Gadget Hacks How-Tos
How To: Everything You Need to Know About iOS 8 Beta 5 for iPhone, iPad, & iPod Touch
Apple has just released iOS 8 beta 5 to developers, which is speculated to be the second-to-last beta build before they launch the gold master (GM) edition at the end of this month.
How To: Show Off Photos to Camera Roll Snoops on Your iPhone Without Any Risk
Last week, I showed off a deeply buried accessibility feature built into iOS 7 and 8 that lets you disable screen touches in certain apps. While useful for many reasons, I found it most helpful for preventing nosy family and friends from swiping through the Camera Roll when showing them a photo.
How To: Make Your Nexus 5's LED Notification Light Dance to the Music
Most of the time, the LED notification light on the front of your Android device just sits there doing nothing. Other than that brief period of time between when you receive a notification and when you turn your screen on, it's practically useless for anything other than showing when your charger is plugged in.
How To: Get Instant Access to Your Favorite Media Apps on Android When You Connect Your Headphones
Samsung's Galaxy devices, for all the grief they get about supposed "bloatware", offer quite a few functional features that are not included in stock Android. From "Air Gestures" to a handy "Smart Alert" notification reminder, many of these features are more than just the latest gimmick to pitch in their ads.
How To: Speed Up Charging Time on Your OnePlus One
My OnePlus One easily gets over a day of battery life without a problem, but when I try to charge it, it seems to take just as long. For some reason, no matter what charger you plug your OPO into, it never gets more than USB-level power, meaning that charging times are more than double when compared to traditional AC-charging.
How To: Root Your Amazon Kindle Fire HDX in Less Than 5 Minutes
Amazon released the Kindle Fire HDX back in late-2013, and if you picked one up or received one as a gift, you've probably had a good amount of time to get to know your tablet.
How To: Create Google Now Reminders Straight from Google Search on Your Computer
Google Now is a quick and intuitive way to tailor your device to work for you and, unlike other personal assistants, provide you with up-to-date information based on search habits, emails, and the general all-knowingness of Google.
How To: The Flat-Out Easiest Way to Create a Nandroid Backup on Android
If you have a custom recovery installed on your Android device, the first thing you should have done as soon as you finished installing it was to create a Nandroid backup. But if you didn't, I'm not here to judge—I'm here to show you a much easier way.
How To: Fix an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch That Won't Charge Anymore
If you've ever had issues charging your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, like most other Apple products, the culprit to blame is usually a frayed or damaged cable. It's a common design flaw due to the thinness of the cords and the weak sheath surrounding them — but that's not always the problem.
How To: Get Karaoke-Style Floating Lyrics for Any Song on Your HTC One
We've previously shown you an app called Floating Lyrics which displayed song lyrics in a, you guessed it, floating window. And while that app was great for any minimalist, it was pretty bare bones overall.
How To: Black Out System Apps on Your Samsung Galaxy S5 for Better Battery Life
As I've explained before, black app backgrounds save you a bit of battery life on your Samsung Galaxy S5. This is because the AMOLED display on your S5 does not have to power pixels or a backlight for portions of the screen that are black.
How To: Safely Manage All Your Two-Factor Authentications in Just One Android App
As great as the Internet is, it is not without its dangers. Hackers at any time may be breaking into your online accounts and compromising your sensitive information. Last year, hackers broke into Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter and made off with 2 million stolen passwords.
How To: Install Almost Any Google Play or Third-Party App on Your Amazon Kindle Fire HDX
Amazon's Appstore has come a long way since it launched in 2011, with over 250,000 apps to its name. That being said, their app numbers pale in comparison to Google's Play Store, which currently boosts over 1.3 million apps.
How To: Make an Arduino Shield
Two years ago, driven by a good friend of mine i decided to give it a try on timelapse photography. I had a DSLR camera but didn't had an intervalometer, so i assembled a small electronic circuit on top of an Arduino Uno, made some basic code and did my first timelapse movie. The result was awful, but for some reason I was hooked.
How To: Speed Up Your LG G3 in 10 Seconds Flat
Your new LG G3 is fast, no doubt about it. With a state-of-the-art Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM (dependent on model), there is more than enough under the hood for blazing fast speeds. The problem is, the device actually slows things down on purpose. This is meant so that you see all the cool transition animations LG put in place, providing for a sense of "change" as you navigate from one app or menu to another. But once you've used your device for a while, these animations can lose...
How To: Remove Button Clutter from the WhatsApp Interface on Android
If you're one of the millions of people who use the WhatsApp service for messaging, you've probably noticed a recent propensity that the app has had for adding buttons to its interface. Two such buttons have made their way into the message thread screen, cluttering up the interface with functionality that is a tad bit redundant.
How To: Switch Between Your Two Most Recent Apps Faster with a TV-Style “Return” Button for Android
There are a gazillion app switchers on the market, and some are really awesome, like Edge, GloveBox, Loopr, and Switchr, to name just a few. However, these can all be a little bit more complicated and cumbersome than necessary when I just want to switch back to the last app I was in.
How To: Swap Out Your Samsung Emoji for the More Popular Google & iOS Icon Sets
Emoji icons can vary greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer. Normally, this isn't be a problem, unless all of your friends use iPhones and you're the only one that receives a different icon than the rest of your group. And for the record, they don't all correspond to each other, which only makes using them that much more difficult.
How To: Send Photos, Videos, & Other Files That Automatically Self-Destruct on Android
Certain files contain sensitive data that you don't want being shared with just anybody. Even still, it would be nice to be able to send such a file to a certain confidante without fear of it falling into the wrong hands.
How To: Assign Apps Individual PINs & Passwords to Quick Launch Them from Your Lock Screen
Most times when you take your smartphone out of your bag, pocket, or purse, you probably know exactly what you're going to do with it. Make a call, send a text, take a selfie, browse viral videos on YouTube, or one of the other many things a smartphone can do nowadays.
How To: Quickly Track & Free Up Space in Your Cloud Storage
It seems like every cloud service out there is offering tons of upgrade options and free promotions to give people as much space as they need to store their files online. I personally have over 100GB of Google Drive space which is shared between multiple computers, phones, and tablets, so keeping track of everything can be a huge pain in the ass.
How To: Get New Transition Animations on Your Nexus 5
Transition animations are an essential element of any mobile operating system. They give the user a sense of what's happening on the screen, where the apps are coming from, and where they're going.
Canvas Fingerprinting: How to Stop the Web's Sneakiest Tracking Tool in Your Browser
Canvas fingerprinting is the web's trickiest privacy threat, but it's not impossible to stop. With all the media attention it's gotten lately, it's time we lay out exactly how to detect and prevent this invasive tracking technique.
How To: Theme Android L on Your Nexus 5 with New Colors & Icons
Google's upcoming Android release hasn't even received a name or version number yet, but the third-party development community is already having its way with the firmware.
How To: Cancel or Undo a Sent Mail and Preview Your Gmail
This video will show you how to cancel or undo a sent mail and preview mails in inbox. If you sent an incomplete mail or to a wrong person you could undo your action. Gmail will provide you few second to cancel the send operation. Watch the video and follow all the steps carefully.
How To: Show Someone a Photo on Your iPhone Without Them Swiping Through All of Your Pics
You hand your iPhone to a friend to show them a picture. What happens? They swipe. Left, right, it doesn't matter. You don't remember what lies in either direction of the photo in question, and you don't want anything compromising exposed to the unassuming viewer. Luckily, Apple includes a safety net in iOS to prevent this scenario from ever happening, so long as you set it up ahead of time.
How To: Turn Any Photo You Want into a Custom Emoji Icon on Your iPhone
The biggest hurdle faced when text messaging (besides more convincing lies) is accurately communicating our emotion and tone. Anything we say can be interpreted in various subjective ways by the recipient, and that's why we have emoji—to illustrate what we actually want to say.
How To: Secure Android Apps with Mathematical Expressions on Your Galaxy S4
Security is a priority for many when they first set up their mobile devices. Nobody wants to have a stranger or nosey friend go through their phone and discover risqué photos or embarrassing text messages. These days, the closet is gone—everyone keeps their skeletons in their phones.
How To: Theme Your Nexus 5 with Flat System Icons & Translucent Pull-Downs
Yes, I know. Nexus owners aren't exactly the biggest Apple fans out there. That "Pure Android" experience was one of the main reasons we bought our Nexus devices. But give the other side some credit—the iPhone's operating system has come along way, and is still the champ when it comes to aesthetic design (at least until Material Design dethrones it this fall).
How To: Search in Twitter Using Parameters Without Log In
This video will show you how to search Twitter by parameters without sign up or log in. Here a person can use search parameters to find the desire twits. So there is no headache for signing up or logged in for searching. So please Watch the video and follow all the steps to do it yourself.
Attention: Your Galaxy Note 3 Can Be Used as a Heart Rate Monitor
Your heart is constantly work for you, yet you think nothing of it—and Samsung wants to change that. They stuck a dedicated heart-rate monitor on the Galaxy S5, they're putting one in the upcoming Note 4, and they're bound to slap one in every Galaxy device thereafter.
How To: Make Google Now Obey Custom Voice Commands—Even Without Root
It seems like custom Google Now commands are a dime a dozen these days. With Commandr for Google Now giving non-rooted users their first taste of custom voice commands just a couple weeks ago, you may wonder why we're covering this subject again.
How To: Prevent the Screen from Waking When Plugging in Your Galaxy S4 to Charge
Much like the high volume warning, there are various minute features on Android that users either hate or just find annoying. Thankfully, there are developers out there that sympathize. It may seem frivolous, but one feature that a lot of people want eliminated is the screen waking whenever a charger is plugged in.
How To: Quickly Launch Your Favorite App from Any Screen on Your Nexus 5
Even though there are over 1.3 million apps available for Android, we normally confine ourselves to a select few for day-to-day usage. With an average of 41 apps installed per user, most apps on our smartphones lay idle for the majority of the time we spend using them. Instead, we find ourselves constantly coming back to that small set of apps that meet almost all of our needs.
How To: Install & Multi-Boot Bodhi Linux on Your Nexus 7 (& Why You Should)
When people first learn that their Android device is capable of dual-booting different operating systems, e.g. Linux, they almost universally respond with, "That's so cool." And for those of us ambitious enough to actually try one out, we are typically filled with glee as we see Ubuntu, or something similar, boot up for the first time on our tablet or phone.
How To: Get CyanogenMod's "Theme Engine" Themes on Your Nexus 5
Surely you've heard of the wildly-popular custom ROM CyanogenMod, right? As the longest-tenured third-party firmware for Android devices, CM has been able to maintain its popularity by supporting a wide array of devices and offering many customization options.
How To: Increase Battery Life on Your Samsung Galaxy S5 by Automating Data
When you're not using your phone, it doesn't make much sense that it would be wasting power by maintaining an internet connection for the inside of your pocket or purse. Well, perhaps you need a little bit of intermittent data here and there so that apps can update themselves in the background and still post notifications, but it doesn't need to be constant.
How To: Update Your Nexus 4 to Android L
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you're probably well aware that the Android world has been buzzing with excitement over the recently debuted Android L preview build that was released for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 at Google's I/O conference.
How To: Take Control Over Your MacBook's Fans for a Cooler, Smoother-Running Laptop
MacBooks are built for creation and creativity. They're built to withstand our careers, our hobbies, and our everyday use. I use mine every day, and there's nothing I'd recommend more for computing needs.
How To: Prank Your Friends with Random Cat Facts Text Messages
It's time to enjoy one of America's longest lasting favorite pastimes. No, not baseball—pranking our friends! With the internet currently overrun with countless pictures and memes of cats, there's no way for your feline-hating friends to surf the web without coming across a kitten or two. But things can get worse for them. Way worse...