Everything Else
How To: Prevent Google from Using Your Profile Picture in Ads
Every time you Google something or click on an ad in a YouTube video, Google gets paid. They are estimated to make well over $100 million a day, and I honestly think that's low-balling it.
How To: The Easiest Way to Share Your Complicated WiFi Password with Friends & Family—No Typing Required
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.
How To: Turn All of Your Email Accounts into Unlimited Free Cloud Storage!
The majority of our documents and music are digital, which is great for convenience, but it presents a problem for those with a lot of stuff—where do you store it all? There are tons of sites that offer cloud storage, like Dropbox, SkyDrive, and even Flickr, but most of them have limits unless you want to pay, and no way to connect them all.
How To: The 7 Most Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for Chrome, Firefox, IE, & Safari
There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts out there, but these 7 are the ones you'll definitely want to remember. I use them every day, and you should too. Step 1: Tab Domination
How To: Use Your New Terabyte of Free Flickr Storage for More Than Just Photos Using This Hack
Dropbox lets you store anywhere from 2 GB to 18 GB of data for free, but if you want more cloud storage you're going to have to pay. Even if you do, Dropbox only gives you 500 GB for a pro membership. So how do you get more cloud storage without paying a dime? Start using Flickr.
How To: The Quickest & Easiest Way to Remove Backgrounds from Images Without Using Photoshop
One of the very first Photoshop skills we learned in my tenth grade photojournalism class was cropping the background out of images. I hated it. It was extremely time consuming, and the magnetic lasso tool never seemed to want to cooperate with me.
How To: Set Up a Remote Desktop Connection Easily & Quickly on Your Computer
Has your grandmother ever called you complaining about her internet not working? Don't you wish you could just see what she was talking about and fix it instead of having her try to explain why the mouse won't double-click on the thingamajig?
How To: Use Dropbox to Track and Locate Your Stolen Laptop
I recently had my iPhone stolen at public park and did everything I could to locate it, but with Find My iPhone disabled (I know, what an idiot) and no exact address to give to the police, I had about a .00000001 percent chance of getting it back.
How To: Organize Your Email Subscriptions (Or Banish Them from Your Inbox Forever) with Azigo
Newsletters, subscriptions, and receipts are all necessary evils that come along with online services and shopping, and they take up a significant amount of space in a lot of people's inboxes. If you've ever signed up for an account on a website, chances are you've gotten an email from them.
How To: Make Contagious YouTube Videos Using TubeRank's Secret Viral Formula
While the phenomena of viral videos and internet celebrities are relatively new, it seems like there's a new one every other day. Sometimes they're funny, other times they have a social mission, like Kony 2012, and sometimes they're just videos of cats jumping in boxes.
How To: Make Reading Online Articles Easier by Hiding Ads & Other Webpage Distractions
I read a ton of articles online and I am always looking for a way to make the experience a little better. Reading long articles can be tiresome, and if an article has multiple pages, I will most likely skip it. With the ability to endlessly scroll, no site should have multiple pages. It's just a sneaky way to get more page views, IMHO.
How To: Add Specific Emails in Gmail to Your Astrid To-Do List in One Click
I check my email every morning as part of my daily routine (usually while I'm brushing my teeth, if you really want to know). As a result, there have been many, many times where I've read an email on my phone or computer and forgotten to respond in a timely fashion.
How To: Prevent Accidental "Reply to All" Emails from Ruining Your Life
You know that sinking feeling you get when know you've just done the unthinkable? It's the worst. Sending that ridiculous text message to the wrong number or posting a shameful tweet during a weekend bender.
How To: The Easiest Tricks for Bypassing YouTube's Annoying Age Restrictions on NSFW Videos
YouTube is the first place I go to watch funny videos online—me and about a billion other people. But one thing that always annoys me is having to sign in time after time to view age-restricted videos.
How To: Find and Shut Up Those Annoying Music or Video-Playing Tabs in Your Browser
If you're the type of person who constantly uses multiple tabs in your browser, you know how annoying it is when one of them starts playing unwanted music or video.
How To: Transfer Your Google Reader Feeds to One of These Better RSS Apps for Mac, PC, Web, & Mobile
Google Reader is soon to be no more. Yesterday, the company announced that the service will be shutting down as of July 1, 2013, as part of Google's second "Spring Cleaning."
How To: Facebook Like a Pro Using These Little Known Facebook-Specific Keyboard Shortcuts
Facebook recently revamped its Newsfeed in order to save us some time when scrolling around the website. But an even cooler, more underground time-saver are these super legit keyboard shortcuts. Facebook actions have been around forever, but I bet you never even knew about them. I sure didn't.
How To: Turn Your Facebook Friends into Your Own Personal Music Station
I get advice from my friends on a lot of things in life—cool video games, movie reviews, and feedback on my choices in women. Friends can be very helpful in filtering out some of the excess noise and are more likely to give you suggestions you can relate to.
How To: Kiss the USPS Goodbye—Here's How to Digitize Your Mail and Ditch Paper for Good
The U.S. Postal Service has been in trouble for quite some time. With more and more people choosing to go digital to take care of bills, legal documents, and pretty much all other forms of correspondence, they haven't exactly kept up with the times. I mean, let's be honest—when was the last time you sent snail mail?
How To: Your Complete Guide to Getting Refunds for Downloaded Apps, eBooks, Movies, & Music
These days, you can find a digital version of almost any form of entertainment. Being able to download or stream content is convenient for a lot of reasons—you can avoid going to the store and you never have to worry about late fees on rentals.
Quick Tip: Get Rid of Facebook's Graph Search (For Now) by Changing Your Language Settings
Every time a major social media network changes its layout, people are pissed—especially when it's Facebook. Zuckerberg and company seem to have a knack for implementing changes that people hate, and then learn to love (Timeline, anyone?).
How To: Check All of Your Social Media Notifications in Chrome at the Same Time
Checking notifications from all of your social media accounts is half the fun of the Internet, but can become quite tedious—hopping from site to site can take up hours of your time, especially when you're running away from something (in my case, it was always homework/studying).
How To: Suspect Someone Is Using Your Computer? Catch Them in the Act with Just the Click of Your Mouse
There are many ways you can protect your computer from unwarranted access. For instance, you can use Lockscreen Pro to lock your Windows 8 computer and then have the program snap a photo of the culprit using your webcam.
How To: Lose Your Connection? This Add-On for Chrome and Firefox Helps You Recover Missing Text and Erased Forms
We've all had that awful, sinking feeling when something you've been typing away at is suddenly gone. Maybe you accidentally hit the Back button, lost your internet connection, or your computer crashed, but whatever the reason, losing your work totally sucks. A lot of word processing programs have a built-in auto-save feature to prevent you from losing everything, but most websites and blogs haven't gotten there yet. An extension for Chrome and Firefox called Lazarus: Form Recovery can help y...
How To: Speed Up Downloads and Uploads for Kim Dotcom's New MEGA When Using Firefox
Megaupload was one of the very first file-sharing sites I ever used. But since 2005, the beloved (and pretty gangster) Kim Dotcom, has been in a legal battle with the U.S. Justice Department over copyright infringement.
How To: Take Free Online Courses for Real College Credit
The internet is a great place to find information for pretty much anything you can think of. So why shouldn't it be a place for official higher learning? I'm not talking about a course in Wikipedia or SparkNotes, but real colleges offering real college courses completely online. And guess what—it's FREE.
How To: 5 Must-Know Tips for Not Getting Scammed on Craigslist When Buying or Selling
Craigslist is probably the greatest site ever created, and I'm just talking about it's classified section, both awesome and amazingly creepy. Seriously, spend 20 minutes scrolling through the personals and you'll never want to take your eyes off the screen. But I digress—Craigslist is also one of the most convenient places to buy and sell pretty much anything you can think of. I've used it to buy my bed, my old bike (which was stolen!), and my couch. And while Craigslist is great in many ways...
How To: 10 Cool Tricks and Secret Features That Make YouTube Even Better
YouTube is the third most popular website in the world, after Google and Facebook. Millions of subscriptions happen each day on YouTube, with over 800 million unique users visiting each month. In that timespan, roughly 4 billion hours of video are watched, with 72 hours of video uploaded every single minute.
How To: Convert Your 6 Second Vine Videos into Animated GIFs
I recently wrote about Twitter's super now app called Vine, which lets people create 6 second video clips that can be embedded in a tweet. Those videos have their own proprietary extension, but if you want to turn those 6 second videos into an animated GIF, you can now do so thanks to developer Esten Hurtle, who created VineGifR, a seamless way to transform your (or someone else's) Vine movies into GIFs.
How To: Filter Profanity, Bad Grammar, and Other Undesirable Comments on YouTube with Comment Snob
YouTube is home to some of the most vile commenters on the internet—completely void of literacy, accuracy of facts, respect, and goodness in general. Known to many as the cesspool of the internet, the YouTube comment board can be a tough place for a person who's not accustomed to hostility on the web. "Tracking my cookies? They will never get my recipe!"
How To: Short Attention Span? Use These Browser Plugins and Mobile Apps to Summarize Long News Articles
Our attention spans have vastly shortened thanks to the Internet and our subsequent procurement of information from it at a rapid pace. It's tough to pay attention to something for a good amount of time, unless it's ridiculously interesting and stimulating. It's gotten so bad for me that I keep checking my phone every ten minutes—I even did it during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises.
How To: Twitter's New Vine App Lets You Embed GIF-Style Videos into Your Tweets
I can't say that I'm a huge Tweeter, but I'm definitely a good follower. Having the ability to follow comedians, brands, and athletes helps me stay up to date on the things I'm interested in, and I appreciate being thrown a good joke every now and then.
How To: Download Your Twitter Archive for Every Single Tweet You've Ever Sent
A few weeks ago, Twitter announced that they would be creating an archive feature for its members, which they've been slowly rolling out to select users. After signing in today, I noticed the feature was finally available for my account, so I went to test it out.
How To: Know If Someone Is Blocking You on Google Talk
I can certainly say that I don't like be ignored, and you're probably right there with me on that. Also, if you're like me, you don't like being blocked on an instant messenger, either. There's something about being shafted like that that can really cramp your style.
How To: Reveal Saved Website Passwords in Chrome and Firefox with This Simple Browser Hack
The number of passwords I have for different websites and emails is easily in the triple digits. And if I had to actually remember all of those individual passwords, I would be locked out of accounts on a daily basis.
How To: Facebook Adds Voxer-Like Voice Chats to Their Mobile Messenger Apps (VoIP Coming Soon!)
Facebook has been revamping its Messenger apps these past few months, trying to lure in more users. Competing in an already crowded market of third-party messaging applications, Facebook Messenger just upped the ante, by introducing voice messaging.
The Ultimate Facebook Prank: How To "Kill" Your Friends on Facebook by Faking Their Deaths
It only takes a minute for something well intentioned to turn into something sinister. Facebook created 'memorial pages' as way for friends and family to share their thoughts and feelings for those that are no longer with us.
How To: Grant Other People Access to Your Gmail Account Without Sharing Your Password
Whether it's because you have no access to the internet or because you're simply on vacation, having someone else check your emails may be a possibility. You can give them your password and screen name, but that's never a good thing. Giving out your password to anyone, even someone you trust, is not something that I would ever suggest for two reasons:
How To: Find Out Who Doesn't Like You Anymore on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter
Offensive pictures, depressing tweets, political statuses, and just plain old dumb comments are only a few of the reasons why people unfriend or unfollow others on social media sites. Sometimes it's just social spring cleaning, other times there's no reason at all.
How To: Easily Transfer All of Your Instagram Photos Over to Flickr
It's been a rough week for Instagram. First they came out with a new terms of service that suggested the right to let companies use people's photos for advertisements without the user's permission. Then everyone started freaking out and debating whether or not to leave the online photo-sharing and social networking service. Now, they've changed the controversial wording saying that the selling of user photos "is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing".