Author: Felix Yates

I am a passionate user and lover of technology and run a small YouTube channel based around it. Admin and author for TechLife and the WYCCA.
The copyright symbol

YouTube FIXES Copyright System

On August 15th, @TeamYouTube on Twitter announced that they were making some hotly-anticipated changes to the copyright system. The tweet describes the new policy that will prevent copyright owners, such as much-hated UMG, from making money on manual claims on unreasonable grounds, including short song clips and unintentional audio.

Many YouTubers have been speaking out about the broken copyright system on YouTube for years now, as large media corporations have been taking advantage of this broken system by using manual claim farms, basically where people are paid to watch big YouTuber’s videos and listen for any remotely claimable content, and then manually claim all of the video’s ad revenue.

Continue reading
The Swift Installer app icon

How to enable ‘Dark Mode’ on ANY Android app

Many Android users seem to be left in the dark- get it, dark? No? OK- with ‘true’ dark mode on apps like YouTube and Twitter, while iOS users seem to be getting all the good stuff. Dark mode is not only great for browsing at night, but also for saving battery life. You see, on OLED devices, when black is displayed on the screen, the LED is switched off, conserving battery life and giving deeper blacks.

Continue reading

What is up with smartphone trends?

Over the past few years, it has felt like the smartphone market has been totally oversaturated with devices. With phones from hundreds of different manufacturers releasing every month, it’s hard for companies to find a gap in the market. However, instead of trying to innovate to try and find and fill that gap, they are still continuing on the old screen-battery-processor cycle. o.5cm less bezel and half an hour’s more battery life for just £200 more!

Continue reading

Is ad blocking ethical?

I’ve been using an ad blocker for a few years now, and it hasn’t really crossed my mind whether it was ethical or not- until now. Of course, I have seen all of the popups asking me to disable my ad blocker, but I have simply just disabled it without a second thought, but now that I think about it, ad blockers should only be used to block malicious or intrusive ads that are trying to harm your computer or just jump out at you, blasting audio when you forgot to mute your computer. It’s not right to deprive the website you are using’s revenue, after all, they have to pay for hosting, the domain and other things. Even with large corporations like YouTube, they rely on advertisements to pay the creators of the videos, so: do the content creators a favour and disable it for them so they can keep making the content you love.
As for the intrusive ads, you can block them by using Adblock Plus. Simply right-click on the bad ad you want to block and click on ‘Block element.’ If this doesn’t appear, try highlighting the object first.

Continue reading