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How To: Get better grades

The only things that will get you into a good college is persistence, a will to learn, and of course… grades. If your grades are lacking that oomph they need to impress the schools and your parents, there's a few ways to aid in improving your scores. With a little effort and focus, your next report card will sport better grades.

How To: Count cards

If you think that card counting is only a thing in the movies then think again. You too can try a couple of methods to help you count cards. Like anything, the more you work on it the better you will be.

How To: Handle a bridezilla

Is a Bridezilla driving you crazy? Whether the bride gone wild is your sister, daughter, or BFF, you can stop the insanity. Here are some tips offered on how to deal with an out-of-her-mind bride.

How To: Generate Private Encryption Keys with the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

When we are building programs that communicate over a network, how can we keep our data private? The last thing we want is some other lousy hacker sniffing our packets, so how do we stop them? The easy answer: encryption. However, this is a very wide-ranging answer. Today we're going to look specifically at how to encrypt data in Python with dynamically generated encryption keys using what is known as the Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

How To: Unlock Your Android with a Secret Sequence of Volume Key Presses

Yes, they're called volume keys, but they can do much more than adjust your volume. With minimal effort, you can do some amazing things with these physical buttons, like secretly record videos, toggle on your flashlight, scroll through pages, control your music, and much more. And while using them to wake your screen is useful, let's take it a step further and show you how to use them to completely unlock your device, even if the screen is off.

How To: Monitor System Usage Stats in Your Mac OS X Menu Bar

Like a car, your Mac needs to be monitored and cared for to keep it running as smoothly as possible. While your vehicle comes with a ton of gauges to keep track of your oil, temperature, and in some cases, even tire pressure, your Mac has no easy way to watch for low memory or high disk usage. Normally you would have to open up Activity Monitor to take a look at your usage stats, but now there is something better.

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: Add an Actual Shutdown Button to the Windows 8 Start Screen

Windows 8 the biggest update to Windows yet. The new gesture-friendly version replaces the aging start menu with a dynamic new Start Screen, complete with live tiles that give you a glimpse into your apps before you launch them, not unlike the new Windows phones. With such a radical departure from the past, some familiar features have been moved around, which will take some getting used to. It's worth noting that the new Windows 8 does not abandon the old desktop model completely; it still ha...

How To: This DIY Illuminated Isomorphic Keyboard Changes Colors as You Play Music

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.

How To: Use expressions in SSIS

Expressions are new in SSIS (meaning that they were not in DTS) but they allow you to create extremely flexible packages. Expressions can be used to assign values to variables, help you determine whether to execute a task, and to assign properties. If you ever found yourself writing ActiveX code (VBScript) in DTS to determine which task to execute based on a variable's value, then you probably can forego the scripting all together in favor of expressions! They are very powerful in SSIS and yo...

How To: Transition from cactus arms to cigarette girl in yoga

The yoga cactus arm movement helps establish stability underneath the shoulders and upper arm area for inversions and back bends. This yoga how-to video demonstrates how to use the cactus arm movement to transition into cigarette girl action. Cigarette girl action is a name that Kira Ryder, our yoga host, has assigned to a movement she uses in her yoga classes. Watch and learn how to transition from cactus arms into cigarette girl movements in yoga.

How To: Unlock Home Button Shortcuts on Your iPhone

If your iPhone has a Home button, such as either iPhone SE model, old or new, then it has a secret triple-click gesture to activate a suite of shortcuts. These options, dubbed accessibility shortcuts, can work wonders for folks that are hearing impaired, have limited use of their hands, or have vision problems. Still, the shortcuts have plenty of everyday applications that everyone should know.

How To: Control the Axiom 61 Keyboard MIDI with Enigma

In this tutorial, Jeff Dykhouse demonstrates how to use the powerful Enigma Editing Software to assign MIDI message to all the different controllers that the Axiom 61 keyboard has at its disposal. Jeff covers: Downloading Presets, Creating User Banks and Loading and Creating Presets. You can use the Axiom 61 with Reason, Ableton Live, Pro Tools and even GarageBand.