Digiwonk How-Tos
How To: Sync Your iTunes Library with Several Computers Using Dropbox
I regularly use iTunes on my home laptop and my work desktop forty-five traffic minutes away. I'm ashamed to admit it, but until recently, I'd been saving my iTunes library on a USB and transferring it back and forth, over and over again, between the two computers.
How To: Start Any Web Browser in Private Mode for Fast Incognito Browsing
When it's most important for me to browse the web incognito, I always seem to forget to enable private browsing. If that sounds like you, it's time you stop making that mistake for good. Manually deleting the cache and browser history is a thing of the past, and as it turns out, so is manually switching to incognito mode.
How To: Search Your Chrome History More Easily by Indexing All Text from Webpages Visited
Let's be real, browser histories are virtually useless. Trying to find something you passed up a week ago is like, pardon the cliché, finding a needle in a haystack.
How To: Get Facebook Chat Head Bubbles on Your Computer
Hangouts and WhatsApp might be the preferred messaging apps for Android, but it's only a matter of time before Facebook Messenger surpasses them.
How To: Make Phone Calls Straight from Google Search on Your Computer
Notice anything different about your Google searches lately? Your favorite businesses are becoming even more reachable online. Now, you can simply Google a business and click on its highlighted phone number to give them a call immediately from your computer.
How To: See Who's Ignoring Your Emails (And Which Ones You're Ignoring) in Gmail
You send out a lot of emails, but probably get very few responses. How can you be sure those emails are even opened?
How To: Save Hundreds of Wasted Hours with Gmail's "Canned Responses" Tool
Time is money, and if your job requires sending out hundreds of generic emails—think "Thank You" notes and sales pitches—you could save days of work by creating templates stored within your Gmail called "canned responses."
How To: Search Public Posts on Facebook
The newer Graph Search in Facebook can help you find friends in specific cities, photos of a particular subject, restaurants that your friends liked, and a whole lot more. One thing it can't help you with just yet is searching public posts on Facebook, which you could do in the previous search version. Actually, some users do have the option to search public posts with Graph Search, but it's very limited and doesn't include me. If you're like me and don't have access yet, there is a workaroun...
How To: Organize Tasks Better & Increase Your Overall Productivity with Trello
What separates the work habits of the ultra-productive from us mere mortals struggling to check items off our never ending to-do lists? While the answer to that question is by no means simple, one undeniable factor in their success is a clearly defined, highly organized workflow.
How To: How One Man's Python Script Got Him Over 20,000 Karma on Reddit—Without Cheating
A friend of mine has a crazy amount of Reddit karma and gold, and yesterday he let me in on his secret. This person, who will remain unnamed for obvious reasons, created a Python script called Reddit Karma Crawler that finds rising posts before they get too popular.
How To: Post Tweets & Facebook Status Updates with a Voicemail
Facebook will let you do pretty much anything via a text message, but unless you still have a flip phone, it's more of a novelty than actually useful.
How To: Watch the 2014 World Cup Online & on Your Phone—Every Match Streamed Live
While FIFA may be one of the most corrupt organizations in the world (depending on who you talk to), that won't stop millions of us from tuning in this Thursday, June 12th, to watch the first game of what's going to be a month-long World Cup affair.
How To: Keep Comcast from Using Your Router as a Wi-Fi Hotspot
In a era where cyber security is becoming increasingly important, Comcast has decided to use its customers' routers to provide hotspot access to the public. A new program, outlined by Dwight Silverman over on the Houston Chronicle website, seeks to provide Xfinity customers with city-wide Wi-Fi hotspots by using, well...other customers' wireless routers.
How To: Hack Someone's "Private" Friends List on Facebook to See All of Their Friends
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.
How To: Make Your Facebook News Feed STFU
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.
How To: These Online Retailers Will Give You Unpublished Discounts if You Abandon Your Cart
Shopping online can be as easy as buying cigars in Mexico. You find what you like, ask for the price, and walk away. "My friend! Come back! I give you 10% off. Just for you."
How To: Use Pinterest & Tumblr to Find Your Next Great Job
If you've ever searched for a new job online, chances are you've been completely overwhelmed by the process. Clicking through pages and pages of semi-relevant job postings, sending out hundreds of emailed résumés, and filling out applications is tiresome and dull.
Popup Killer: How to Bypass Website Barriers Without Signing Up or Completing Surveys
Last night, I was reading a riveting National Geographic article on the green-eyed tree frog, until I was quickly interrupted by an annoying popup asking me to "create a free account" or "sign in." Really, I'd like to do neither. I just want to read about tree frogs.
How To: The Single Best Way to Keep Your Facebook Friends List Clean & Tidy
Admit it: you haven't talked to more than 70 percent of your Facebook friends in the last year. Whether you barely know the names crowding your friends list, or have vague memories of high school Spanish class with them, Facebook friends are easy to find and difficult to get rid of.
How To: Stop Friends from Asking You What Your "Relationship Status" Is on Facebook
Facebook rolled out a new feature that lets your friends ask you about your current relationship status. This is great feature if you use Facebook for finding hookups, but if you use it mostly to connect with family and friends, a bunch of questions about your dating status can get annoying real quick.
How To: Peek at LinkedIn Profiles Anonymously
Log in to your LinkedIn profile, and you'll immediately be prompted to check out who's peeked at your profile. With one click, you can discover how many recruiters, companies, and random people have viewed your online resume.
Quick Tip: Avoid Craigslist Scams with a Reverse Image Search
As I begin my move across the country, I find myself dodging all kinds of Craigslist scams, particularly in the apartments and housing classifieds. Fortunately, I've discovered a little trick that will tip me off to a scam before I lose $1,000 in a fake security deposit.
How To: These Clever Gmail Hacks Will Stop Spam from Sites Who Sell Your Email Address
I rarely receive spam mail, but every now and then I’ll get an email from Cat Fancy Magazine. I’ve never read an issue of Cat Fancy Magazine or been to their website. Actually, I’m allergic to cats. So how did they manage to get my information?
How To: Play YouTube Videos Locally to Save Bandwidth, Skip Ads, & Always Watch in HD
Real suffering is sitting through a thirty-second ad to watch a fifteen-second video, or watching your favorite music video in three-second fragments. Real suffering is this: “An error occurred, please try again later.” If you’re a modern human and multitask with multiple tabs while you're on YouTube, you don’t have to sacrifice your bandwidth and sanity. There's a simple way to watch YouTube ad-free and lag-free.
How To: Stop Being Duped by BuzzFeed, Upworthy, & Other Headline Clickbaiters
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.
How To: Sync Your Entire iTunes Library to Spotify's New "My Music" Section
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...
How To: You Can't Stop Gmail from Scanning Your Emails—But You Can Limit Their Ad Targeting
Google recently updated their TOS to reflect the email scanning practices they use in Gmail, which are used to display more relevant ads, among other things.
How To: Drop Everything! Here's How to Secure Your Data After Heartbleed: The Worst Web Security Flaw Ever
This time it's serious. Really. The largest web security vulnerability of all time went public on Monday, April 7th, 2014, resulting in widespread panic throughout the Internet as system administrators scrambled to secure their websites from the OpenSSL bug known as Heartbleed.
How To: Encrypted Sites May Not Be Safe to Visit Using Chrome's Default Settings
As you may have already heard, the worst bug in OpenSSL history went public yesterday, dubbed Heartbleed. While we can go deeper into the technical details of it later, the short version is that OpenSSL, the library used to encrypt much of the web running on Linux and Apache has been vulnerable for up to two years.
How To: Save $20 on Your Amazon Prime Subscription
Amazon Prime is a yearly subscription service that offers free two-day shipping as well as free streaming of Amazon's movie and TV show catalog. If you're a member, you probably got a not-so-fun email this morning saying that the price of the service would increase from $79/year to $99/year after April 17th. While their reasoning is understandable, twenty bucks is twenty bucks! Here's how to renew your current membership at the original price, if it expires after April 17th, courtesy of Slick...
How To: Your Chrome Extensions May Be Stealing Your Personal Info: Here's How to Stop Them
A long time ago, we recommended the Hover Zoom extension for Chrome as an easy way to blow up small image thumbnails without actually have to "click" on the images themselves. Over the past year, there have been reports that Hover Zoom now collects and sells your browsing data to third-party advertisers without your consent.
How To: The Quickest Way to Search on Google in Chrome, Firefox, & Safari
So, you find an interesting article online, but there’s something you don’t quite understand about it and instinct kicks in. Open new tab. Go to Google. Enter keywords. Search. Find information. Understand.
How To: What Kind of Porn Are Your Neighbors Watching—And How Much?
Most people keep their ungodly sexual desires deep inside, only to be indulged in private on their computers. It makes you wonder... what secrets do your neighbors have? What kind of porn are they watching? And how much and for how long? Thanks to some public (and anonymous) data, you can now find out.
Dropping the Beat: How to Make Google Translate Beatbox for You
I know that after seeing 8 Mile for the first time, you and your friends tried a few freestyles yourself. Nothing to be embarrassed about. As one person dropped the beat, you started your stuttering flow, and everyone else nodded their head. And for a second you probably thought you sounded pretty good, until the beat maker started coughing and threw you off.
Quick Tip: Chrome Has a Built-in Task Manager to Help Fix Your Misbehaving Tabs
I can't tell you how many times I've force-closed or restarted Chrome due to it freezing or loading pages incorrectly. And don't even get me started on that obnoxious "Aw, Snap!" error. I guess you could say I have a love-hate relationship with my most used browser.
How To: The Easiest Way to Find Creative Commons Images for Anything You Want
Sometimes I actually search Google Images for things other than GIFs and pictures of athletes' extremely hot wives. Google Images has helped me with school projects, work, and proving my friends wrong on numerous occasions. Unless you're strictly using it for the latter, you're going to have to be aware of copyrights.
How To: Turn Your Personal Handwriting into a Custom Font for a More Unique Look
There are thousands of fonts you can download online. Some are free, some you have to pay for, but they all have something in common—if you can get them, so can everyone else. If you want a truly unique font that no one else is using, you have to make your own, and what's more unique than your own handwriting?
How To: Bye Bye, Inbox Zero? Gmail Is Going to Let Anyone on Google+ Email You—Here's How to Block It
As of this week, Gmail is going to start letting Google+ users email each other using a new option called "Email via Google+." There's nothing wrong with making it easier to get in touch with people you want to hear from, but the default setting allows anyone with a Google+ account to send a message to your Gmail inbox. After the feature is in use, Gmail will start to suggest Google+ connections along with your other contacts as recipients. Email addresses will not be displayed for Google+ co...
How To: Find Out When One of Your So-Called "Friends" Unfriends You on Facebook
You don't have to be Drake to realize that some friends are better than others. There are friends you know are only there for the party, and friends who actually listen when you whine about your life. There are friends you go out with for a beer, and friends you call when you're drunk and need a lift at 4am.
How To: Snapchat Lost Your Trust? Here's How to Completely Delete Your Snapchat Account
Snapchat is like that very attractive girl at the bar that has one too many shots and ends up slobbering on the bouncer as she gets led out. Of course she can still recover since she is hot, but you only get so many chances before you just become a complete failure. And that's where Snapchat has been treading these past few weeks.