How to force restart Samsung phone without using screen menu

Nowadays you can only shutdown Samsung phone by holding the power button which brings up a menu with options for shutdown, restart and emergency mode. Without a working screen, there was no way to select from the menu.

I wanted to shutdown a Samsung Galaxy J7 Pro that I had the screen changed but it couldn't display anything. Holding down the power and volume down button until the phone vibrated did the trick.

Restart your device

In the unlikely event that your device becomes unresponsive, you can attempt a force restart. This will turn your device off and back on without affecting any data stored on the device.

How do I force my Galaxy S7 to restart when the screen is frozen?

How to trick the heart rate monitor on your fitness tracker

Disclaimer: The following information provided is for educational and experimentation purposes.

You can trick a heart rate monitor that uses optical sensor to spoof a heart rate reading. This should work on trackers that use photoplethysmography(PPG) sensors that usually have a green flashing LED on the back.

The following video presents an example of the trick using pulsating colours. A heart rate tracker is placed with the sensor facing the video and wait for it to detect a reading.

Video URL: Can You Fool A Heart Rate Monitor

Another way to mimic this is to make an alternating image of 2 colours and adjust the speed according to the heart rate you require. You can test a demontration of this with the HTML/CSS code I had made here: https://www.w3schools.com/code/tryit.asp?filename=FWOZYIEUO85Y. You may adjust the code such as the speed by changing the number in the animation element, ie. "animation-duration: 0.4s" and rerun it. Generally 0.4s should take the bpm above 120.

A very basic black and white blinking might even work as shown here.

Tested succesfully on PPG heart rate trackers from National Steps Challenge: Carereach HR and Tempo 2.

Certain static surfaces like tabletops, mats and tablecloths may even be able to trick the sensor to register heartrate.

Source: HPB National Steps Challenge (Singapore)

Other sources of info:
Photoplethysmogram
https://valencell.com/blog/2015/10/optical-heart-rate-monitoring-what-you-need-to-know/

Don't buy Corel products if you hate pop up ads

I bought a Humble Bundle deal that had Corel Painter Essentials and Aftershot, installed them and started getting popup ads. These popup ads appear outside of the app even when you are not running Corel apps. Apparently this has been going on for many years even if you paid full price for their products. So to stop getting ad popups, I uninstalled them. Alternatively you can disable or delete any item that has Corel from Task scheduler in Windows to remove the popup ads.

Reference (Facebook post): https://www.facebook.com/corelpainter/posts/10154631865189283?comment_id=10155962484579283&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D

Download Canon Camera Software with Serial Number

Canon has some useful tools like their Digital Photo Professional software but you need a Canon camera serial number in order to download from their website. I had no interest to dig out the my camera's box so I searched and found following serial numbers to download Canon software from any Canon software download page.

• Range 0910400001 – 0910402496
• Range 0920400001 – 0920407771
• Range 0930400001 – 0930417770

Source:Download Canon Camera Software with no Serial Number | Best Mac Tips