Gopear Technologies

Apple Launches iPhone 12

Emmanuel Boahen — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:11:23 +0000

Apple has just launched the iPhone 12 at its “Hi, Speed” event today. The device came with 5G, Super Retina XDR display, a ceramic shield front-glass cover design and multiple colors. Below are some more details on some interesting quirks that came with the device.

Screen

The iPhone 12 came with a 6.1 inch display. Kaiann Drance, vice president, iPhone Product Marketing stated that the device has a 460 pixels per inch screen which gives it twice the sharpness of the iPhone 11 screen. It also came with the toughest cover glass ever made in the industry which is know as “Ceramic Shield.” according to Drance. It is called Ceramic Shield because its design included a new high temperature crystallisation step, which grows nano ceramic crystals within the glass matrix to dramatically improve toughness.

Colors

You can get the new iPhone 12 in either black, blue, green, red, or white.

Processor

The device came with Apple Silicon A14 Bionic Processor which brings 50% improvement over the iPhone 11 according apple.

Camera and Video

It came with an improved ultra wide dual camera system. This new camera allows more light to hit the sensor for better photos. The current is the first phone camera with the ability to shoot HDR video in Dolby Vision. Apple also said the iPhone 12 has Night Mode capture which means brighter and better pictures with less noise.

Much Better Wireless Charging

The new wireless charging system is compatible with Qi wireless chargers. Also when charging with the improved and new MagSafe compatible connectors, the device can receive up to 15W when charging. MagSafe uses magnets to make sure that the wireless charger properly aligns with the iPhone wireless charging system.

Price

The new iPhone will be available to pre-order at $799 in the US from October 16th and customers may be receiving their orders around October 23rd.

Unfortunately, the new iPhone 12 will not be coming with a power adapter and headphones in the box. Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives defended the decision to take out power adapters and headphones by saying that many customers have embraced the wireless experience and already there are over 700 million lightening headphones in use out there.

She also said there are over a billion power adapters out in the world so removing these items from the iPhone box reduces carbon emissions and avoids the mining and use of precious metals. She also stated that these changes will cut over 2 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

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8 Google Search Tools You Will Love.

Emmanuel Boahen — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 16:45:46 +0000

Google Search is great search engine but what many people don’t know is that its capabilities go beyond just searching for items. In this write-up, you will discover eight(8) amazing tools built into google search for quick productivity or even fun.

Built-in Google Search Tools

Calculator
Calculators are obviously for calculating. If you find yourself in a situation where you need a quick calculator to calculate any thing, just type “Calculator” and a calculator will appear right in your search.
Color Picker
Color picker is a very important tool for determining colors. Designers and app developers rely on color picker apps a lot to choose favorable colors for their projects. Typing “color picker” into your google search box will pull up a Color Picker tool immediately.
Unit Converter
This simple tool helps you do unit conversions quickly right from Google Search. Just type “Unit Converter” to start converting.
Metronome
As a musician, have you found yourself in a situation where you needed a Metronome so bad to time your music? That is what Google Search’s metronome tool is for. Just type “metronome” in the search and one will appear for use.
Flip a coin
If you find yourself in a situation where you want to flip a coin but don’t have a real coin on you, just type “flip a coin” in your google search box and a quick tool will be provided for that.
Meditation Tool
The meditation tool is an awesome tool which helps you perform some breathing exercises. This can really come in handy when you are feeling a bit nervous about an upcoming presentation or anything, Just type “breathing exercise” and the tool will show up.
Roll Dice
You roll a dice right from your google search. Just type “Roll a die” an a tool will appear for that. This interesting thing is that you can even roll multiple dice all from this tool.
Spinner
There is a spinner tool in google search which can be used for number or fidget spinning. Typing “20 value spinner” for example will show a spinner tool with 20 values on it.

Don’t forget to share this discovery with your friends.

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8 Google Search Tips You Must Know

Emmanuel Boahen — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:24:05 +0000

Google search is a powerful search engine to find pretty much anything you are looking for on the internet. In this write-up, you will learn 8 plus 1 bonus cool tips on using Google Search. Let’s get started already!

Google Search Tips

Combined Searches
Combined searches helps you to search for 2 or more things at the same time. Using this trick saves you a lot of time since you may not have to search individually for the multiple things you are looking for on google. To perform a combined search, just use “OR” in between your search terms. For example “Shoes or Belt” will perform a combined search on Shoes and Belt.
Exact Match Search
Use this technique to get results which contain the exact phrase you are looking for. For exact match searches, wrap your search phrase in a quotation mark. An example is “free trips”.
Wild Cards
Sometimes you may not know the full phrase you are searching for and may want to make a quick guess to see if you will get some results and this is where Wild Cards (*) come in. For example, lets say you are looking for “Game of Thrones” but you have forgotten the “Thrones” word in your search phrase, you may write it like “Game of *” in the search bar and google search will make a wild guess on your behalf to get you some good results.
Word Exclusion
You use this trick when you want to search for something but also want to exclude all results containing a particular word. You do this by adding a dash (-) or minus in front of that word you want to omit. In order to test this we will search for the phrase “food for thought” but will tell google search to return only results not containing the word “food”. I doubt if we will get anything but let’s see.
Synonyms
Use this trick if you wish to include results which contains synonyms of some selected words in your search term. You can achieve this by adding a tilde (~) in front of your selected words.
Number Range Search
This trick helps you to search for particular items between a range of numbers. Example use “Car $1000..$5000” to return search results containing Cars between the prices of $1,000 to $5000.
In Url, title or body
This trick will let google search return only websites containing your search term either in their url, title text or body text. For example “intitle:Hello” will return pages with the word “Hello” in their title, “inurl:tech” will also return site URLs containing the word “tech”.
Site Search
You can search through any particular website using this trick. Entering “”site:cnn.com google”” for instance will search for the occurrence of the word google on the cnn.com website.
Bonus Tip: Timer
You may be having a trivia session with some friends or any other thing which will need to be timed and you can easily start a timer from Google Search by entering timer [your number of minutes]. Click here to read about other interesting tools that have been built into google search.

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How to Create Quick Surveys using Google Forms

Emmanuel Boahen — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 12:53:03 +0000

Before the internet existed, conducting a survey was not an easy task; you will have to print lots of papers with questions and physically give it out to people to fill then later come back for it. Now there is the internet and this process has been made very easy with Google Forms.

Google forms is one of those amazing and free services by google which helps you to collect information from users/people online. Imagine there is a product you have launched and you need customer feedback as quickly as possible, or you are embarking on a research and you need public opinion about anything in your research, Google Forms will come to your rescue just in time. Below are some easy steps to help you to create your first simple survey with google forms.

Creating Your Survey Form

Creating a google form is really easy. All you need is a google account and you are good to go. If you do not have a google account, find out how you can create one from here.

Visit https://forms.google.com from your browser.
Sign in if you are asked to. After successful sign in, you will be taken to a page which shows you various form templates that you can begin to work with.
Click on the blank template since we will be creating a customized form.

Enter “Earth Shape Survey” as the title and enter anything you want in the Form description section to describe your survey.

Below the title and description block, you will see another block. This is your first question block. Click on the ‘Untitled Question’ text and enter your own question. Eg. “What is your name?”

On the right side of your question text is a drop down control to select a format for the answers you hope to receive from your respondents. Choosing “Short Answer” for instance will give your respondents a place to enter a simple text as response. Choosing “Date” will give them a date picker and choosing “Multiple Choice” will give them the option to choose answers from a number of given options provided by you. In our case we will choose “Short Answer” for our first question since we are asking for just their name. Try to play with the other options.

Click on the ‘+’ icon on the far right tool strip to add a new question block. As our question for this block, let’s type “How old are you?”. Select multiple choice and enter “Between 14-40 yrs” as our first option and “Between 40-100 yrs” as our next option.

Lets repeat step 7 but this time our question will be “What do you believe is the shape of the earth?” and for our options enter “Flat” and “Round”.
Now our Survey form is ready. Let us preview it to see how it will look like for our respondents by clicking on the preview button. This looks like a human eye and it is at the top of the page. This will open a new tab to display our final form

If everything looks great, it is time to share our form with friends on social media and anywhere else we hope to gather responses. Just click on the send button at the top of the page. You will be presented with options on how you hope to send your form (email, link, embed). Choose link since we want to share the link to our form. Copy the link and share it with people to fill your form.

And there you have it! Congratulations! You just created your first survey with Google Forms!

You may be wondering where the responses go after your respondents fill the form. All responses are curated at the “Responses” tab of your forms page and Google forms does not only curate your responses in the response section, it also visualizes your responses for you to make your reporting faster and easier.

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How to Set A Custom Screen Resolution on Ubuntu Desktop

Emmanuel Boahen — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 14:26:22 +0000

About 3 years ago I decided to try out a linux distro and i ended up with Ubuntu. Since then, it has been quite a learning journey as i come across new challenges everyday which makes using the OS fun. I bought a new monitor recently to extend my laptop display and the resolution wasn’t quite good when i connected it to the laptop. i had to set a custom resolution to make things work well and this is how i was able to do it.

1. Open your terminal with this key combination Ctrl+Alt+T and run this command:

xrandr

This will output all available screen resolutions and displays on your machine.

2. Next command will help to calculate VESA CVT mode lines by the given resolution.

cvt 1680 1050

1680 1050 was the resolution i needed. Replace that with your desired screen resolution

3. Copy these words from your terminal output after the previous command and run the next command.

sudo xrandr --newmode "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync

This above command will create a new display mode which can be applied to your display.

4. Now assign the newly created mode to your display device with the command below (my display device was called VGA-1, replace that with your display device):

sudo xrandr --addmode VGA-1 "1680x1050_60.00"

Now when you go to your display settings, you will see your newly created resolution. Simply apply it and you are done.

One important thing you have to do is to make sure you add your newly created resolution to your .profile file so that you don’t loose this settings after restart. To do that simply enter the command below and add the last 2 commands to the end of the opened file and save it.

gedit ~/.profile

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