarter campaign may satisfy that nostalgia without compromising musical integrity. A startup called Taybles is offering its line of cassette tape-shaped coffee tables at a big discount.

It’s been about six years since the first Cassette Tape Coffee Table was created by Taylor Calmus in the manager’s closet of the apartment building he was working in at the time. The first product was simple, built from plywood, and found its home in Calmus’ own living room. But after showing the retro piece to his friend and business partner, Justin Nanfelt, they decided to up the quality, enlist Taylor’s brother Zach, and try to sell Cassette Tape Coffee Tables online.

Since then they say the’ve sold their tables to nostalgic customers in 10 countries. The high-quality tables came at a cost. The “A-Side” tables sell for between $1,700 and $2,300.

More: New MacGyver stars explain how reboot taps into ‘80s nostalgia

Frugal fans gave feedback, asking Taybles to offer a more affordable model. Taybles responded with a Kickstarter campaign, offering The B-Side for $250.

“The easiest way to describe the difference between the A-Side table and the B-Side table is with this analogy,” Nanfelt told Digital Trends. “Think of the A-Side as an original masterpiece painting and the B-Side as a more mass-produced print of that same painting.”

Both tables are scaled 10.5 to 1 of a cassette tape. While the A-Side is handcrafted in Los Angeles and completely customizable, with options like LED lights and bar-top epoxy, the B-Side is built overseas with fewer features, though it still includes a whiteboard top and hidden storage drawer. The Taybles team hopes it will connect with both young and old audiences.

“The campaign will allow past generations to reminisce about their favorite tapes, expose a new generation to what cassettes were all about, and allow both to be part of the journey in making the first run of tables a reality,” Nanfelt said.

Over 225 backers have pledged money for a B-Side, earning the campaign over $66,500 with two weeks still left to go.

VoxEra is a tiny device that helps you avoid roaming fees

Why it matters to you

International calling and texting can get expensive. Luckily, a tiny device called VoxEra lets you use your domestic plan while overseas.

As any smartphone-touting traveler who’s flown abroad can tell you, international roaming isn’t cheap. And when you add voice to the mix, the charges can really start to add up. But VoxEra, an Egypt-based startup, wants to solve that problem once and for all.

The VoxEra, with its four flashing indicator lights and connectivity ports, looks a little like a home router. The diminutive device connects to Wi-Fi or a spare Ethernet port. And once a SIM card is inserted into its designated rear slot, the VoxEra works its magic: All calls placed while you’re traveling are charged at domestic rates.

More: AT&T’s International Day Pass nets unlimited data, calls, and texts for $10 a day

That’s thanks to VoxEra’s clever system of relays. When you’re abroad and someone calls or texts your number, VoxEra receives the incoming data and converts it to an encrypted internet-based message. It sends that message to the startup’s remote servers, which transcribe it back into a cell network call or text. Your phone’s none the wiser.

It may sound complicated, but the legwork can save you big on roaming fees. AT&T’s cheapest international option, International Data Pass, starts at $10 a day. Theoretically, calling and texting with VoxEra is free.

VoxEra’s system provides the added benefit of being able to use your number and your domestic plan’s balance. For calls outside the country, the startup’s Reach service offers low-cost options. And when you’re in an area without an internet connection, VoxEra can forward incoming calls through voicemail.

The idea for VoxEra came from CEO Amr Elgalby, who checked in at work frequently while he traveled abroad. The calls to clients became prohibitively expensive.

More: Roaming charges to end in EU, but Brexit confusion may dampen celebrations

“I realized that a majority of the travel community faced the same issue: The price to stay connected to home, to loved ones, and to work was too much,” he said. “I used my love of technology to create VoxEra in hopes that I, and everyone else who decided to use this device, could stay connected.”

According to VoxEra, cell carriers make a killing on the more than 29 million people who use mobile roaming while abroad. A survey by Juniper Research found that roaming fees generated a collective $57 billion in 2013, and that 88 percent of travelers paid more than $100 a month in international charges.

The VoxEra is launching on Kickstarter, where it’s already surpassed its $20,000 goal. Units start at $80, and are expected to ship in June.

Uber is now helping get older people in the U.K. to and from hospitals

Why it matters to you

Uber hasn’t been in the news for much good lately, but this new partnership with the NHS in the U.K. could be a welcome change. The company will be helping London’s older population.

Your grandparents could soon be getting some help from Uber. That is, if your grandparents reside in the U.K. Thanks to a new partnership between London-based geriatrics startup Cera and the transportation giant, the elderly portion of the U.K.’s population will soon be able to make their way home from the hospital with greater ease thanks to rides from Uber and its drivers, who are to be specially trained to assist people with disabilities.

The collaboration, which has been heralded by U.K. officials as “interesting and innovative,” hopes to give British citizens more control over the healthcare of their older citizens. Cera, which helps people book emergency or extended care for aged patients via their smartphones, allows users to communicate directly with patient caretakers and receive regular alerts. Recently, Cera inked a deal with a number of London hospitals that are part of Britain’s National Health Service, its publicly funded healthcare organization, which means that the NHS could soon be paying for health-related Ubers.

More: Uber does a U-turn and applies for a California self-driving permit

“Older people and those with disabilities will now have access to the highest quality drivers, while carers will be able to efficiently travel to ensure they can provide services in the right place at the right time,” Dr. Ben Maruthappu, Cera’s co-founder, told the Telegraph. “These partnerships tackle major challenges in the NHS, cracking down on bed-blocking and delayed discharges, while providing high-quality and efficient care,” he added.

As part of this partnership, Uber will also be offering special vehicles which address the needs of the elderly or disabled. “Uber’s mission is for everybody to have access to reliable, safe, and affordable transportation, and this partnership brings us a step closer to making that a reality,” Jo Bertram, regional general manager at Uber, said in a statement. “Simply by tapping a button on our app, carers will be able to get to people quickly and efficiently, while those with mobility needs will have the freedom to get out and about.”

It’s unclear as of yet whether this partnership will be found in cities outside of London, or for that matter, countries outside of the U.K. But if this model proves successful, it seems likely that Uber could begin playing a larger role in healthcare. “This pioneering partnership between Cera and Uber will radically integrate care and transport through technology,” Maruthappu concluded.

Ditch the cart and surf your way around the green with the GolfBoard

Why it matters to you

The makers of the Golfboard aim to bring younger players to the links with the modified electric skateboard.

When spending a day golfing, the enjoyment comes from each swing, not from the traveling between strokes. Using a golf cart speeds things up, but it’s still just about getting between two points. The GolfBoard makes traveling around the green much more entertaining.

The technology began as the brainchild of professional surfer Laird Hamilton. His goal was to create a way to surf on land the way we do on the water. What began as a modification of an electric skateboard has grown into the product that’s now available.

More: Mercedes’ luxurious golf cart has a built-in fridge, touchscreen, leather trim

After stepping up onto the board, operating it is fairly intuitive. Controlling the GolfBoard can be done wirelessly with a handheld controller or with the onboard thumb throttle. Both control methods only handle acceleration and brakes. Riders simply lean from side to side to turn as they would with a skateboard. To keep the GolfBoard running from shot to shot quickly, it uses four-wheel-drive powered by an advanced lithium-ion battery.

For inexperienced riders, there is a stability handle that doubles as a bag mount. If riders are feeling more adventurous, the stability handle can be removed so they can really surf around the golf course. If the idea of carrying around a golf bag all day doesn’t appeal to you, the GolfBoard supports the new movement toward a single club with an adjustable head.

The GolfBoard team understands that zipping around the golf course isn’t for everyone. In fact, its aim is more focused on bringing younger golfers to the game. It was conceived as an alternative to traditional golf carts. With its smaller form factor, riders can be sure they are having less of a negative impact on the course itself.

The GolfBoard is made in the United States, start at $6,500, and can be purchased directly from its website.

Microsoft shows you how to build a Terminator heads-up display using HoloLens

Why it matters to you

If you’ve ever wanted to see like a Terminator, then you will appreciate this new Microsoft HoloLens tutorial.

If you’ve watched any movies about killer robots, then you have seen the stereotypical Terminator-like heads-up display. It’s usually oddly colored to connote non-human vision and it flashes various threat assessments and other information across the robot’s field of view.

Setting aside the question of why a walking computer would require a visual display of the very same information that is already contained in its memory, the Terminator HUD is a staple of science fiction movies and TV. Now, Microsoft has posted a tutorial on how to create your own using HoloLens.

More: Microsoft is reportedly shaking up its HoloLens development roadmap

This is no mere graphical representation of a HUD, however. Not only does HoloLens make for a realistic augmented reality (AR) mockup of the T-800 Terminator’s visual field, but the interface can be hooked up to Microsoft Cognitive Services to analyze objects in the physical space — including face detection and limited optical character- recognition (OCR). In other words, it’s not just a gimmick. It’s actually (kinda) functional.

Microsoft has put the HUD together as more than just an entertaining exercise. The company is exploring how new technologies are moving beyond the 2D interfaces that have dominated our computing for so long. Input devices, displays, office spaces, and furniture have all been focused on 2D, while modern technology is moving toward 3D and even one-dimensional (1D) interfaces.

The Terminator HUD project combines 3D and 1D to create a “new type of experience that may one day lead to virtual personal assistants that will help us to navigate our world and our lives.” Heady stuff, for sure.

If you have access to a HoloLens and a variety of development tools, including Unity and the Holo Toolkit unity package, then you can follow along and create your own robotic vision of the world. Specifically, you will be putting together a recreation of the T-800 thermal HUD display — but note that Microsoft did not testify as to its effectiveness in searching out Sarah Connor and ensuring the future existence of Skynet.

AMD’s latest Radeon GPU driver boosts performance of ‘Ghost Recon Wildlands’

Why it matters to you

Updating the graphics driver is always a good idea for PC gamers, especially when the driver is optimized for a specific PC game and fixes several others.

AMD on Monday released a new driver for its Radeon graphics cards, bringing Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition up to version 17.3.1. The new driver is optimized for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, promising up to 6 percent better performance than driver version 17.2.1 (on a Radeon RX 480 card). The driver also provides a multi-GPU profile for the game running on DirectX 11.

As with the previous driver, AMD is not supporting the 32-bit version of Windows 8.1 with this release. But don’t fret: AMD hasn’t abandoned all 32-bit platforms. The company offers a driver for the 32-bit versions of Windows 10 And Windows 7. AMD reportedly pulled support for Windows 8.1 32-bit because the download numbers were too low to continue supporting the platform.

The driver also provides a batch of fixes for specific PC games. Here they are:

Battlefield 1:
After returning from performing a task switch, users experienced flickering textures or terrain.
For Honor:
In the menus, players saw flickering or corruption when highlighting character models.
For Honor:
Systems with multiple GPUs saw texture flickering.
Counter-Strike Global Offensive:
Radeon Chill caused stuttering.
DOTA 2:
Radeon ReLive caused stuttering on some system configurations.

Outside the game-specific fixes, the new driver provides solutions for previous problems ranging from Radeon WattMan to Radeon Settings to Radeon ReLive. Here they are:

Radeon Settings:
User accounts that contained spaces caused the latest graphics driver to not install.
Radeon WattMan:
Application hangs or display flickering appeared when adjusting WattMan settings on Radeon R9 300 series-based systems.
Radeon WattMan:
Custom WattMan settings occasionally wouldn’t stay saved when the PC went into hibernation or sleep.
Radeon ReLive:
This feature couldn’t be used on Windows machines with Hyper-V enabled.
AMD FreeSync:
Some multiscreen setups caused stuttering or flickering with both FreeSync and borderless fullscreen mode enabled.
General:
Radeon RX 400 Series cards caused mouse cursor corruption.
General:
Custom Radeon Software installs prevented systems from rebooting when clicking on the “Restart Now” option.

That’s it for fixes. AMD’s release notes for driver version 17.3.1 also lists nine known issues that still need to be addressed, and seven more outstanding issues tied to the company’s new Radeon ReLive feature. Still hanging around is the conflict with Microsoft’s Xbox DVR service, installation failure on systems with APUs, application hangs when Vulkan is in use, no low storage warnings, and more.

More: Ryzen proves the PC industry can no longer ignore AMD’s comeback

As for that performance increase in Ghost Recon Wildlands, AMD determined its results based on a system with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor, the Radeon RX 480, 16GB of DDR4 system memory clocked at 2,666MHz, and the 64-bit version of Windows 10. With the game running at a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, driver version 17.3.1 produced an average rate of 44.79 frames per second while version 17.2.1 only produced an average of 42.1 frames per second.

To grab AMD’s new 17.3.1 driver, click on the appropriate link below:

Windows 10:
64-bit
32-bit
Windows 8.1:
64-bit

Windows 7:
64-bit
32-bit

Google Home has a fake news problem

Google Home isn’t always the most reliable source of information, and as more people turn to voice assistants for news, that’s a big problem.

Over the past few months, various examples of Google Home responding to inquiries with answers of questionable veracity have popped up over the internet. Here’s one such example.

And here’s what happens if you ask Google Home “is Obama planning a coup?” pic.twitter.com/MzmZqGOOal

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) March 5, 2017

The problem is that Google, in order to optimize for voice-based answers, is reading off the top search result of a given query — without necessarily verifying whether that source is providing truthful answers. According to The Outline, this problem will only get worse as more people invest in voice-based AI companions that take the onus off the user for obtaining knowledge:

The number of browser-less internet-connected devices is growing fast, and already voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are penetrating the market. Google’s traditional list of search results does not translate well to voice — imagine Google Home reading you a list of 10 websites when you just want to know how many calories are in an orange.

Google can be relatively easily gamed, and with enough manipulation a particular website can rise to the top of the search results.

The issues arise when Google balances the notion that its search engine is inherently trustworthy — a majority of people say they believe the information they find on websites shown on the first page of Google — with the machine learning algorithms that help particular pieces of information rise to the top result.

The ability to read featured snippets is also the major distinguishing characteristic between Google Home and competitors like Amazon Echo and Siri, said Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. “Google sees that as a competitive advantage and they don’t want to turn it off,” he said. The problem is that even when they are wrong, the featured snippets bear Google’s highest endorsement. “Where is the tipping point where you get enough of these embarrassing answers that you decide to shut it off?”

This is a very difficult problem to solve. Google is utilizing its extensive Knowledge Graph to provide what it believes to be the best answer to any question, and its biggest strength — data, and using it to provide a response to practically any inquiry — is also its biggest liability. That’s because Google can be relatively easily gamed, and with enough manipulation a particular website can rise to the of the search results. Google currently doesn’t differentiate between its search engine — the text- and video-based list of results millions of people use every day — and that of its Assistant, which provides the answers to Google Home. Down the road, it may be forced to curate the results of more commonly-asked questions, or risk disseminating content that it doesn’t necessarily stand behind.

Of course, Google itself is not pretending to endorse any of these claims, nor is it verifying the veracity of the top results supplied to Home. It states that very clearly in every response by prefacing, “According to ,” to every answer. But most users, for better or worse, don’t differentiate Google the search provider from Google the trustworthy news source, and that will get the company into trouble as more of these controversial examples arise.

Our own Jerry Hildenbrand wrote about the issue of Google Home’s publicness in an earlier column:

The proper way to address this according to Google is to report the featured snippet as inappropriate. The problem is that it’s not inappropriate on a website that doesn’t read it aloud. I don’t think the search is made better by removing an interesting result featured at the top as long as a creepy female robotic voice isn’t reading it out loud to the kids. And Google Home is designed to be out in the open in front of everyone doing its thing. It’s no longer private once it comes out of the speaker.

That gets to the core of the problem: people are better able to distinguish the real from the fake when they’re shown a list of alternative results. When Google offers just a single definitive result, people are more likely to treat it as truth.

In the meantime, Google Home is about to launch in the UK, and has proven to be one of Google’s biggest hardware successes of the past few years.

Google Home

• Google Home review
• These services work with Google Home
• Google Home vs. Amazon Echo
• Join our Google Home forums!

Google Store Best Buy Target

Verizon finally releases Nougat for the Galaxy S7

Verizon’s update means the Big Four have all brought their Galaxy S7 into Nougat country.

The Nougat update for your Verizon Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge is available for downloading. If you haven’t received a notification about its availability yet, you can manually check through the device settings and you should be good to go. For a refresher on what to expect with Nougat on the S7, we’ve got a handy video!

Verizon reminds us that to update (the new software version is NRD90M.G930VVRU4BQA2) you’ll need to have a charged battery and you should either be connected to Wi-Fi or have a “strong connection to the Verizon network.” For more details hit the Verizon update page and have a gander.

Now we wait to see when the unlocked model gets a turn.

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge

• Galaxy S7 review
• Galaxy S7 edge review
• U.S. unlocked Galaxy S7
• Should you upgrade to the Galaxy S7?
• Best SD cards for Galaxy S7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

Unlocked
AT&T
Sprint
T-Mobile
Verizon

Facebook is testing a dislike button and other reactions in Messenger

Facebook doesn’t like the idea of a dislike button, and yet, we may get it soon in Facebook Messenger.

Facebook introduced reaction buttons a year ago for statuses and photos and videos, but at the time, it didn’t include a dislike button. Now, however, Facebook is testing a thumbs-down reaction – only, it’s not for posts that show up in news feed. Instead, it’d be a feature for Facebook Messenger, according to TechCrunch, which said the company wants to add reaction emojis next to text in conversations.

To send a reaction, you’d click on a button next to text in your conversation. You’d then see a series of reactions similar to the current six available for posts. There’s even a thumbs down option, as well as a reaction counter, which would count the number of reactions on a line of text. Facebook has already confirmed it is testing all this on a small scale to see if it lets people better represent their feelings in a message.

• You can make Facebook posts colourful now – here’s how

The most interesting part about the feature is that Facebook is considering a thumbs-down reaction. It originally chose to avoid creating one in order to avoid negativity on Facebook. TechCrunch suggested Facebook is considering this version of the thumbs-down as “more a ‘no’ button”. So, if someone in a group chat asks if everyone wants to meet up at 10 pm, you can send that in place of a “no”.

The feature isn’t available yet for all users, but the company typically performs tests on small groups of users before a wider rollout.

Amazon Fire tips and tricks: Making the most of your Amazon tablet

It seems like everyone owns a Fire.

Amazon’s e-reader tablets are extremely popular because they’re affordable and easy to use. It’s no wonder that everyone from your kid to your mother has one – heck, you might own one yourself. However, no matter how simple these devices appear to be, there are tonnes of hidden tips and tricks out there, which you’ve probably never used, but you should still leverage in order to maximise your experience.

In fact, we’ve rounded up a few here. We’re sure you’ll be sharing this tips and tricks guide with your mom or wife or father or brother or best friend or anyone else around you who happens to own a Fire too. But let us know in the comments if we missed something worth adding.

Fire tablet tips and tricks

Note: These tips and tricks were tested on an Amazon Fire HD 8 (2016) but should work across the latest Fire tablets.

Hard reset your tablet

If your tablet freezes or seems to crash, all you have to do is press and hold the power button for 20 seconds and the device will really shut down. Once you give it a few moments of rest, turn it back on by holding the power button. You’ll get the boot-up animation and all should be well.

Access Quick Settings and notifications

The easiest way to change settings on your Fire is via Quick Settings. Go to your home screen and swipe down from the top. You will see a menu that lets you adjust the Screen Brightness, enable Blue Shade, set the device to Do Not Disturb, or open the full Settings menu, etc. The area below the Quick Settings menu also serves as your notifications shade, where you can see and dismiss notifications.

Name your Fire

You may have several devices hooked up to your Amazon account, which can make things confusing, so it’s best to pick a specific, identifiable name for your Fire tablet. Instead of using “Joe’s 3rd Fire”, the default name, change the name of your Fire tablet. Simply pull down the notification shade from the top, and then tap Settings > Device Options > Change Your Device Name.

Set up profiles

Before sharing your Fire tablet with a spouse or child, set up individual profiles under Settings > Profiles & Family Library.

You can add two adult profiles and up to four child profiles. Doing this allows you to share tablet but your personalised content will only be accessible when you log into the Fire tablet. It’s worth noting that once you have created a child’s profile, it will appear at the bottom of Profiles & Family Library and you can tap the profile to manage the parental controls, such as daily time limits, schedule times.

With children’s profiles, you can also pick the content that’s available to them, and there are smart filters for web access. You can also review what your child has accessed or attempted to access. The profile management page also offers the options to subscribe to Amazon FreeTime Unlimited (Fire for Kids Unlimited in the UK) to get access to more than 10,000 children’s books, movies, TV shows, games, etc.

• Go to Amazon’s Help hub for more about profiles and parental controls.

Disable adverts

You can buy Fire tablets that don’t offer “special offers” on your lock screen. But if you didn’t do that and bought the cheaper, ad-based version, you can still remove them. But it will cost you $15.

Go to Amazon in your browser and sign into your account. Click Your Account > Your Apps and Devices and choose Your Devices from the menu on the left. From there, click on Actions next to your Fire and then Manage Your Content and Devices. You’ll then need to select Your Devices. Special Offers will be listed with Subscribed next to it. Click on Edit to get the option to Unsubscribe for $15.

• Go to Amazon’s Help hub to learn more about “special offers”.

Install apps non-Amazon Appstore apps

By default, you can only install apps from the Amazon Appstore. Obviously, there are more apps in the Play Store and other Android app stores. To get apps from other sources, you’ll need to do something known as sideloading. More specifically, you need to find the APK file and get it onto your tablet to install it. First, enable the option under Settings > Security and turn on Apps from Unknown Sources.

You can find APK files from a lot of websites, such as APK Mirror, but you be cautious of malware. You’ll also need to download an app like ES File Explorer. From there, download the APK file to your computer, plug in your tablet to transfer it (or download the file directly to your tablet via the browser), then use the file explorer to find the APK file on your Fire tablet. Once you’ve found it, tap on it to start the install.

Uninstall apps

FYap and hold on an app or piece of content to remove it from a Fire tablet. If you’re in the carousel, you will see a pop-up option to remove or uninstall whatever you’ve long pressed on, and if you’re on the home screen, you need to tap and hold on an app icon to get the Uninstall option. From there, you can tap to select multiple apps and then tap Uninstall to get remove them all at once.

You can also uninstall apps or games from Settings > Apps & Games > Manage All Applications. Then, tap on the app you want to get rid of – one by one – and then tap Uninstall in the top right.

Group your apps in collections

Don’t like seeing your apps all over your home screen. Group them into Collections (aka folders).

To create one, select an app and hold down on it. When the menu appears, tap the Add button with the plus sign in the corner and then tap To New Collection. Enter a name for your collection and then hit Next. To see your collection, go to the Apps screen, tap the menu button on the left hand side (looks like three stacked lines), and select Collections. To add it to your home screen, tap and hold the Collection, then tap Add, and select To Home. To add a new app to a collection, tap and hold an app, tap Add, select To Collections, and tap the collection.

Clean up your carousel

You can remove items from the home screen carousel. Simply press it and hold down. A giant check mark should appear in the program’s icon, along with a menu at the top of the screen. Tap Remove and then select From Carousel. That’s it.

Free up storage space

If you think you’re running out of storage space on your Fire tablet, you can check how much storage you have left under Settings > Storage. If you select on Internal Storage, you’ll get more information about what’s on your tablet. You can go into each category and choose to delete files to free up additional space. You can also offloading items you haven’t used in a while under the 1-Tap Archive option.

It’ll bring up a list of apps and other files stored on your Fire that you haven’t used in over a week. Each item will have a box with a check next to it. Check the box on anything you want to archive, and then hit Archive. These items will be cleared from your device’s memory but still be available in cloud storage. If you need to get those items back, you can tap on them to download them again from Amazon’s cloud.

• Go to Amazon’s Drive page to learn more about the Amazon cloud.
• Go to Amazon’s Help hub to learn more about 1-Tap Archive.

Back up photos and videos

You can automatically back photos and videos to Amazon Drive. Every Fire user gets 5GB for free, but Prime members get free unlimited photo storage. To turn on the automatic backups, go to the Photos app, tap to expand the menu via the three horizontal lines in the top left, and choose Settings. You’ll see options to enable Auto-Save, and you can choose the files you’d like to back up.

You can also specify to back up only when your Fire tablet is charging. All photos or videos that have not been backed up will have an icon of a cloud with a line through it in the bottom corner. If there’s an arrow there, it is currently uploading. And finally, all backed up photos and videos can be accessed in any browser. Just go to Amazon Cloud Drive and sign in with your Amazon account.

• Go to Amazon’s Drive page to learn more about backing up and Prime Photo.

Encrypt your data

If you have data on your Fire that you want to keep private, you can encrypt it. You’ll then be required to enter a password in addition to any lock screen password you may have set up. Encrypting your data requires that your Fire be charged at least at 80 percent and be plugged in – and the process takes about an hour. Unfortunately, encryption will be disabled if you reset your Fire to factory settings.

So, here’s what you do: swipe down from the top of the Fire screen, then tap Settings > Security & Privacy. In the settings that appear, tap Encryption > Encrypt Tablet. And that’s it. 

Manage notifications

Notifications pop up in the notification shade, such as an incoming email or a system update. However, if you get notifications you simply don’t want to see, then you should turn them off under Settings > Sound & Notification > App Notifications. Tap on the app you want to block notifications from – or you can toggle Priority if you always want to hear from a specific app. 

Manage your e-book library

Download Calibre. It’s a well-rated e-book library management software that’s totally free. It can help you organise your books, convert files to e-reader-friendly formats, sync with your device, and more. We really like it for converting books downloaded from other sources, like Project Gutenberg, which has tonnes of free reading material in the public domain, or Humble Bundle.

E-books – even if in the MOBI format – not directly from Amazon tend to end up in the Documents section of a Fire rather than Books. But by loading the file into Calibre, highlighting it, selecting Convert Books and MOBI Output, then getting rid of the “[DOC]” tag in the “Personal Doc tag” field, and selecting “OK”, it’ll be converted and should appear in the Books section of your tablet.

Upload your personal music

You can upload your personal music collection to Amazon Cloud Drive and stream it or download it to your tablet. Follow these directions for uploading music. Keep in mind only the first 250 songs are free, then you have to get a $24.99 premium plan to add 250,000 more.

Change the wallpaper

Your Fire lets you change its wallpaper: open Settings > Display > Wallpaper, choose a wallpaper from the default set, or pick your own.

Take a screenshot

This one is easy: hold down the Power button and the volume down button at the same time. You may see an animation and hear a capture sound. To find your screenshot, go to the Photos app.

View desktop websites

The Fire uses Silk as its default web browser, and it automatically loads websites in mobile view. If you’d rather view full desktop versions on it, simply load the mobile version of a page in Silk, tap the menu icon in the upper right (looks like three dots stacked on top of each other), then select Request desktop site. It will then bring you to the full site you were just looking at in mobile view.

Close all browser tabs

Sometimes when you’re in Silk browser, you can end up with lots of tabs open. To get rid of them, press on any open tab, and in the menu that appears, tap Close All Tabs (or tap Close Other Tabs to close all tabs – except the one you’re pressed).

Disable screen rotation

You can disable and enable screen rotation by opening the notifications menu (swipe down from top of homescreen) and tapping the screen button to either lock or unlock its ability to automatically rotate.

Check battery percentage

Go to Settings > Device to see how much battery percentage you have left. You can also monitor battery usage with an app like GSam Battery Monitor, which will also conveniently show you the exact battery percentage in the notifications menu so you don’t have to dig to find it.

Set up lock screen password

Under Settings > Security, you’ll see an option to set a lock screen password so that other people cannot easily access your Fire.

Want to know more?

Here’s the link to the Fire HD help section at Amazon. It has user guides and help articles on getting started, navigating the user interface, troubleshooting, and plenty more.