With the Google Play store on your Android device, it's a relatively easy process to check all of your application updates. All you have to do is launch the Market app, go to the My Apps section, and from there you'll be able to see all of the available updates for your applications, which should be positioned at the top of the list. The problem with this process is that many times, you'll go days or weeks and quite possibly even months without checking the Google Play application market, lea...
If you ride your bike or motorcycle a lot, especially in a large city, you've probably had a few close calls. No matter how safely you're driving, you never know what other people are going to do, and being on a smaller vehicle makes you difficult to see.
We've all had that awful, sinking feeling when something you've been typing away at is suddenly gone. Maybe you accidentally hit the Back button, lost your internet connection, or your computer crashed, but whatever the reason, losing your work totally sucks. A lot of word processing programs have a built-in auto-save feature to prevent you from losing everything, but most websites and blogs haven't gotten there yet. An extension for Chrome and Firefox called Lazarus: Form Recovery can help y...
This video demonstrates how to calculate shipping costs with UPS. UPS provides an easy-to-use online calculator to help customers accurately estimate shipping costs. By following a few simple steps, this tool can help customers control their shipping costs and avoid confusion during the billing process.
If you don't have a car, or just prefer to take public transit to work, you know that an unexpected change in the weather can quickly...er, dampen your day. If you're not expecting it, rain or snow can turn your trip into a long, hellish ordeal—especially if you bike.
Want to secure your home? There are plenty of ways to go about it. You can make your doorbell send you a text if someone rings it while you're not home, or build a motion-triggered security camera. Even better, you can beat potential crooks at their own game by installing a door they can't even find.
There are plenty of times when it would be nice to be able to give other drivers a piece of your mind, or let them know you're having car trouble so they go around instead of riding your bumper.
One of the coolest things for readers using the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is the stock Smart Rotation feature. While most smartphones use the accelerometer to adjust the screen orientation, Smart Rotation actually uses the camera to detect your face-to-screen angle and adjusts accordingly. Now, if only there was a way that all Android users can continue reading an article or text without sporadic and unexpected 90-degree turns of their screen. Wait, there is!
There are plenty of useful shortcuts in Mac OS X, but not all of them are necessarily simple. You can use one of built-in shortcuts to take many different kinds of screenshots, but the shortcuts can be rather annoying to use because they require at least three different keys, which can be a little awkward to perform.
Google Play has no shortage of Nintendo emulators: SuperGNES (Super Nintendo)
Growing up, my family would get together in the living room every Saturday night and gather around my mom's old boombox radio and listen to Disco Saturday Night on 104.3 FM from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. (the show ended in 2008 after 14 years of consecutive shows). The old ladies in the picture below are the best representation of these nights that I could find. Now, the radio is all but dead (just like the old ladies above) in this world of music streaming services and torrenting. All of our music is...
There are plenty of ways to create time-lapse photos and videos, but most of them are taken over the course of several hours. If you want to do a longer term shoot over several weeks or months, you'll need a battery that can last that long, and you probably don't want to leave your DSLR sitting somewhere for that amount of time anyway.
There's no shortage of uses for steel wool, but the majority of them tend to be on the pyromaniacal side, like DIY fireworks. This trick by Mike Mikkelson is no different—it uses a homemade reusable "wool cage" to create a spinning vortex of light, like in the photo below. You can do this with just a piece of steel wool on a cable, but Michael wanted something he could easily reuse no matter how many shots he took, so he built a small cage to house the steel wool out of chicken wire, a small ...
Robotic Rubik's Cube solvers are nothing new. We've seen ones that are run on Android, made of LEGO Mindstorms, and faster than the world record holder. The most recent Rubik's Cube robot making the news was made by high school student James Watson as a school project, but it's ended up getting a lot more attention than that.
I use Google Chrome every day for my browsing needs, and I had no idea they were hiding something from me. So, I was pretty surprised to see that Chrome has an entire hidden experimental add-ons section. There are add-ons that work for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, so there's something for everybody.
I've been using Windows 8 for a few months now, and it's definitely not as terrible as some people say, but it definitely isn't as revolutionary as the big wigs at Microsoft had hoped for.
With all of the advancements in the smartphone world, we can virtually use them for anything. You can use your smartphone as a mobile hotspot, an Xbox controller, a car locator, and a security camera. Heck, you can even turn it into a Swiss Army knife. And now you can even use it as a wireless mouse for your computer!
While putting content and information online gets easier every day, it seems like getting it back is only getting harder. In a lot of cases (we're looking at you, Facebook), once you upload something, it's forever in the hands of someone else. That's where The Data Liberation Front comes in. Believe it or not, The Data Liberation Front is a team of Google engineers who work to make it easier for users to take their stuff back whenever they feel like it.
Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick had a bunch of dieters, one at a time, sit and watch a movie, each with a bowl of candy next to him. Some were told they shouldn't eat the candy, while others were told that they should hold off during the movie but could have the candy later.
Eavesdropping from a distance can be tricky because it usually requires some sort of bug or transmitter. It's easy to transmit audio through lasers, but you can also use lasers to build a microphone that picks up audio from a distance. LucidScience built the Laser Spy System for about $20. To make your own, you'll need a cheap laser pointer, an NPN phototransistor, a headphone amp, and a few other small pieces listed below. A light-to-sound circuit is installed in a small plastic box with the...
It's good to password-protect your PC to make sure that your personal files, folders, and important documents are safe and can't be modified without your permission. Though, entering the password all of the time before using your computer might frustrate you.
There are plenty of ways to mount your camera on your bike, but there's not much you can do about uneven surfaces on the road that cause your videos to end up looking shaky. If you're on a motorcycle, it's even worse because turns force you to lean, which makes your video tilt.
If you've spent most of your life in one geographic location, you're probably pretty familiar with the weather there (unless you're a hermit). If you live in a tropical climate (and haven't done much traveling), maybe you've never even seen snow.
Google has just launched a new revolutionary augmented reality game for Android called Ingress. Their new mobile game centers around the fight for control of the minds of everyone here on Earth. It's a freaking worldwide fight—from your smartphone! While augmented reality in is nothing new in the smartphone gaming world, it has never seen the likes of this. With an almost Halo-like storytelling, Ingress seeks to bring out gamers all across the globe to perform physical activities by transform...
Restoring your computer to a previous point is an extremely important thing if something goes wrong. I've restored my computer at least a dozen times after downloading some suspicious software or running into an error I couldn't remedy on my own.
It's tough out there on the battlefield, especially when your stuck in the trenches and your comrades are dropping like flies. There's no hope. At least, until the next airsoft battle.
Windows 8 has been reimagined to take full advantage of touchscreen devices as the "future" of computing. A few years ago, touchscreen devices were super buggy and only played well with smartphones, but with the advent of the iPad and a ton of other tablets, touchscreen capabilities have spread to full-sized desktops and even televisions.
It always sounds like a good idea to throw a party... until the party gets there. Next thing you know, you're running around hiding anything breakable, and once everyone leaves, you're stuck cleaning up the mess. But the worst part is footing the bill for everything, and if you don't charge at the door, your chances of getting anyone to chip in are slim to none once the party starts.
Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows 8, will hit stores everywhere on October 26th, and they hope this new version will shift the way we think about computers and their interfaces. In an effort to get as many early adopters as possible, Microsoft is even making their OS cheaper than usual, offering upgrades from previous versions for as low as $40 for a limited time.
If you haven't met a person that's broken a pair of headphones, you might need to get out more. No matter how expensive or cheap a pair of headphones are, the sound can get buggy, the wire can get cut, or the headphone jack itself can be broken or ripped off the cord. But instead of buying a new set of headphones or borrowing the ones from your cousin with the earwax problem, you can easily fix it yourself.
The newest update of the Firefox web browser was released yesterday, and whether you were upgraded automatically or manually, Mozilla is advising that you downgrade to Firefox 15.0.1 as soon as possible. Firefox 16 is Mozilla's latest release, and is apparently extremely susceptible to malicious sites hacking their users complete browsing history.
Earlier this week, we learned that you can get people to put more money in a tip jar simply by drawing eyes on it. But what if you want to keep them away from something? Eyes can do that, too, especially when they're Putin's.
An isomorphic (or self-transposing) keyboard is "a musical device where a grid of notes is displayed to the user and the interval change between notes in constant for any given direction." For those of you who didn't grow up playing the piano like I did, that basically means that it lets you move between keys easily without having to learn new patterns because the keys are laid out so that a chord is the same pattern in every musical key.
Apple gets a lot of flak for their lack of customization on their devices, but hey, at least you can move your apps around on your iOS device—that's customization, right? Well, you couldn't even do that on your Apple TV—until now. The newest Apple TV 5.1 software update released earlier this week added the ability to move apps and icons around the interface.
Ever been halfway to work or school and suddenly remembered you forgot to log off your computer? A lot of people are constantly logged in to email and social media accounts, so if you have a mischievous roommate or sibling, this situation could be disastrous. That's where TweetMyPC comes in—it's a free Windows application that lets you send commands to your computer just by tweeting. Image by Twittermania
It can get pretty chaotic when you're gaming. When you're playing a fast-paced game like Black Ops, frustration, urgency, and confusion will lead to a sudden loss of control, i.e. a panic attack. There's an enemy at your six and you try to spin around, but it's too late—and that sudden rush of adrenaline will tear your controller to shreds. It's a step beyond mere button-mashing, because it's not really intentional—you just put a little more force on that thumbstick than needed. And now you'r...
Most of us have given up our big, bulky stereos in favor of smaller, sleeker models, but how many of us actually get rid of the old ones? If you don't like the idea of throwing out or giving away electronics you spent good money on, you can always upgrade them instead!
So, you want to throw a steampunk party and you have almost everything in place—your steampunk persona and iPhone are ready to go, and you've even got your own steampunk straight razor. What's missing? The Elixirator, that's what. The Elixirator is a steampunk cocktail-making machine by Botronics that can hold four different ingredients and mix up to ten drinks. It has a Picaxe microcontroller for a brain and was built using a lot of pieces from thrift shops. It has a plasma globe at the top ...
Looking to transmit some super-secret audio communications to your other spy buddies? A laser is the perfect tool for getting your sounds heard from a small distance—without anyone intercepting them— even if it's just a cover of your favorite pop song. A laser audio transmitter uses light rather than radio waves to transmit sound. This is a much more secure way to send audio communications because the laser is a focused beam of light, whereas radio waves are not controlled, so they can be pic...
