On the internet, everything is possible, even if it's not grounded in reality (check no further than anything The Onion publishes). Witty headlines combined with clever photo edits make even the most absurd topic seem like a serious news story.
The desktop browser market has some stiff competition going on, but Opera has always been able to maintain its market share by offering innovative features such as a data saver option. With over 350 million users, it's safe to say folks are appreciative of the efforts being made by the web browser's development team.
Headphones cables, USB cables, and other cords have a nasty habit of getting tangled up in-between uses. These tangles are almost always a result of us just mashing and twisting the cord up for "storage," which ends up taking several minutes to carefully untangle.
How much you've actually spent and how much you think you've spent are usually two completely different results, and is especially true on Amazon when it's so easy to click and buy. You might think you've given Amazon a couple thousand over your lifetime, when the fact is that it's three or four times that amount.
When you click a link from Google search, the link itself turns purple to let you know you've already visited this page. But let's say you're searching for something similar a few weeks from now and you see one of these purple links—you'll probably think to yourself, "What was I reading about on that site?"—and if you don't remember, you'll end up clicking the link again. And if you're a frequent Reddit user, you know this pain all too well.
Whether scheduling meetings, events, tasks, or even keeping tabs on the weather, a good digital calendar can help you stay on top of your game in ways that a normal calendar could never do. Indeed, there are many calendars to choose from, but Google Calendar is one of the best due to Google's excellent cloud service, feature-rich web-client, and their easy-to-use Android and iOS applications.
Chrome's download bar has looked pretty much exactly the same for years now—a simple horizontal menu that spans the entire bottom of the browser and displays buttons for each of your recent downloads. It's not exactly pretty, and when it comes to functionality, the space it occupies could certainly be put to better use.
It was definitely a shocker when Microsoft proposed cross-network play between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 last month. After all, Microsoft and Sony have been competing for the same user base for more than a decade now, and this new feature might actually decrease console sales as a whole.
Facebook just keeps coming up with more and more diversions to help you ignore your responsibilities. At least this diversion is a little more intellectual than most of the other things that can easily distract you on Facebook.
The VLC media player just celebrated its 15th birthday in February 2016, marking a decade and a half of hassle-free video playback for hundreds of millions of users on virtually every major operating system. The free and open-source player is so powerful and easy to use that it has almost completely vanquished all would-be competitors in its rise to the top.
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.
If you've ever used the YouTube mobile app for Android or iOS, you've probably noticed a cool little multitasking feature it has. While watching any video, you can simply swipe down on your screen to shrink the video down to a thumbnail view, which then allows you to browse the rest of YouTube while the original video keeps playing.
If you read the reviews on Google's Pixel C, you'll notice one big complaint about the tablet/laptop—most reviewers feel that Android simply isn't ready to be used as a desktop OS. The developers at Jide felt the same way, so they set out to make a custom version of Android with proper multitasking support and a UI optimized for the mouse and keyboard.
Google has added some fun Easter eggs to Hangouts that'll give you a few more ways to procrastinate throughout your day. All of them (except for one) work on the web browser version, the Chrome app, and the mobile apps for Android and iOS, and are activated by sending a specific message.
If you've been visiting websites of ill repute, or if you've been Christmas shopping and don't want to spoil the surprise, it would be a disastrous situation if anyone were to come across your browsing history. Visited sites, cookies, and cache can paint a very clear picture of your recent internet activity, and depending on the situation, you may only have a few seconds to delete your history before someone else barges in.
These days, if you're having friends over, they'll probably ask to log into your Wi-Fi network before asking for a drink. But if you've forgotten your password, it can be quite hard to find, since most devices obscure the characters with asterisks.
One of the first things most people ask for when staying with a friend is the password to the Wi-Fi network. Even if you trust your friends to the end of the earth, a super secure password can be a pain to share with them, especially if it's just a bunch of random characters.
John Oliver sunk his teeth into Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during the long segment on the latest Last Week Tonight. The whole 21-minute video is definitely worth a watch, but the real fun starts around the 18-minute mark.
Taxi drivers and cab companies across the globe are in an uproar over Uber, and for good reason, too—you just can't compete with the low fares and ease of use that Uber brings to the table. The only downside is that the groundbreaking ride share service usually requires a smartphone—but that shouldn't be an issue anymore with one simple tip that I'll outline below.
Learn how to hack Google with this amazing video. This video will teach you how to hack Google by using advanced search operators and esoteric search terms to find "hidden" files and mp3s quickly and easily; you'll also learn how to use Google to hack unprotected Internet-controlled devices like webcams and security cameras. For more information on Google hacking, and how to get started using these hacks yourself, take a look at this instructional video!
Google's design chief Matias Duarte has gained fame and acclaim for his recent visual revamp of the Android operating system, and now, Google's starting to incorporate this Material Design styling into more of its products.
If you ever need to make calls and/or send texts to the U.S. or Canada from abroad, or even just receive them from those locations, there's an easy way to do so without breaking the bank. In fact, it's free, and all you need is a smartphone, computer, and some free tools.
Dropping upwards of $60 on a new game can really break the bank, and being a struggling college student leaves me having to decide whether to pick up the latest title or, you know, eat. But often my more primitive urges win out, meaning the only way to enjoy the latest and greatest games are vicariously, using increasingly-popular live streams.
Roughly four years ago, Adobe decided to abandon development of the mobile version of their popular Flash Player browser plugin. Their excuse at the time was that this move would enable them to focus more on HTML5 development for mobile devices and allow them to put more effort into maintaining the fluidity and security of their desktop Flash plugin.
Need to clear you cache? This guide details how on any web browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet, and Dolphin) for any platform (Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android).
If Netflix's $9.99/month has deterred you from signing up for its streaming service, you're probably looking for cheaper alternatives to stream movies and TV shows, like Crackle (free with ads) or Hulu ($7.99/month with some ads). And now there's a new option for you when it comes to movies—Paramount Vault.
Although I am a loyal premium Spotify subscriber, I still regularly use Pandora in hopes of stumbling across new artists and songs. If I'm fortunate enough to come across something I enjoy, it's easy to use the Like feature in Pandora to locate the song later.
When it comes to news, updates, and arbitrary nonsense, it's hard to find a better source than Twitter. And for some of us, the best way to consume Twitter is through the web (versus a mobile app). But as much as I prefer the standard browser version, it's easy to make it better, faster, and more convenient using a few Chrome extensions—and here are my favorites.
School internet filters serve a valid purpose—they keep students from wandering off into the deep corners of the web while still allowing at least some internet access. But a lot of these restrictions are completely ridiculous, to the point where some school districts block access to the educational material in National Geographic or forbid searching terms like "China," "Iran," or "Russia"—because, you know, breasts and commies.
Reddit, the self-proclaimed "front page of the internet," continues to take a big bite of my free time each and every day, as well as millions of its other users'. The clicking and scrolling through page after page never gets old, but you could speed things up with a few browser extensions and double your Reddit knowledge in half the time. Here are my favorite extensions you can try out for the Chrome, Firefox, and Safari web browsers.
Just last month, Microsoft announced plans to take away a huge chunk of storage from the free tier of their OneDrive cloud service, and users are understandably quite upset. At the same time, they reneged on an offer to give Office365 users unlimited OneDrive storage, and instead, will only be offering 1 TB of storage.
We are most certainly not machines. We all need some downtime every once in a while to set our sanity scales back in balance, which in turn, makes us more productive workers. This is a premise that several forward-thinking employers fully understand, but these types of companies are few and far between in corporate America.
There are going to be tons of great Black Friday deals on electronics in stores like Best Buy, Target, Walmart, etc. But if you can't endure another holiday of standing in lines and running over people to get what you want, shopping on Amazon from the comfort of your own home is the way to go.
When an album sells a million copies, it gets certified as platinum and cements itself as one of its generation's biggest hits. When an album sells 10 million copies, it reaches diamond status and transcends generational gaps. But when an album sells well over 40 million copies, there's only one thing you can call it—Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Unless you've been living under a rock or ignoring recent news headlines, Ashley Madison, the dating site for married people (or individuals in a committed relationship) has recently been hacked. Millions of their users are shitting their pants, and for good reason, as all of those accounts have just been leaked.
After my hard drive crashed recently, I lost everything. Old college essays, half-written stories, short films, and most importantly, all of the photos that I had saved from the past five years... all gone.
Spotify has a feature called Taste Rewind that claims to know what you would've listened to back in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and oughts ('00s), all based on your listening history and favorite artists. You can essentially time travel into the past and already have "favorites" songs to listen to!
If you want to watch a movie on Netflix with a friend, family member, or significant other, but can't meet up in the same living room, the next best thing is doing it remotely from the comfort of your own homes.
It's bad enough that we have to deal with autoplaying video advertisements all over the Web, so why do we have to be subjected to autoplaying videos on Twitter, too? Autoplay video are muted by default, but that doesn't make them any less annoying, especially if you have a small data plan on your phone.
When people get accustomed to something, any type of change is typically met with resistance or disdain. So when Twitter decided to swap stars for hearts, the internet wasn't exactly receptive to the new aesthetic.
These days, there is no shortage of ways to exchange files to and from friends and family: text messages, email, Bluetooth transfer, and cloud services are just a tiny sliver of what you can use to share music, photos, videos, and more.
Amazon Prime is a yearly subscription service that offers free two-day shipping as well as free streaming of Amazon Video's movie and TV show catalog, which includes their original award-winning series Transparent.
Amazon.com has been around for a long time now, but there are still a few things most people don't know about when it comes to buying products from them. Here's a quick roundup of tips to help you get the most out of Amazon and save some money in the process. The holidays are the busiest time of year for online shopping, but these tricks will work all year around.
If you've noticed a tiny discolored spot on your computer screen that just doesn't seem to go away, chances are you have a stuck pixel. With modern LCD and OLED screens, there are millions of incredibly small dots (pixels) that make up all of the contents of your display—and within these pixels, there is a set of red, green and blue subpixels. These mix together at various levels to create all of the different colors you see.
In early-2014, Facebook had the brilliant idea of auto-playing all of those annoying videos in your news feed that you never wanted to see in the first place. Fortunately, they realized their mistake and have provided a way to disable auto-play, which means you can now get rid of some of those plugin-blocking browser settings you have enabled.
Being an Google fanboy means that I pretty much use anything with the company puts out, so it's no surprise that out of all the cloud services out there, I stick with Google Drive. But, this is way more than just some blind allegiance.
YouTube has officially rolled out their new video player design, featuring transparent controls floating above the video, replacing the opaque ones. While you've been able to enable this player for a while now, YouTube finally flipped the switch and enabled it site-wide.
Hidden deep in WhatsApp's emoji database is a middle finger emoji, and there's a really easy way to use it. Much like Spock's "live long and proper" Vulcan salute, this one can be used simply by copying and pasting the emoji from our tweet.
In most cases, when the free trial of software is over, that's it—you're left to either pay for it or find an alternative. But what happens if the trial wasn't long enough to sell you on the product? It'd be nice if there was a way to test it out again without having to whip out your credit card.
A recent update to Google Chrome replaced the colored avatar menu in the top-left (Windows) or top-right (Mac) corner of the browser that let you easily switch from profile to profile with a plain gray button that simply names what profile you're in.
It's no secret that Google stores your search history in order to provide you with targeted ads when surfing the web. What's even more interesting (or freaky) is that your Google Now voice searches are also being stored, and you can actually listen to them right now.
Send an email prematurely? Forgot to attach a file? Accidentally addressed it to the wrong person? It happens to the best of us. But what can you do to get it back? Hack into the other person's email account and delete the email before they get a chance to see it? Unless you're a hacker extraordinaire, that option is unlikely. So, what can you do?
Chrome has been pushing out a lot of new changes lately, but not all of them are as good as they think they are. Earlier this year, there was an update that changed how user profiles worked, which made it harder to actually switch profiles. Luckily, there was a way to get back the old profile management interface, but now there's another "improvement" that you might want to change—Chrome's new Bookmarks Manager interface.
