How-To Guides from Gadget Hacks: Page 2

Open the Health app on your iPhone and there's a feature tucked inside that can hand a paramedic someone's blood type, list their allergies, and name who to call when they can't answer for themselves. It only works, though, if someone filled it in before the emergency happened. This guide walks through how to set up Medical ID and emergency contacts on iPhone: building the medical profile, adding contacts, deciding what to expose on the Lock Screen, configuring Emergency SOS without triggering...

Snap two windows side by side in Windows 11, drag the shared border to resize one, and in many cases the other window resizes too, whether you wanted it to or not. Microsoft currently documents a checkbox for controlling that behavior under Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows. Some users nevertheless report that the checkbox is missing on their installations, so this guide covers both the documented setting and the available workarounds.

If you mostly use Apple Podcasts to press play and nothing else, there's a handful of useful controls sitting untouched: a library that actually surfaces what you want to hear, playback settings you won't have to hunt for every session, chapter and timestamp navigation for long episodes, and syncing that's supposed to carry your spot across every Apple device you own.

Google Photos has grown well past a backup app. It can search your library in plain English, answer questions about a single photo, edit images from a text description, and create new AI-generated images through templates.

As of this week, a Samsung Messages alternative app called Messages by OzarksMade is undergoing closed testing through Google Play, with a public launch set for 14 days after its testing Google Group hits 12 members and a post-launch price of $0.99. Treat that as a snapshot, not a finished product. Betas shift, thresholds get hit or missed, and pricing plans change before launch.

Google Drive's "Organize My Files" tool lets Gemini scan loose files sitting outside your folder structure and suggest where they belong. Nothing actually moves until you review the recommendations, select the files you want moved, and approve the batch.

A phone that works fine at home can go dark within minutes of touching down in China. Not because one app breaks, but because three separate systems, internet access, navigation, and mobile payment, all require setup steps that are much easier to handle before you've already landed. Figuring out the best apps for traveling to China matters less than getting that setup order right before you leave.

The best time to charge a Samsung Galaxy Watch comes down to timing: pick whichever stretch of your day you can afford to lose tracking data, charge during that window, and make sure whatever charge you end up with covers your next sleep period or workout.

Audible buries a handful of useful features behind menu labels that don't always explain themselves clearly.

If you're searching how to watch Lions vs. Bills for free, the live window has already closed. The Week 2 matchup between the Detroit Lions and Buffalo Bills kicked off at 8:15 p.m. ET on Sept. 17 at Buffalo's new Highmark Stadium.

An ASUS laptop running slow on Windows 11 rarely comes down to one mystery cause. It's usually a process using too much CPU, memory pressure, low storage space, an older hard drive, heat buildup, or a power setting working against you. Sometimes more than one problem is involved.

Most CarPlay customization doesn't happen on the car's screen. App order and widgets are managed from the paired iPhone, while wallpaper, display appearance, text size and Smart Display Zoom are adjusted through CarPlay itself.

iOS 27 now lets iPhone owners create their own Apple Wallet passes without a developer account.

Apple calls Finder the home base of the Mac: the tool for organizing and reaching almost everything on the system, from documents to a connected iPhone. Most people use about a tenth of it. This collection of Finder tips and tricks for Mac users covers the rest: the browsing, previewing, editing, and search tools sitting in the same window you already open dozens of times a day.

The word "reset" gets stretched to cover three unrelated jobs when an Apple TV remote acts up, and that stretching is where most of the confusion starts. Learning how to reset an Apple TV remote really means figuring out which of three things applies: restarting a frozen remote, re-pairing one that's lost its Bluetooth connection, or wiping the entire Apple TV back to factory settings. Only the last of those erases the Apple TV's data.

iOS 27 gives Apple Wallet two new jobs that have nothing to do with each other: reading a restaurant receipt and settling it through Apple Cash, and turning a barcoded loyalty or membership card into a pass you build yourself. This guide covers how to split bills with Apple Cash in iOS 27, how to create a custom pass in Apple Wallet, and the availability gaps worth checking before you hand either one a real tab or a card you actually need at checkout.

A large photo library stops being something anyone scrolls through to find one shot. OneDrive Photos has a Favorites feature built for exactly that problem: mark the images worth keeping close, then pull every favorited photo into one filtered view inside Gallery. This guide covers how to add or remove favorites in the OneDrive Photos app on Windows 11, using Microsoft's documentation, with one clearly labeled comparison to the separate Windows Photos app.

Search "my Roku remote won't pair," and most of what comes back isn't a pairing failure at all. If the remote can already move through Roku's menus and pull up voice search, pairing has succeeded, and the real issue is that the TV hasn't been set up for power and volume control yet, which is a separate step handled independently of pairing.

In late January 2026, Banjo: Recompiled launched for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a standalone native app. Not an emulated N64 game running inside a simulated console, but its own application, built with remappable controls, a second-stick camera option, and mod support. It's one entry in a growing scene that lets players play classic console games natively on Mac without touching an emulator.

This guide walks through how to fix Apple CarPlay problems by matching your specific symptom to its most likely cause. By the end, you'll know which of six failure modes you're dealing with and have a clear fix to try, rather than cycling through generic tips that don't apply to your situation.