We make things simple
You log in to your bank and a six-digit number arrives by SMS. That little number is doing more work than you think. A password on its own stopped being enough a long time ago. Passwords leak in company breaches, and most of us reuse the same one everywhere. Multi-factor authentication simply means proving who …
We all have one favourite password. It picks up a capital letter here, a number there, and off it goes to the next website. That one habit is the most common reason accounts get broken into. The target is usually your email, because your email is the reset button for your bank. What makes a …
You unbox a new iPhone, and it immediately asks you to sign in. That sign-in is your Apple Account. Apple used to call it an Apple ID; only the name changed. What is an Apple Account? Think of it like your PAN number. Your bank accounts, investments and tax returns all hang off one PAN. …
Your phone flashes "Storage almost full" just as you're trying to take a photo. Or worse, the laptop doesn't switch on one morning and ten years of files are inside it. That is the problem the cloud quietly solves. What exactly is the cloud? Everything on your computer sits on its hard drive, a disk …
You press the power button, then go and make chai while the laptop wakes up. That wait is almost never the processor's fault. Two upgrades will fix it, and both cost far less than a new laptop. Why is my laptop so slow? Older laptops keep your files on a hard drive, or HDD. A …
You order something on Amazon.in at night, and it lands at your door the next morning. Somebody in the house is paying for Prime. What is Amazon Prime? Prime is a paid membership on Amazon.in. It bundles several separate things into one subscription. You get faster delivery, a streaming service, music, e-books, and early entry …
Think about how many photos are sitting on your phone right now. Birthdays, holidays, the first day of school, that one good photo of your parents. Now imagine the phone slips out of your pocket in the monsoon rain. Copying photos to a computer by hand takes time and discipline, and most of us never …
Someone at dinner asks whether you have seen the show everybody is talking about. You hunt for it on your set-top box and it simply is not there. That is because it lives on the internet now, not on a channel. What are Netflix, Prime Video and JioHotstar? They are cable services that arrive over …
Someone sends you a talking cartoon fox that blinks and nods exactly like their own face. If you have wondered how they did that, it is an Animoji, and it is built into your iPhone already. I first wrote this when Animoji were brand new and still sitting in a beta version of iOS. They …