Smartphones How-Tos
TIDAL 101: How to Enable Loudness Normalization
Jay-Z's Tidal streaming service provides Hi-Fi music to a mainstream audience. Even better, Tidal can do this without blowing out your eardrums, because it's easy to enable volume normalization so that one track isn't louder than the next.
TIDAL 101: How to Download Albums & Playlists for Offline Playback
When it comes to Hi-Fi music streaming services, Jay-Z's Tidal is one of your only choices. But as you can imagine, true High Fidelity audio requires faster download speeds than your average music service. So the question becomes, how do you listen to Hi-Fi tracks on Tidal when a speedy internet connection isn't available? Offline music is the answer.
TIDAL 101: How to Cast Music to Your Google Home or Chromecast
With so many Chromecast-powered devices available, chances are, you're near something with casting abilities right now. Whether it's Android TV, Google Home, or any one of the various gadgets with Chromecast built-in, you can use a more powerful speaker to play media from your smartphone. The only caveat is that the app you're streaming from needs to support Google Cast, but thankfully, Tidal does.
TIDAL 101: How to Create & Edit Playlists
Playlists are a vital feature for any music streaming service. For many, the ability to add and organize songs into the perfect order is a deciding factor in which streaming service to choose. The folks at Tidal (including owner Jay-Z) certainly recognize this, as they've provided users with the tools to not only create perfect playlists, but edit them as well.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 6 (Delegates & Events)
In this chapter, we want to start seeing some real progress in our dynamic user interface. To do that, we will have our newly crafted toolset from the previous chapter appear where we are looking when we are looking at an object. To accomplish this we will be using a very useful part of the C# language: delegates and events.
Kodi 101: How to Get Free Live TV Legally
When most people first become aware of Kodi (formerly known as XBMC), they hear about its ability to stream illegal content. But the real Kodi community knows that it's much more than just a haven for pirated material — it's an all-in-one media player that addresses the majority of home theater needs, particularly for those that decided to cut the cord.
Kodi 101: How to Get Free Subtitles for Your Favorite Movies & TV Shows
When it comes to streaming your favorite movies and TV shows, there aren't many media players that are better than Kodi. With its fast performance and easy-to-use interface, it is definitely one of the best options. But what really sets it apart is its ability to add functionality.
Gaming: The 9 Best Paid Action Games for Android & iPhone
Thanks to ever more powerful smartphones — the iPhone X with its advanced A11 processor and the Galaxy Note 8 powered by Snapdragon's 835 come to mind — the mobile industry is fast closing in on consoles and PCs with regards to gaming. Game developers have been aware of this fact, and have ported many games once dedicated to computers onto our handheld devices.
Kodi 101: How to Customize the Main Menu
The default look for Kodi is a menu that shows all of the possible media playback options available to the media player. From movies to radio, Kodi's main menu has an option to meet your needs. But everyone's needs are different, and sometimes we don't want all of these options.
Kodi 101: How to Add Your Own Movies, Music & Pictures to the Media Library
Over the years, Kodi (formerly XBMC) has become one of the most popular media players. It provides all the essential functionality needed for any home theater setup while remaining open source and free. However, Kodi is not limited to just your living room. With the Kodi app for iOS or Android, you get a streaming media player that can act as a video player, music player, picture gallery, and so much more.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 5 (Building the UI Elements)
Alright, calm down and take a breath! I know the object creation chapter was a lot of code. I will give you all a slight reprieve; this section should be a nice and simple, at least in comparison.
Kodi 101: How to Change the Default Skin for a Fresh New Theme
When you first use Kodi, it can be intimidating. The main menu has numerous options for the various types of media Kodi can play back, and the settings menu has a broad array of tools to customize Kodi to your needs. After poking around in theses menus, you might realize that you don't like the default look. But whether it's the color, font, layout, or just the general theme, Kodi skins can change it all.
How To: Avoid Tolls on Waze to Save Money While Driving
Discovering you're on a route filled with tolls while you're already on the road, with no cash on hand, is never a pleasant surprise. Fortunately, Waze has an incredibly simple solution to nip this potential headache in the bud and save you money while navigating.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 4 (Creating Objects from Code)
After previously learning how to make the material of an object change with the focus of an object, we will build on that knowledge by adding new objects through code. We will accomplish this by creating our bounding box, which in the end is not actually a box, as you will see.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 3 (Focus & Materials)
We started with our system manager in the previous lesson in our series on building dynamic user interfaces, but to get there, aside from the actual transform, rotation, and scaling objects, we need to make objects out of code in multiple ways, establish delegates and events, and use the surface of an object to inform our toolset placement.
Cheap Phones Ranked: The 4 Most Durable Budget Phones for Clumsy People
Clumsiness is the great equalizer when it comes to smartphones — it makes no distinction between the most expensive flagship handset and cheaper mid-range models. A hard drop onto pavement will usually result in a shattered screen, regardless of how pricey your device is. And with a smartphone breaking every two seconds, we're truly our own handset's ultimate nemesis.
ProtonMail 101: How to Send Self-Destructing Emails
When you're sending sensitive information via email, it's best to do so with end-to-end encryption. Even better, set the email to destroy itself after a set amount of time for a little piece of mind.
ProtonMail 101: How to Send End-to-End Encrypted Emails to Non-ProtonMail Recipients
It can be hard to get all of your friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances to jump on board with the more-secure email system ProtonMail, but that doesn't mean you can't still send them encrypted emails. Best of all, they won't even have to install any other apps or extensions to read or reply to the messages.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 2 (The System Manager)
Now that we have installed the toolkit, set up our prefabs, and prepared Unity for export to HoloLens, we can proceed with the fun stuff involved in building a dynamic user interface. In this section, we will build the system manager.
ProtonMail 101: How to Change Your Display Name That Shows Up in Emails
Your display name in ProtonMail is what email recipients will see when they first receive your message in ProtonMail, Gmail, or another email provider. You can choose this name when you first set up your ProtonMail account, but it can also be set up after the fact if you skipped that step.
HoloLens Dev 101: Building a Dynamic User Interface, Part 1 (Setup)
Alright, let's dig into this and get the simple stuff out of the way. We have a journey ahead of us. A rather long journey at that. We will learn topics ranging from creating object filtering systems to help us tell when a new object has come into a scene to building and texturing objects from code.
Ranked: The 4 Best Phones for Music Lovers — Under $400
One of the most popular usages of modern-day smartphones is listening to music. It doesn't matter if you download or stream your tunes, you are part of a massive group of users who do exactly the same. While statistics are a bit foggy on how many smartphones users download music, we do know that over 68% of American smartphone owners stream music on a daily basis.
Telegram 101: How to Make Your Entire Account Self-Destruct (Or Just Delete It)
You can send self-destructing messages in Secret Chats, but that's not the only thing that can destroy itself in Telegram after a specified amount of time. Your whole account can disappear after a certain amount of inactivity, so it's important to adjust these settings to give you more time or to kill your account even quicker.
Telegram 101: How to Send Self-Destructing Messages in Chats
While using end-to-end encryption may be enough security for most of your messages in Telegram, you can go a step beyond this by sending messages that disappear after an allotted amount of time. This prevents you from having to manually delete the message at a later time, so you can send it and forget it without worrying about whether or not it's still out there.
Telegram 101: How to Password-Protect Your Chats for Extra Security
If you're using Telegram for its "Secret Chats" feature, which provides end-to-end encryption for your messages, then I'd highly recommend locking down the app itself with a passcode, PIN, or password. While your phone itself may have a secure lock screen already, if that gets compromised, you'll at least have an extra layer of security on your important conversations.
Spotify 101: How to Disable Volume Normalization
Back in 2009, largely due to the sheer number of users demanding it, Spotify added an amazing little feature — the ability to disable volume normalization. While the feature is nothing more than a toggle on the visual front, the audible difference is far superior and moons apart.
How To: Format WhatsApp Messages with Italic, Bold, Strikethrough, or Monospaced Text
Unless you're a WhatsApp pro user, you may be surprised to know that there are text formatting options that you can apply to your messages. Markdown characters can help you emphasize certain words or phrases by making them italicized or bold, and it'll even let you cross out words and change the font. It's one of those nice touches that isn't available in most other messaging apps.
How To: Enable End-to-End Encryption in Telegram Chats for Totally Private Conversations
Telegram routinely boasts about its secure messaging for truly private conversations between two parties. However, default cloud chats in Telegram are only encrypted between client and server, not client and client, which means you have to be a little proactive in making sure your private conversations on Telegram are really private.
How To: Broadcast a Message to Multiple WhatsApp Contacts Individually at the Same Time
Let's say you want to send out a message to all of your friends. Normally, you'd have to put all of the recipients into one giant group thread to do this. But when people started responding to your message, everyone in the group would get a notification, so your friends would probably be annoyed that you started the group thread in the first place. Luckily, if you're using WhatsApp, this isn't an issue.
How To: Use Waze's 'Add a Stop' Feature to Save Time & Money on Roadtrips
Road trips almost always include unforeseen pit stops, which can take you way off track from your destination and end up causing massive delays. But if you rely on Waze for navigation, however, this issue is totally covered.
Snapseed 101: How to Blur NSFW Images to Share on Social Media
There are many different ways and many different apps that allow you to censor a racy photo and then share it to Instagram or Facebook. If you're in a time crunch and don't have the time or the patience to deal with something like Photoshop, then Snapseed is a great and easy app that will blur out your raunchy images in a quickie.
How To: Hide Your Waze Location from Others by Going Invisible
Some of the things that make Waze such a great navigation app are also its biggest downsides. Real-time data shows where individual users are, and the app automatically gathers traffic info that other drivers may encounter. These elements ensure that road conditions are as up-to-date as possible so that everyone gets to their destination safely, but it's certainly not ideal if you're a privacy-minded user.
Google Assistant 101: 70 Easter Eggs & Interesting Voice Commands
Despite a rocky start with plenty of feature disparity, the Google Assistant now provides a pretty consistent experience regardless of what device you're using it on. Be it Android, iPhone, or Google Home, the AI behind the Assistant is virtually identical — including its quirky commands and funny responses.
Signal 101: How to Quickly Delete All Your Messages at Once
If thieves, hackers, law enforcement, or other would-be enemies should ever gain entry to your smartphone, they could also access conversations you've had in Signal Private Messenger. To better secure your encrypted communications, you can password-protect the whole app and its contents — but only on Android. Even then, it's necessary to perform data deletion on a periodic basis, if not immediately.
Signal 101: How to Verify the Identity of a Contact You're Communicating With
If you've received a spam message in Signal Private Messenger, you know that anyone can contact you as long as they have your linked phone number. But when it comes to the people you're actually trying to have a private conversation with, how do you know it's really them?
Google Assistant 101: How to Set Up Voice Command Shortcuts
The Google Assistant is great about understanding what you actually mean, so you don't have to issue exact commands like you do with Amazon Alexa, for instance. But even though it's a master of colloquial speech, it could still be better, and that's where shortcuts come into play.
How To: Use Different Voices in Waze to Personalize Navigation & Direction
If you've been looking for an alternative to Google Maps, look no further than Waze. In addition to benefits like crowd-sourced traffic data, police trap locations, and road work avoidance, the app even lets you personalize the voices used for navigation and directions.
Google Assistant 101: How to Add Your Smart Home Devices to Control Them by Voice
The world around us keeps getting smarter. Not only do we have advanced AI services like the Google Assistant, but now we've got the Internet of Things connecting physical objects to the digital world. It's amazing when you think about it, but the real sci-fi stuff starts to happen when these two technologies intersect.
Signal 101: How to Block Contacts from Calling or Messaging You
While it's a more secure platform for messages and calls, Signal's job isn't to prevent unknown users from contacting you, so you run into the same issues you would with a regular phone number. People you know that you don't want to talk to may try to strike up a conversation and you'll still get spam messages. Luckily, it's easy to block these suckers.
Google Assistant 101: How to Customize Your News Feed & 'My Day' Experience
The Google Assistant comes in several different flavors. There's the baked-in Google app on Android, the dedicated Google Assistant app on iOS, and the Assistant-powered Google Home smart speaker. But no matter how you access it, your Assistant will only get better if you take some time to personalize things.