Hot Gadget Hacks Posts — Page 287 of 464

News: Android 4.4.3 Update Rolling Out Now for the Nexus 5

It appears that the next iteration of KitKat, Android 4.4.3, is fast approaching. If the past is any indication, today's update to the Nexus 5 software changelog on Sprint's website tells us a new version of Android will begin rolling out within 24 hours. Sprint has broken the news of a forthcoming Android release twice in the past. With 4.4.1 and 4.4.2, a mini-changelog was posted on the Sprint website about a day before Google began pushing updates to its Nexus devices.

News: My Pillow for Macrame - Unboxing (What Is Inside?)

Many people asked in my email, how was and of what is my Macrame Pillow made. I couldn't answer because it is a long story, but now I decided to show you. A surprise is awaiting you, because it's not a ordinary pillow for macrame. Watch how to make a macrame pillow.

How To: Put Your Nexus 7 in Deep Sleep Mode to Conserve Battery Power Throughout the Day

Battery life is precious to all mobile device users, and nothing is worse than running out of it. The only thing that can save a device from the dreaded low battery warning is the charger, but who carries those around?

How To: Free Space on Your Android Phone!

I still have a nexus one. This little phone 196 Mb of storage space (and most of that is taken by the system). But I have somehow managed to live off it for 2 years. This is for anyone with a small amount of memory. We will be using Link2SD. MUST HAVE CWR AND A ROOTED PHONE.

How To: Play the Largest Pokémon Game in History on Your Android Device

Online gaming is nothing new, and with live YouTube streams becoming ever more popular, there always seems to be a way to watch people play video games. Twitch TV offers the same spectator experience you've come to know and love, but the people over at TwitchPlaysPokémon have gone a step further and made it so that the spectators are the ones playing the game.

How To: Watch the Coachella Music Festival on Your HDTV All Weekend

One of the world's largest music festivals in kicking off this weekend in southern California, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. With a diverse lineup ranging from AFI to Empire of the Sun to HAIM to Muse, the music world is on display this weekend and the next.

How To: This Intelligent Personal Assistant for Your Galaxy S4 Is Way Better Than S Voice Could Ever Be

One feature of Samsung devices that's less useful than I had expected is S Voice, the voice assistant that ships with all new Galaxy devices. The voice is annoying, the features are lacking, and it's an all around subpar product. With Google Now, Siri, and now Microsoft's Cortana, Samsung needs to really step up their game—even on the new Galaxy S5.

How To: Run MIUI's Apps & Launcher on Your Galaxy Note 2 Without Rooting

While rooting your Galaxy Note 2 certainly has its advantages—everything from increasing security to relieving the Power button of its duties—it's definitely not for everyone.

How To: Put Your Galaxy S3's Screen to Sleep Just by Double-Tapping the Display

The "Knock Knock" features on LG's G2 phone have proven popular and useful enough to spawn various apps and mods cloning these abilities for other devices. Porting the "Knock On" feature to our Samsung Galaxy S3 isn't as easily doable, since developers would need to create a modded kernel, like they did for the HTC One. The "Knock Off" function, on the other hand, is a lot more manageable.

How To: Turn Your Videos into Animated GIFs on the Nexus 5 with No Quality Restrictions

Now that Hangouts is Android's default messaging app, it's given us a lot of cool new features. A bouncing ellipsis lets you see when the other party is typing, and an indicator shows you whether they've read your message or not. You can even answer the age-old question of "Where you at?" with a tap of a button, sending a map of your location.

How To: Two Simple Tricks to Taking Clearer, Sharper Photos on Your HTC One

Despite having the UltraPixel branding, the M7's camera can leave you feeling a little let down. The picture quality is clear and the low-light shots are decent, but when looking at the same shots taken on a friend's iPhone, you may feel a little inadequate.

How To: Block Phone Calls More Efficiently & Conserve Battery on Your Galaxy Note 3

When it comes to blocking unwanted calls, your Android device comes stocked with a native blocking feature that allows you to reject certain phone numbers. That being said, the native blocking feature on the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 isn't the prettiest or the smartest, with its non-obvious setup and lack of features.

How To: Get iPhone Ringtones, Notifications, & System Sounds on Your Nexus 5

As Nexus owners, we love our device's operating system, and it's probably the reason we went for a pure Google experience in the first place. But that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement in Android, especially when the OS has so many freely available softMods to tinker with.

How To: Get Rid of Annoying YouTube Ads on Your HTC One

YouTube makes money hand over fist every year selling ad space to companies, but unless you're reaping those benefits, they can be pretty annoying. Luckily, there is a simple way to get rid them on your rooted HTC One with Xposed and YouTube AdAway.

How To: Get the S5's New Rounded Quick Settings Toggles on Your Samsung Galaxy S3

Samsung's TouchWiz skin gets a lot of flak for its appearance, namely the garish colors on the quick settings toggles. The bright green on dark blue scheme is definitely an eyesore compared to the ones in stock Android, and even other manufacturer skins like HTC's Sense.

News: Doctor Says Google Glass Saved His Patient's Life

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the practical uses of Google Glass. Sure, you can use them for translating text instantly or further engraining yourself in social media, but how about saving someone's life? That's precisely what Dr. Steven Horng of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has says happened with a recent patient of his. After launching a Google Glass pilot program late last year, the device was seen as a critical factor in saving the life of a patient in January.

News: Just How Unbreakable Is the New Samsung Galaxy S5?

You've been there. Those precarious few seconds between dropping your expensive smartphone right on its face and reaching down to survey the damage. Or maybe you got thrown in a pool while your device was in your pocket, or you dropped that sucker right into the toilet bowl. Heck, I've managed to accidentally wash two devices by leaving them in my pants pocket when throwing in a load of laundry.

How To: Drop Everything! Here's How to Secure Your Data After Heartbleed: The Worst Web Security Flaw Ever

This time it's serious. Really. The largest web security vulnerability of all time went public on Monday, April 7th, 2014, resulting in widespread panic throughout the Internet as system administrators scrambled to secure their websites from the OpenSSL bug known as Heartbleed.

How To: Make Incompatible Apps Work in Multi-Window View on Your Galaxy Note 2

Multi Window, a feature that was greatly improved with the release of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, is still quite limited on the older Note 2, allowing only the use of a few stock applications to multitask with.

How To: Fix the Random Auto Brightness Spikes on Your Nexus 5

If you've ever noticed, even just for a fleeting moment, that the auto brightness on your Nexus 5 seemed to "glitch out"—you are not alone.

Hollywood's Nightmare: Watching Pirated Movies on Your HDTV Is as Easy as Buying a $35 Chromecast

Popcorn Time is an app that streams movies directly from torrents on to your computer, and it's seen its fair share of publicity, being lauded as a free Netflix alternative and chastised as an illegal file-sharing network.

News: Dropbox Releases Two New Apps to Help Corral Your Emails & Pictures

Dropbox, the cloud backup tool that is a mainstay on many of our devices, has added two companion apps to its service. Earlier today, we showed you a glimpse into a new testing version of the Gmail app, with features like pinning and snoozing to keep your inbox in check. Now, Dropbox has released Mailbox for Android, about a year after they purchased the company and its iOS app, with a simple goal: taming your inbox.

How To: Create Stop-Motion & Time-Lapse Videos on Your Samsung Galaxy S4

If you've seen ParaNorman or Fantastic Mr. Fox, then you have some kind of idea of what stop-motion animation is. Basically, these artists make objects, or small figures, appear to be moving on their own by manipulating and repositioning them in the smallest increments, then capturing each frame after doing so. When all the frames are compiled together, the final product is something spectacular like The Nightmare Before Christmas, which took roughly 109,440 frames in all.

News: New Google Calendar & Gmail Apps May Be Just Around the Corner

Google I/O may still be a couple of months away, and although we don't expect anything groundbreaking—no new Android versions, just fixes to KitKat—we could be treated to some new apps. No, not Pokémon inspired Maps, rather new versions of Google's Calendar and Gmail apps.

How To: Make Your HTC One M8 Feel Like a Google Play Edition Without Rooting

The all new HTC One M8 is the latest Android flagship making the rounds through major carriers hoping to beckon your purchase. Coming in at about $200 for most carriers with a contract, it makes a good case for itself with its advanced features and solid price point—but, there's another way to buy the One, and it's not from your carrier.

How To: Get the HTC One M8's All New BlinkFeed Launcher on Your Nexus 5

HTC's recent release of a new flagship phone brought tons of fanfare along with it. Dubbed The All New HTC One, the M8 edition of the popular One series phone also marked an update to the HTC Sense UI. Manufacturer skins like Sense can be a bit of a polarizing subject, especially amongst Nexus owners who are used to experiencing Android's interface exactly as Google envisioned it.

News: This “Weight-Loss” App Lets You Shed 15 Pounds for Selfies

If mainstream media has taught us anything, it's that being beautiful can get you ahead in life. The notion isn't necessarily correct, but it's what the general consensus accepts and it seems to hold quite a bit of weight (no pun intended) in the western world.

How To: Encrypted Sites May Not Be Safe to Visit Using Chrome's Default Settings

As you may have already heard, the worst bug in OpenSSL history went public yesterday, dubbed Heartbleed. While we can go deeper into the technical details of it later, the short version is that OpenSSL, the library used to encrypt much of the web running on Linux and Apache has been vulnerable for up to two years.

How To: Customize Appearance Settings for Individual Android Apps on Your HTC One

By this point, you've definitely come across an app or two that wasn't designed with the HTC One in mind. Either the resolution is too small, the status bar stays active when it shouldn't, or the font isn't the ideal size. There are ways out there to get that changed, but up until now it wouldn't just change one app—it would change all of them.

How To: Open Google Now Instead of S Voice with the "Hi, Galaxy" Command

Google released its long-awaited Google Now launcher a couple months ago, allowing users to access Google Now with the simple command of the voice. As great as the feature is, it requires that our screens be on, unlike the Moto X's "active listening" service that operates with Google Now, activating through a screen-off state.

How To: Swipe Between Message Threads for Faster Multi-Texting

I'm a textaholic. One of the problems with being a textaholic is that your device just can't keep up with you.

News: The End of Dead Phone Batteries Is Closer Than You Think

The old "my battery is dead" excuse for not calling your mother may soon be a thing of the past. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), led by Professor Jo Byeong-jin, has developed a "wearable thermo-element" that can be built into clothing to power your electronic devices. The science behind the innovation converts body heat (thermal energy) into usable electric energy. Made with lightweight glass fiber, this small thermo-element strip can produce about ...

News: Sprint HTC One M8 Receives First Update—Your Battery Life Will Thank You

Although the new HTC One M8 was only released about two weeks ago, owners of the Sprint variant are receiving their first software update this morning.

How To: Perform Quick Calculations & Google Searches on the Fly

Numbers are everywhere in life, and some are better at doing the math than others. Unless you're Gert Mittring, it's safe to say you use the calculator app on your tablet just as much as I do, and it's often disrupting your other tasks.

News: Twitter (Sorta) Buys a Lock Screen

Earlier this morning, Twitter announced (through a tweet, naturally) that it has acquired Cover, roughly a minute after Cover made the same announcement. Cover Lock Screen, a lockscreen replacement app, has been vastly popular during its first year. The app places relevant shortcuts on your lockscreen that adapt to your habits, so whether you're at home, work, or in the car, you'll find the apps you use the most in these situations readily available for you. For more information on Cover, inc...

How To: 6 Surefire Ways to Speed Up Google Chrome

With the release of Jelly Bean, Chrome became the default web browser on Android. The wildly successful desktop browser was now fully entrenched in the world's largest mobile operating system.

How To: Use the M8's New Sense TV App on Your HTC One M7 & Ditch Your Remotes for Good

Let's face it, finding your remote, let alone finding something to watch, can take more time out of our days than we'd care to admit. There are remote locators and channel guides out there, but why use those when you have a perfectly good remote always on you—your HTC One. HTC put an IR blaster into their One and when it's coupled with their Sense TV app, it can make for one hell of a smart remote.