Gadget Hacks How-Tos — Page 156 of 336

Heartbleed Still Lingers: How to Check Your Android Device for Vulnerabilities

Unless you've been living under a rock with no internet connection, it's safe to say that you've heard of the Heartbleed flaw that allows practically anyone with the right knowledge to steal your personal information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and e-mail addresses using OpenSSL.

How To: Change Font Size & Text Colors in Snapchat on Your Galaxy Note 2

In an attempt to keep things simple, Snapchat has a limited amount of editing features, made up of "smart" photo filters, drawing pens, and special text captions. If you want more editing capabilities, you'll be pleased to know there's a way, no thanks to Snapchat, but you will need to be rooted.

How To: Apple's CarPlay Finally Revealed: Here's What You Can Expect

Integrated rather secretively into iOS 7.1, CarPlay gives a better hands-on experience when driving, working with the car's built-in display to help you find directions, send and receive calls and text messages, control music, and more—without having to fumble around with your small iPhone.

How To: Add the "Knock Off" Feature to Your HTC One M8 Without Rooting

Your new HTC One M8 has a ton of really cool features, some of which relate to waking the device up. A swipe up to unlock to your last active screen, a swipe down to access the voice dialer, and a double-tap (or knock) to wake the device and bypass the lock screen.

How To: Assign Your Volume Buttons to Almost Any Task on Your Galaxy S4 Without Root

The new HTC One and Nexus series devices have already replaced their physical navigation keys with soft keys, and it's inevitable that we'll see more and more of this on future mobiles. Samsung continues to buck the trend entirely, but no manufacturer as gone as far as to remove the volume rockers.

How To: Turn Your HTC One into the Ultimate Gaming Machine

What's the point of having a 1080p screen if you're not using it to get in some quality gaming time? Google Play is great for downloading games, but you probably already have an extensive library of games for your consoles, so use those!

How To: Access & Control Your Computer Remotely with Your Nexus 5

With popular remote desktop app LogMeIn recently ending its free service, lots of Android users have begun looking for alternatives. There are some good ones out there like TeamViewer and Microsoft Remote Desktop, but today, Google released an app that makes a pretty good contender.

How To: Categorize Old & New Photos Automatically by Topic on Your Nexus 7 for a Tidier Gallery

It can be a pretty exasperating ordeal to hunt for one image on your tablet when you have hundreds and hundreds of photos in your gallery. Luckily, there are ways to make this a pain-free process on your Nexus 7, as well as make sure it's never a problem in the future.

How To: Add a Sleep Timer to Any Music Player on Your Samsung Galaxy S3

Silence can therapeutic at times, but unsettling at others. When I'm in bed at night, I need some sort of background or white noise to help me fall asleep. Pure silence just does not do it for me. Whether it's a fan oscillating left to right, or the TV playing, I need background noise to soothe me to sleep.

How To: Turn Your Galaxy S4 into a TV-Pranking Machine with a Universal Power Button

April Fools may be over, but any day is a good day to prank someone, and the best time to do it is when everyone's eyes are glued to the television.

How To: Unlock the Hidden Developer Options on Your HTC One M8

Your shiny new HTC One M8 is a pretty stellar device. From controlling your entertainment center to lock screen gestures and camera shortcuts to being pretty damn indestructible, this device has a lot going for it.

How To: Fix a Soft-Bricked HTC One by Flashing a New ROM via ADB

Flashing ROMs can be a tricky process, and sometimes you can end up leaving yourself without a ROM at all, often referred to as a soft brick. If you accidentally wiped your internal memory before a flash or forgot to download the ROM before wiping your system partition, don't worry, there is always a way to get your phone back up and running.

How To: You Can't Stop Gmail from Scanning Your Emails—But You Can Limit Their Ad Targeting

Google recently updated their TOS to reflect the email scanning practices they use in Gmail, which are used to display more relevant ads, among other things.

Stop Procrastinating: How to Lock Yourself Out of Addictive Apps on Your Galaxy S4

While it may be impolite to play around on a smartphone at dinner, having it consume my attention while I'm on a deadline or trying to study can prove disastrous. With Netflix and social media just a tap away, it's a dangerous game of wills, one that the phone usually wins.

How To: Theme the Stock Phone Dialer App on Your Nexus 5

When it comes to smartphones, we can sometimes get a little carried away with the "smart" aspect of it all. Things like apps, games, and softMods take center stage, and we can almost forget that the device also functions as a phone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.