Author: batteryforpc

After years of using mostly stock-Android phones, I bought a Galaxy S10e for myself a few months ago, and I’ve used it almost every day since that point. While the software experience isn’t perfect, Samsung does usually provide options to disable functionality I don’t care for. However, there’s one software quirk that can’t easily be fixed: screenshots are constantly backed up to my Google Photos library.

I’m sure every Samsung phone owner is thinking “welcome to the club” right about now, but for those of you unaware of this absurd behavior, allow me to elaborate. By default, Android stores photos taken with the camera in the ‘DCIM’ folder (short for Digital Camera IMages) of your device’s internal storage. Screenshots are saved in a sub-folder of a completely separate ‘Pictures’ directory. Makes sense.

Samsung changes this behavior on its phones and tablets by placing screenshots in a sub-folder of the DCIM directory. My best guess is that this is done to make life easier for iPhone converts, since iOS shows both camera photos and screenshots in the same ‘Recents’ menu of the Photos app.

This change causes most apps that scan for new photos, including Google Photos, to recognize screenshots as new images. While you can exclude certain folders from Google Photos backups, you can’t exclude sub-folders of the DCIM directory. There’s also no setting in Samsung phones to change where screenshots are stored. While hacks are available that can mitigate this issue to some extent, like PinSync, the only “fix” that is guaranteed to work is to search for “Screenshots” in Google Photos every once in a while and delete the results.

This is by no means a new problem. There have been complaints for years about screenshots being backed up against the wishes of device owners, but the functionality has remained consistent. Even Samsung’s recent One UI overhaul didn’t put the Screenshots folder back to the default location.

There could be many potential fixes to this issue. Samsung could add an option to move the Screenshots folder, or perhaps Google Photos could add support for excluding DCIM sub-folders. Ideally, Samsung and Google could work together on a fix, but this is still something that could be done without the participation of both parties.

The holiday season is coming to an end, but I do have a belated Christmas wish: Samsung and Google, please let me exclude screenshots from my Google Photos backups. Please. My library is filled with hundreds of random screenshots I took while writing articles and guides.

Earlier this year, Google Chrome officially launched tab groups on Android, confirming the change from the classic tab switcher to the new grid-based design. Google’s next step for their mobile browser is to integrate Tab Groups into Chrome for Android’s recent “Duet” redesign.

As it stands today, Chrome for Android’s tab groups UI uses a bar along the bottom of the screen to allow you to quickly switch among your current group of tabs. At the same time, Chrome for Android’s “Duet” redesign moves the browser’s UI from the top of the screen to the bottom.

As both of these features seem to be here to stay, Google needed to find a clean way to combine the two, rather than running two distinct toolbars at the bottom of your screen. A new flag in Chrome for Android, currently available in Dev and Canary, brings tab groups to Duet in a much smaller UI.

Duet-TabStrip Integration

Allows users to access integration of Duet and TabStrip.

#enable-duet-tabstrip-integration

The new experimental UI takes the “strip” of favicons from tab groups and lets it float just above the tab count button. On the same strip, you’ll see a plus (+) icon to add a new tab to the group and a down arrow to hide the strip.

Once the strip has been hidden, you can open it again by long-pressing on the tab count. As you add more tabs to your group, the strip gets wider to compensate and allows you to scroll once you’ve run out of room.

The biggest problem with this tab strip design though is that there’s no easy way to distinguish between two tabs that have the same favicon. If you forget what order your tabs are in, you can end up wildly swapping around to find the right one. Thankfully, you can still preview each tab’s title and thumbnail from the main tab switcher UI.

Bigger isn’t always better, though when it comes to gaming monitors, I’d argue that staring at a larger display is more enjoyable than looking at a smaller one, even if only at 1080p. If you agree, then check out MSI’s 27-inch Optix MAG270VC. It’s on sale at Best Buy for $199.99, which is $100 below its list price.

Sure, a 27-inch panel is a good fit for 1440p, but if you’re not looking to spend a premium for a higher resolution and still want a larger monitor, this one fits the bill. It’s the same size an resolution as the Pixio PXC273, which we consider one of the best gaming monitors. This deal also brings pricing parity between the two, and MSI is a more recognizable brand.

This monitor is built around a curved VA panel with a fast 144Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time (MPRT). Given that 1080p is not super demanding on hardware, this is a great candidate for games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and less demanding games in general, where speed matters.

Viewing angles are on par with a typical IPS display (178 degrees horizontal and vertical), while the 3,000:1 contrast ratio (100,000,000:1) is better than most. MSI also claims 110 percent coverage of the sRGB color space, which indicates a relatively high color gamut.

FreeSync is supported here as well, to smooth out the action if you own a compatible Radeon graphics card. Bottom line—this is a nice price on a fast display.

Microsoft plans to officially stop supporting Windows 7 on January 14. Kind of. People who’ve signed up for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program will still receive, well, security updates even after the rest of the operating system is abandoned. But there was some confusion around that extended support, which is why Microsoft engineer Mike Cure recently offered some clarity in a recent AMA.

The Tech Report summarized this episode by explaining that an FAQ for ESU (which is a surprisingly catchy combination of initialisms) was responsible for the confusion. That FAQ article said “No, your Windows 7 computer is not protected by MSE after January 14, 2020. MSE is unique to Windows 7 and follows the same lifecycle dates for support.” That directly contradicted what Microsoft had said elsewhere.

Which is why Computerworld’s Woody Leonhard asked Cure about ESU customers receiving Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) updates even after January 14 during the AMA. (For anyone unfamiliar: AMA stands for “ask me anything,” and discussions of that sort are popular on sites like Reddit, where seemingly everyone is endlessly curious about practically everything that even remotely interests them.) Cure said:

“MSE will continue to receive signature updates after Jan. 14.”

The perfect response: definitive, simple and straight to the point. But in case that wasn’t enough–and we’d suggest that blindly accepting answers offered via AMA threads might be just a little naive–Microsoft also updated the FAQ. It now reads: “Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) will continue to receive signature updates after January 14, 2020. However, the MSE platform will no longer be updated.”

More information about MSE can be found on Microsoft’s website. Despite updating the FAQ to reassure people that MSE will continue to receive new signatures after Windows 7’s end of support, Microsoft also said that Windows 7 users who rely on MSE should switch to Windows 10 “to continue to receive security updates.”

Just a little while ago we were able to catch a glimpse of the Intel Core i3-10300, a hyperthreaded entry-level chip from the upcoming Intel Comet Lake-S lineup. But, now, thanks to a new leak, we may have seen the entire range of 10th-generation desktop processors.

Some leaked slides from Intel appeared on Informatica Cero showing a broad lineup of desktop processors, from the 4-core, 16-thread Intel Core i3-10100 to the 10-core, 20-thread Intel Core i9-10900K. If these leaks are to be believed, we should see some much improved multi-core performance out of Intel in 2020.

But the leaks go even further. In some now-removed slides on VideoCardz, we got to see some more detailed information about the new lineup. For instance, Comet Lake-S processors will apparently feature up to a 4.8GHz all-core turbo, which will result in some extremely fast performance when the processors are pushed to their limits. What we don’t know yet is if it’ll hold a candle to AMD.

Here are the processors that were leaked, along with their single-core Turbo speeds:

Intel Core i3-10100: 4 cores, 8 threads 4.3GHz Turbo

Intel Core i3-10300: 4 cores, 8 threads, 4.4GHz Turbo

Intel Core i3-10320: 4 cores, 8 threads, 4.6GHz Turbo

Intel Core i5-10400: 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.3GHz Turbo

Intel Core i5-10500: 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.5GHz Turbo

Intel Core i5-10600: 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.8GHz Turbo

Intel Core i5-10600K: 6 cores, 12 threads, 4.8GHz Turbo

Intel Core i7-10700: 8 cores, 16 threads, 4.8GHz Turbo

Intel Core i7-10700K: 8 cores, 16 threads, 5.1GHz Turbo

Intel Core i9-10900: 10 cores, 20 threads, 5.1GHz Turbo

Intel Core i9-10900K: 10 cores, 20 threads, 5.2GHz Turbo

According to these leaked slides, core counts see a modest bump up from 8 cores to 10 in the flagship Core i9-10900K. But unless the processor sees a healthy price cut a lá Cascade Lake-X, we’re not sure how well it will hold up against AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation processors, the flagship of which has 16 cores.

Another mystery here is how much further Intel can push performance without it moving to 10nm. Comet Lake will still be based on Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, and we just have to wonder just how much further speed and efficiency can be pushed there.

Either way, with how fast these leaks are coming out, our guess is that we’ll learn much more about these processors at CES 2020, which is rapidly approaching.