Whether you're a celebrity or someone with something to hide, Facebook allows you to keep your "friends list" private so you can protect the identities of your Facebook friends. But it only kind of protects them.
Facebook is a black hole. The constant stream of baby photos, #hashtags, BuzzFeed quiz results, and unintelligible status updates is mind-numbing. I know too much about too many people I hardly know.
True story: a friend of mine regularly started a fight with her boyfriend everyday at 4 p.m. Every day. This went on for years until he finally got the bright idea of shoving a granola bar at her the minute she came home from work. Shazam! The fights were a thing of the past.
It started in Australia, and now seems to have made its way statewide—hackers are remotely locking iOS and Mac devices, holding them for a $100 ransom. Users awoke to the loud "lost iPhone" ringtone, with a message on their lock screen stating that "Oleg Pliss" has hacked their device, and that "they" will unlock it after being sent $100 through PayPal.
One booze hack that's been making the rounds for years is that inserting a spoon by the handle in a champagne bottle's neck will preserve its carbonation. This is one of those tips that I wish were true. Champagne is a great thing to have around on a special occasion, and it seems a shame to pour any leftovers down the drain once its lost its fizz. While there's lots of anecdotal evidence surrounding this trick, Harold McGee and Stanford University chemist Richard Zare debunked this myth as d...
Instagram is not only a great platform to easily share some of your favorite moments with friends and family, it's a useful service for peering outside of your physical location. While you share a picture of your dog in Los Angeles, you can almost instantly view and like a picture someone posted of their breakfast in Tokyo.
Hey, coffee drinkers—your morning cup of joe is killing your metabolism.
How many times have you heard someone utter the phrase, "Now, let's break into groups"? From classroom discussions to workplace think tanks, gathering into groups to generate ideas is common practice. These forced get-togethers are intended to encourage creativity and unique thought, but they can actually do the opposite. More often than not, group brainstorming is annoying rather than encouraging, and these group sessions can actually be detrimental to your productivity. Getting together har...
There are so many things to love about the Nexus 5, from timely updates to newer versions of Android to a terrific blend of price and specs. But while mobile phone tech keeps churning along, battery technology isn't quite up to snuff yet, and I find myself wishing that my phone's battery lasted longer on a single charge.
You've got to be sick of it by now. Those meaningless and unsatisfying articles, lists, and videos you were duped into clicking on because their headline made them impossible to resist.
The point of ice in your cocktail is to make it cold, right? Yes and no.
Smartphone manufacturers strive to craft the most powerful cameras they can, but are limited to using hardware that will conform to small form factors. In most cases, the cameras end up fairly underwhelming, unless we're talking about the 41-megapixel shooter in the Nokia Lumia.
Included in Spotify's new darker, slimmed down redesign is a much needed My Music section, which consolidates all of your starred music, local files, and playlists into a personal collection of songs, albums, and artists, similar to how iTunes organizes your music. This makes me wonder...
Google's new camera, aptly named Google Camera, has been all the rage since it was released onto Google Play last Friday. The main reason is the amazing Lens Blur feature that adds depth-of-field Lytro effects to photos, without the use of any expensive accessories or extra hardware, like on the new HTC One M8. The camera does this by utilizing a depth map through the processing of multiple images. Frame your photo, move the camera (phone) in an upward tilt or motion, and the software capture...
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.
Apple is very tight lipped about their products, and their iPhone is certainly no exception, but when products depend on global manufacturing, it's nearly impossible to keep good secrets contained.
I have a theory that chocolate chip cookies are the gateway drug to cooking. The recipe is easy, no special equipment is required, and at the end, you get warm, fresh-from-the-oven cookies that are simply irresistible. It's how I got hooked on baking and cooking, and anecdotal evidence (i.e. me asking my other kitchen-obsessed friends and a few culinary students) supports me.
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.
With the release of Jelly Bean, Chrome became the default web browser on Android. The wildly successful desktop browser was now fully entrenched in the world's largest mobile operating system.
Whenever a new version of a phone comes out, there's always that one cool feature you wish you had on yours. For me, that's Group Play.
The advent of the Google Nexus 4 seemed too good to be true—high-end hardware, unlocked and contract-free at a low price. As time went on, however, we began to see the compromises. The camera was "meh" at best, and most egregiously, it shipped without LTE functionality.
The status bar is where we get all of the important need-to-know information for our phones. At a quick glance, you can see what time it is on your Samsung Galaxy S3, how much battery power you have remaining, your current signal strength, and more. But after a while, things can feel a little stale up there.
Unless your work clothes require dry cleaning, you probably only go to the cleaner a few times a year. And for those few items in your closet for which you do, you have to then find the time and extra budget to make a trip all the way to the cleaners and back again. In the end, it can be quite the hassle.
There's no shortage of reasons to love the One, yet a feature curiously omitted from the device, much to the chagrin of power users, is a multitasking button.
NSA aside, Apple makes it difficult for users to extract and download text messages from their iPhones onto a computer. For whatever reason (legal, devious, neurotic, etc), we've all found a time where we'd like to save backups of certain meaningful, important, or perhaps incriminating conversations (including all MMS or iMessage pictures and videos). While there are a handful of third-party applications that can help with this process, the majority of them cost money and implement certain te...
Ever since the early days of their existence, cell phones have been reducing the common wristwatch to nothing more than a fashion accessory. I'm not exactly a watch aficionado, but I do own a few that I wear on a daily basis. Since I have family in different parts of the world, I love my watches that have a second time zone, allowing me to see what time it is where they are.
Not particularly good looking, TouchWiz's lock screen adequately supplements the clunky and almost cartoonish-look of the infamous user interface on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. While there are hundreds of lock screen options in the Google Play Store, I've never quite discovered one that I've thoroughly enjoyed, due to the obfuscation from so many options.
If you've been using Google's hidden App Ops to lock down and prevent some of your Android applications from exposing your privacy, then think twice before updating to the new Android 4.4.2 software.
Attention all veterans and active-duty military personnel—this coming Tuesday, November 11th, is Veterans Day, that time of year where the whole country thanks us for our service. For the most part, a simple thanks will do, but some folks like to go above and beyond and give us veterans free or discounted meals and discounts on merchandise in stores.
My favorite type of video game is first-person shooters, and the one that started it all for me was GoldenEye 007. There was just something about the controls, fast-paced action, and free-roaming environment that got me hooked.
Nerds get a bad rap most of the time, but on Halloween, everyone wants to be one. However, not everyone knows how to geek it out without going too far. There is a limit, even for nerds, and these eight Halloween costumes are nerdy times pi.
The 8-bit NES may have ruled the late-eighties, but the SNES took over the early-nineties with its 16-bit graphics and 3D-like gameplay on titles like Star Fox and Dirt Racer. When 32- and 64-bit consoles came out in the mid-nineties, the Super Nintendo took a hit, but with the rise of the Internet, created a huge emulation community in the aftermath.
You don't have to be in debt to receive annoying calls from unwanted numbers. You may love your grandma, but if she calls you three times a day to ask how to turn on the television, you might just want to push all of her calls to voicemail.
With the release of iOS 7, the entire Internet was abuzz with what's the exact opposite of excitement as Apple's servers were overloaded, causing many download fails of the new operating system. Since then, many other bugs and issues have arisen that are fairly common with new Apple software updates, like iMessage fails and wallpaper complaints (to only name a few).
Why unlock your Samsung Galaxy S3 to use with a different SIM card? One possible reason is that you love your phone, but not your cellular provider because of the poor service or an unreliable connection. If you purchased a Samsung GS3 with AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. on a contract, it might be locked for a specific amount of time called the contract period.
If you're an iPhone user, iMessage is great for cutting down on SMS costs from your carrier, but it doesn't always work right away.
If you've never played with a Nexus 10 tablet, then you probably have no idea that your Nexus 7 actually has a different user interface. For some reason, Google decided it was better for the Nexus 7 to use a phone UI instead of a tablet one, but luckily for us, we don't have to accept that.
One of the best features on the new Moto X is Touchless Control, which lets you verbally ask the device questions or perform tasks without ever touching or turning on the display, a feature that would do quite nicely on the Nexus 7, if it could handle it.
My standard text greeting to friends is something along the lines of "Wazzup biznitch?"—but apparently the auto-correct function on my Samsung Galaxy S3 has a problem with that. Time after time I have to retype it or just add all my made-up words to the word list—and I use a lot of made-up words, because that's what bosses do. But texting isn't the only way I communicate. I also use email, chat, and social media on a daily basis—and I don't always use my phone. So, wouldn't it be awesome if m...
The transition from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or other Android device can be a tough one. A vastly different operating system and the ability to customize anything and everything might be too much for some people. Taking in all that new, while having to let go of the old, can be as daunting as climbing Mount Everest.
