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How To: Set Default Volume Levels for Each of Your Bluetooth Accessories Individually

If you have multiple Bluetooth accessories, Android's volume system can be pretty annoying. For one thing, most phones reset to a "Safe Volume Level" every time you reconnect a pair of headphones, which means you'll probably need to turn up the volume once or twice a day. But even if your phone doesn't exhibit this obnoxious behavior, you might want your car's Bluetooth connection to be louder than, say, your home stereo or your wireless earbuds.

How To: Protect Individual Apps on Android That You Can Only Unlock with Your Face

Locking individual apps on your Android device gives you an added layer of security by safeguarding app data from unwanted attention. I personally prefer using an app locker over a standard lock screen because my kids play with my phone, and they've completely disabled it after inputting the wrong PIN. So app lockers give me the right balance between giving my children access to my device, and the security of locking down my data from would-be intruders.

How To: Get Rid of Google Assistant on Your Android Device & Switch Back to Google Now

Now that Google Assistant is coming to all devices running Android Marshmallow or higher, roughly one out of every three Android users will no longer be able to access the old Google Now interface. The Assistant, which was previously exclusive to Pixel devices, takes over your home button long-press gesture and completely replaces all of the old Google voice search functionality.

How To: Brute-Force WPA/WPA2 via GPU

Most of you lot would be aware what WPA/WPA2 is so I won't bang on about the encryption or protocols a great deal. In short WPA and WPA2 both have a maximum of 256bit encrypted with a maximum of 64 characters in the password. The encryption is really only 64bit but x 4 because of the way the authentication functions as a 4 way handshake.

Hack Like a Pro: Metasploit for the Aspiring Hacker, Part 11 (Post-Exploitation with Mimikatz)

Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! Metasploit is such a powerful tool that I can only scratch the surface of its capabilities here. As it has developed over the years, it is now possible to use Metasploit for nearly everything from recon to post exploitation to covering your tracks. Given its versatility, every aspiring hacker should have at least a tentative grasp of Metasploit.

Android Basics: A Series of Tutorials for Beginners

All across the web, you'll find guides on setting up various apps and mods for your Android device—but while these are certainly useful, they all seem to be working under the assumption that the reader has a certain level of knowledge about Android. For someone that's just getting started with the world's most popular mobile operating system, the basics of Android simply aren't covered as well as they should be.

How To: 10 Must-Have Chrome Tools for Lazy Students

Chrome apps and extensions are powerful tools for students: they can help optimize your web browsing experience by helping you take notes, check your grammar as you compose documents and emails, and even help you squeeze a little more juice out of your laptop's battery by freezing unused tabs and optimizing YouTube streams.

How To: Linux Basics for the Aspiring Hacker: Managing Hard Drives

Managing hard drives in Linux is crucial to understanding your system and its operation as well as understanding the system you are exploiting or conducting a forensic analysis on. Linux has numerous commands that can provide us with information, control, and management of hard drives, and in this tutorial, we will examine a number of the most important ones.

How To: Add Widgets to Your Status Bar

While it took Apple a damn-long time to finally include widgets in iOS, I do admire their implementation. Accessible from within any screen by pulling down the Notification Center (or, more correctly, the "Today" view), the home screen remains clean and minimal, which some of you with Android devices might appreciate—despite any Apple hatred you may have.

How To: Create Bootable USB with Persistence for Kali Linux

Recently I was trying to install Kali Live on a USB drive with persistence and struggled to find a tutorial online that was simple and actually worked. After some trial and error I figured out how to do it correctly and decided to make an article for anyone who is experiencing the same difficulty I did. You will need an USB with at least 8GB. Mine is 132GB, nice and large.

How to Train Your Python: Part 3, Basic String Manipulation

Last time in how to train you python, we covered the basics of variables and output. While we were covering variables, we talked briefly about strings. "String" is just a fancier way of saying "Word". A string is simply a set of characters encased in quotations, this lets python know that it is a word. Sometimes when we do things with strings we'll need to change them in order to do something. Python is case sensitive, for example "Null-Byte" is not the same as "null-byte". This is where mani...

How To: Stop Microsoft from Spying on You with Windows 10

Microsoft decided to give users a free upgrade to Windows 10 if they were previously running Windows 7 or 8—but it came with a catch. Their main motivation for knocking off over $100 from the normal going rate was to get more people using new Microsoft services like Cortana and the Windows Store. To bolster these services, Microsoft implemented a host of new tracking "features" in Windows 10.

How To: Spot a Counterfeit iPhone or Android Smartphone

Cheap Chinese knockoffs have been around for ages, but recently, skyrocketing demand has led to a massive influx of counterfeit smartphones. Sellers on Craigslist seem to have no trouble getting ahold of these fake devices, then passing them off as the real deal and turning a solid profit before vanishing into thin air. This type of scam tends to happen even more frequently after Apple launches a new iPhone or Samsung debuts a new Galaxy.

How To: Prevent Windows 10 from Auto-Updating

In a bit of a strange decision, Microsoft has made it to where some users don't have a choice in the matter of applying failed automatic updates. When a Windows or driver update comes your way and fails to apply for any reason, your computer will continue to attempt applying the broken update at seemingly random intervals. The Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows 10 will allow you to delay or stop updates altogether when something like this happens, but the Home edition has no such setting.

How To: Stream Spotify Music to Chromecast from Your Android or iPhone

One of the highest rated posts on Spotify's own community forum is titled "Add support for Google Chromecast," a clear indicator of not only how much this feature is desired, but also of Spotify's lack of care for it. Remaining consistent with statements made in the past, Spotify is firm in their decision to not pursue Chromecast support at this time—or maybe ever—thanks to a deal with Sonos and Spotify Connect.