Download Your Facebook Photos by Daniel Howley

Facebook is a great place for sharing photos online. But let’s say you want to hand out hard copies of an all-time favorite from your (or a friend’s) wall – this snap, for example: To get it onto a flash drive so you can send it off to the printer’s, you’ll have to first download the image from Facebook — which is, luckily, a pretty simple task. Just visit Facebook.com on your desktop and find the photo in a profile’s Timeline or Photos section. After you click the image to open it full-screen, select the Options button in the lower right corner of the screen. Select Download from the pop-up menu, and choose where you want to save the image. Happy sharin...

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It’s Not Too Late: The Procrastinator’s Guide to Last-Minute Christmas Shopping by Christina Tynan-Wood

You waited until the last minute — again. So now you’ve missed every opportunity to “Get it there by the 25th!” You are faced with going to the store with hordes of other grumpy procrastinators. It’ll be a Scrooge Apocalypse out there: Traffic, Christmas music, picked over sale bins, and the smell of desperation. But it’s what you deserve. Right? Oh, stop beating yourself up. This is an opportunity. Even if you are — at this very moment — giftless, dressed in your finest Christmas sweater, and late for the festivities, you can still pull it out. And you don’t have to settle for lame gifts, either. In fact, I believe that, if you fully embrace your procrastination as a casual,...

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Apple is helping out those who have left Christmas shopping a bit late by offering free next-day delivery for online orders made on December 23, MacRumors reports.  Any customer who orders an in-stock item by 2 p.m. on December 23 will be eligible for free next-day delivery in the U.S.  Additionally, in-store pickup orders made two hours before closing on December 24 will also be available for pickup, according to Apple’s website. In the U.S., Apple currently offers free next-day shipping on in-stock iPhone models but everything else, including the Watch, Mac, and iPad, has a two-day shipping as standard.  In the UK, free next-day delivery is usually...

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Tip: Best Way to Fix OS X’s Autocorrect? Turn It Off by Rob Pegoraro

Let’s get right to teh point: I’d rather live with the occasional dumb typo than have OS X’s humorless and militant autocorrect stomping all over my words. You should too. What has this feature done to earn its eviction? The automatic spelling-correction that Apple added with 2011’s OS X Lion got a lot pushier with 2012’s OS X Yosemite. It has now ascended to a level of intrusiveness and cluelessness that makes Microsoft Office’s long-gone Clippy assistant look like a gifted ghostwriter. First, OS X’s spell-check ignores capitalized words, resulting in such acts of brand assassination as turning “Etsy” to “Easy” and “Roku” to “Rook.” It’s done the same to people’s...

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Pogue’s Picks: 7 Terrific Holiday Gifts You’ve Probably Never Heard of by David Pogue

You already know that high-tech products dominate holiday gift-giving. This year, the world’s stockings will be stuffed with an awful lot of the obvious ones: Amazon Echos, Chromecast Audios, Surface Pros, iPads, and so on. But there’s more to life than the big names. Every year, the market overflows with new and obscure products, all scheduled to come out just in time for the holidays. And in there, buried among the boring and the doomed, are some genuinely great ideas for holiday gift-giving. And so, as a service to you, the busy person with better things to do, I’ve winnowed down all those products to just seven, ranging in price from $2 to $300, that are beautifully done,...

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Microsoft pulls botched patch KB 3114409 that triggered problems with Outlook 2010 By Woody Leonhard

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update KB 3114409, intended to help admins keep Outlook 2010 from starting in safe mode, has in fact done the opposite. Many Outlook 2010 customers report that installing KB 3114409 forces Outlook to start in safe mode. As of early Wednesday morning, the patch has been pulled, but if you're experiencing odd problems with Outlook 2010 -- it opens in safe mode only (always opens maximized and has no sounds, no reading pane, or other view settings that stick), has broken templates, and much more -- you should look at the KB 3114409 article for instructions on how to remove the patch. And you should reflect on how a patch this destructive ever made...

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The essential guide to powerline ethernet adapters (including 7 hands-on reviews) by Yardena Arar

Editor’s note: This roundup of powerline ethernet adapters is continually updated. It was originally published on January 15, 2015, and this is the third update. Since the number of products in the story was becoming unwieldy, we’ve removed the older models and kept only the latest HomePlug AV2 MIMO and ITU G.hn adapters. If you want to see the story as it was originally published in January 2015, click here. This latest iteration adds an entirely new review of the ZyXEL PLA5456KIT to our earlier reviews of the D-Link DHP-701AV, Extollo LANsocket 1500, TP-Link TL-PA8030P KIT, and the Trendnet TPL-420E2K. You’ll also find the one ITU G.hn adapter we’ve reviewed to date: the...

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Apple TV vs Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Google Chromecast: Which Streaming-Movie Box Should You Buy? by David Pogue

Big companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon are fighting each other over territory in a surprising market: streaming TV devices. You know—those small, homely, black plastic boxes that connect your TV to Internet video services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Video, and HBO Now (and music services like Pandora and Spotify)? And to these four add one more: The less boxy Google Chromecast device, which plugs directly into your TV and uses a mobile app as a remote. Why would such important companies fight over such a relatively unimportant category? It’s not as though everyone needs a streaming-TV device. The Netflixes and YouTubes of the world come built in to most new “smart”...

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