Gadget Hacks Features

How To: Really Auto Adjust the Brightness of Your Samsung Galaxy Note 2's Screen

If you're constantly going from dark to brightly lit areas, you've probably noticed that the stock auto brightness feature on your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 doesn't work that well. Either the screen is really dim and unreadable, or it's just way too damn bright. Sure, you can disable auto brightness, but then you have to manually adjust the brightness all of the time for that perfect comfort level. This isn't really all that bad of an option, but don't be surprised when you see this: However, the...

How To: Make a solar cell with a condom

Make a solar cell from a condom with this video tutorial. Solar energy is plentiful and better for the environment, so why not take an easily accessible commodity (like a condom), and use it to harvest the power of the sun. To replicate this hack at home, you'll need the following materials: 12 iron hairpins, 2 pennies (pressed before 1982), 2 electrical wires, 1 sheet of aluminum, 2 strong magnets, a condom, and mineral water. For more on making your own condom-based solar cell, watch this h...

How To: Hack MD5 passwords

This episode of Full Disclosure demonstrates how to hack/crack MD5 password hashes. MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a hash function commonly used by websites to encrypt passwords. MD5 is a one-way hash; therefore, to crack the password you most try every possible dictionary word and if that does not work, every possible letter/number/symbol combination. The programs used to crack the passwords are Cain and MDCrack-NG.

How To: Wake Your Samsung Galaxy S6 by Hovering Your Hand Over It

As your Galaxy S6 lies on your desk while you're hard at work, it's difficult to resist from periodically pressing the wake/lock button to check the weather or glance over any notifications you may have on your lock screen. While pressing the hard key is easy enough, there's an even easier method where you simply hover your hand over the device to wake the screen.

How To: Remove and replace your iPhone 4 battery

While the iPhone 4G claims to have vastly improved battery life, some are still not impressed. If you are not convinced of your battery's longevity and wish to replace it, check out this clip. Apple won't do this for you and a repair shop will be pricey, but if you follow these instructions you can do it yourself. So, get ready to operate on your smartphone with this helpful tutorial.

How To: Missing the 3D Touch Multitasking Gesture in iOS 11? Try This

Now that iOS 11 is officially rolling out to millions of iPhones, many users are upset with the fact that Apple has removed the 3D Touch multitasking gesture that we enjoyed in older iOS versions. Though not as fluid as this gesture, there is still a hidden way to quickly get into the app switcher without having to double-click the home button.

How To: Hack the iPhone or iPod Touch

Xeni checks in with the authors of the forthcoming O'Reilly HOWTO book "iPhone Hacks" (David Jurick, Adam and Damien Stolarz) for a demonstration of how to unlock and jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch. The authors promise to teach you how to coax more out of these devices: little-known features, performance tweaks, and tips on great web-based apps to install -- video game emulators, IM and VoIP apps, and media players that can handle a wider range of filetypes.

How To: Tether a laptop to a Droid smartphone for free WiFi

In this Electronics video tutorial you will learn how to tether a laptop to a Droid Smartphone for free Wi-Fi. For this you will need the android wifi tether application. Download the version for your device from here and install it. Then launch the app and press the icon to start tethering. In your laptop, go to settings and then to wi-fi. You will see a new network called android tether. Connect to the network and you will see that it works. As with any other network, you can change the nam...

How To: Automatically Delete Spam Messages in Gmail

Most of the spam messages are commercial advertisements, phishing websites and get rich quickly messages that asks users to provide personal details and other confidential information.Spam filters in Gmail prevent its users from these spam messages and restrict them to enter in user’s Gmail inbox.Generally, it acts like a firewall between spam messages and Gmail Inbox.Gmail filters detect the sender’s email address and accordingly send the received messages in Inbox or Spam folder.

How To: Install Multi-View on Your Samsung Galaxy S3 to Run Multiple Apps at the Same Time

While many of the U.S. carriers have updated their Samsung Galaxy S3 devices to Android 4.1.2 already, one major absence from the upgrade is Samsung's Premium Suite. One of the coolest features from the Premium Suite is Multi-View, a function that lets you truly multitask by running two apps at the very same time—right next to each other. As you can see above in the left image, I have both Pandora and Spotify running. Why? Because why not?!? On the right, I have YouTube on top and Maps on the...

How To: Sen an anonymous text message

Want to send text messages, but don't want your recipient to know they're from you? You can use a website called AnonText.com, which lets you send anonymized text messages to any cell phone number. Use your computer, or, if you have a smartphone (like an iPhone, Droid HTC Evo), then you can navigate to the website using your phone's browser capabilities.