Tab Stop

An online store needs more than product pages. Someone has to host it, take card payments safely, calculate shipping and sales tax, and keep stock counts right. Ecommerce platforms split into two groups by who carries that work. Hosted platforms (Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce and the like) run the servers, apply security updates and handle most of the card compliance for you, in return for a monthly fee and sometimes a cut of each sale.

A budgeting app asks to connect to a bank account through a consent screen, and under PSD2 that access can be withdrawn later from the bank’s own list of outside providers. A loan application uses the same kind of window: when a Polish sole trader applies through Wandoo Biznes, the bank login goes to Kontomatik or Transaction Link, and the service receives only what it needs to assess the application, with no access to the money.

People rarely rent a boat because they need a boat. They rent an afternoon on the water: a fishing trip, a birthday on a pontoon, a sunset cruise with friends. The five points below apply whether the fleet is three kayaks or a dozen charter yachts. Engine size and seat count belong on the booking page, but they are not what makes someone book.

The steps below use Word, but Excel and PowerPoint work the same way in each version. Microsoft keeps a support page covering PDF export across its current apps. Open the document and click File > Export. Choose Create PDF/XPS Document, then click the Create PDF/XPS button. Pick a folder and name. Leave “Save as type” on PDF.

A wildcard certificate is an SSL/TLS certificate issued for a name that starts with an asterisk, such as *.example.com. Browsers accept it for any single label in that position: www.example.com, shop.example.com, mail.example.com, and any subdomain added later without reissuing anything. The asterisk matches exactly one level. *.example.com does not cover api.eu.example.com; that needs its own certificate or a second wildcard for *.eu.example.com.

YouTube is where most people search for video, and nothing here replaces that reach. Creators still look elsewhere for good reasons: ads they cannot switch off on their own videos, strict automated copyright matching, a need to control where a video can be embedded, or an audience that simply lives on another platform. The services below all accept uploads from anyone and are free to start with.

Your email address is the key to almost every other account you own, since password resets go there. That makes the choice of provider worth a few minutes, even when the account costs nothing. Moving later is possible but tedious: every account registered to the old address has to be updated one by one, and some cannot be changed at all.

Every form that asks for an email address is a small privacy decision. Hand over your main address and it may end up in a marketing list, get sold, or leak in a breach years later. Disposable addresses solve this in two different ways. A temporary inbox is a short-lived mailbox, often readable by anyone, that you use once and forget.

Valve handles every Steam sign-in problem through one help site, help.steampowered.com. Its “Help, I can’t sign in” page offers four routes: a forgotten account name or password, a stolen account, a Steam Guard code that is not arriving, and a lost Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator. Pick the one that matches your problem. The whole process is free, and nobody outside Valve can reset a Steam password for you, so ignore sites or chat messages offering to recover an account for a fee.

The trap with free video editors is usually found at the end: hours of cutting, then an export with a brand name across the corner, or a prompt to buy before the watermark comes off. Every editor below exports clean files for free. Where the free version is limited, the limit is resolution or features, and it is stated here.

iMessage is Apple’s messaging service, built into the Messages app on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It sends texts, photos, voice notes and reactions over the internet between Apple devices, and it is tied to an Apple ID. Apple offers it on nothing else. iCloud for Windows syncs photos, mail, contacts and bookmarks, but not messages, and the iPhone’s Text Message Forwarding setting only forwards to Apple devices signed in to the same Apple ID.

The PlayStation 3 is one of the hardest consoles to emulate. Its Cell processor pairs one general-purpose core with several specialized vector units, and reproducing that on a desktop CPU takes a great deal of work. That is why, as of early 2019, there is one PS3 emulator for computers that runs commercial games, and it is still a work in progress.

Since 2017, Android phones with the Google Play Store include Google Play Protect, which checks apps before they install from Play and scans the apps already on the device, including ones installed from elsewhere. It runs without setup and can disable a harmful app on its own. To check it, open the Play Store, tap the menu, and choose Play Protect; the screen shows the last scan and a switch for scanning apps for security threats, which should stay on.

Instagram is built around posting your own photos and videos. There is a heart, a comment box and a paper-airplane icon under every post, but no button that places another account’s post on your own grid the way a retweet works on Twitter. That gap is why a small category of Android apps exists. Since May 2018 the app has let you put a public post into your Story.