Having for First Time

The microwave oven is a monumental technological achievement that's saved college students and single people from starvation for decades. Almost 97% of all American households have one, which makes it the most-owned kitchen appliance in US homes right after the refrigerator. ...more

Apple released the new Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite in the Mac App Store for everyone to download and install for free on October 16th, 2014, but downloading a 5+ GB file for each of your computers will take some serious time. The best thing to do is download it once and create a b ...more

Pallets, Pallets, Pallets. You have to love them! How to build an outdoor play kitchen for the kids using old pallets and recycled / reclaimed wood. I came up with the idea after seeing how my young son loved playing with the one at childcare. Pallet projects and Pallet Ideas ...more

How to build a sandbox / sandpit using pallet wood. Using pallet wood is a really easy way to make a sandbox / sandpit and to top things off they're free! This is another one of my reclaimed wood projects that was a heap of fun to make. Like all pallet projects, it is a good i ...more

One subtle change that Samsung made with the Galaxy S5 is their replacement of the Menu softkey with one for recent applications. Instead of holding down on the Home button, we now have the Recents button, which is used for easy access to multitasking. From the multitasking s ...more

I'm a textaholic. One of the problems with being a textaholic is that your device just can't keep up with you. I tend to text multiple people at the same time, and switching back and forth between conversations on my iPhone is extremely tedious. Any time I want to enter a new ...more

Although the new HTC One M8 was only released about two weeks ago, owners of the Sprint variant are receiving their first software update this morning. Rolling out is software version 1.54.651.8, which officially brings "general stability" and "call performance" improvements. ...more

For over 37 years, Apple has been using the same "bitten" apple as their company logo. Sure, it's looked slightly different over the last couple of decades, from rainbow stripes to monochromatic colors, but its shape has change very little. Since I'm constantly applying new t ...more

Wouldn't it be cool to know exactly who is calling or messaging you without ever looking at your phone? It'd be a great way to keep you from reaching into your pocket or purse every time you get a message, and an efficient method to ignore people you'd rather not deal with. C ...more

If you're really popular, like myself, then you're constantly receiving a steady flow of notifications on your Android device. This is either a nuisance, or a reassurance of your popularity. Sometimes you get too many notifications at one time to view, or you accidentally swip ...more

How to build a Rustic, Outdoor Cooler / Outdoor Esky, Ice Chest Box, out of recycled, or reclaimed wood. This project can be done out of old pallet wood , old fence palings or in fact any old timber you can get your hands on. The whole idea is make a cool looking outdoor coole ...more

If an athlete gets athlete's foot, what does an astronaut get? Mistletoe. Yup, that's about the only time I've ever really needed mistletoe for anything, but cheesy one-liners aside, mistletoe can be the greatest wingman (or wingwoman) ever, but only during the holiday season. ...more

Even as someone with super pale skin that burns instead of tanning, I don't use sunscreen nearly as often as I should. Or, uh...ever. My skin cancer prevention routine mostly involves hiding from the sun as much as humanly possible. If you're like me and hate the greasy feelin ...more

First off, Rooting Your Device voids the warranty on the device. If you want to root your device but are afraid of "bricking" said device, rooting it may not be good for you. Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, its time for... Why should I Root my device? Reason 1: ...more

Eyebrows are made to frame your eyes. See how well-shaped and defined eyebrows creates a huge difference to one's face? Yeah, but most of the time, girls experience a hard time creating the perfect outline that would complement their eye shape and defining while making it look ...more

There has been much talk about how unsecure the cloud is because of PRISM’s newfound ability to demand all of your data without any resistance. This has spin doctors in the Cloud Storage industry losing their mind. They suddenly went from a central hub for 10GB of your files, ...more

According to Nielsen, the average American spends about 34 hours per week watching television. That may sound like a lot, but when you factor in multi-screen viewing, it could be even higher—81 percent of Americans use their smartphones or another device while watching TV. It' ...more

In an increasingly mobile and globalized world, it’s not uncommon to lose touch with people we were once close with. Juggling between job demands, family responsibilities and our own personal needs, it’s often hard to put the time to keep all of our relationships going. Nevert ...more

No matter how good you are at baking, we've all had a cookie mishap (or disaster) or two. Sometimes you forget about them and they burn, other times you open the oven to find your sweet treats have melted into one huge, disappointing blob of a cookie. And occasionally, you jus ...more

Watching movies will always be one of my favorite forms of entertainment. I can spend an entire day watching movies and not feel the slightest bit guilty about it. You can learn from movies, so don't ever let anyone tell you that you're wasting time. Now, if I was über rich a ...more

Humans are able to produce a wide variety of sounds in part because they have descended voice boxes that makes room for longer vocal tracts. Evolutionarily, this appears to have occurred before, and thus may have facilitated the evolution of language. But why would our laryn ...more

With the Google Play store on your Android device, it's a relatively easy process to check all of your application updates. All you have to do is launch the Market app, go to the My Apps section, and from there you'll be able to see all of the available updates for your applic ...more

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. But if you want an even simpler and possibly more effec ...more

Photobombing, the act of covert sabotage on a photographer and unsuspecting subject, can be a terror. This malicious and disingenuous art form has steadily grown since it first received significant coverage in 2009. As an avid photographer and photographee, I've encountered m ...more

While the Google Play Store is filled with big name magazines like Time, Forbes, Sports Illustrated and Maxim, it also panders to smaller audiences, like with Coin Prices, Soap Opera Digest, Watch Journal and Quilter's World (which yes, is all about quilting). If you have a se ...more

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 onl ...more

If you're a professional stalker like me, you know that scrolling the photo gallery on somebody's Facebook profile can take some time. In order to see the full-sized image of any one picture, you have to click on it, view it, and then return to the gallery. Anything that slows ...more

As people continue to upgrade their PCs to Microsoft Windows 8, more and more developers are adding content to the Windows Store. While the offerings are not as vast as Google Play or the iTunes App Store, it does have some solid apps for both productive users and those lookin ...more

As a technology writer, phone screenshots can pile up on your computer in no time. Testing out different apps, showing buggy software, and doing step-by-steps can lead to a plethora of mobile screenshots piling up on your computer's desktop. The problem with my screenshots is ...more

While the PlayStation and Xbox models may rule the current world of gaming, there are still those who love to keep it old school. The grittiness, toughness and nostalgia that is laced throughout old gaming consoles appeals to many people. Every time I play Donkey Kong 64 (with ...more

With some Samsung Galaxy S III owners still waiting for the Android Jelly Bean 4.1 update to hit their device, Google has wasted no time in releasing information on their next operating system update—Android Jelly Bean 4.2, which will come stock with the newer Nexus 7 and 10 t ...more

Summer is over and autumn is here. Serotonin levels are dropping and people don't have the motivation to be outside as much anymore. So we play Minecraft instead. But walking is cumbersome, so we want minecarts. Remembering to carry one in your inventory or placing one on the ...more

Stormtroopers were once the elite soldiers of the unstoppable Galactic Empire that ruled the Universe. Then little ol' Luke Skywalker came along and destroyed the Death Star, ending the evil empire forever. Since then, poor Stormtroopers all over the world have been left witho ...more

Before my time, people used to listen to music recorded on these things... I didn't really know what this thing was until my parents clarified and told me that they were called cassette tapes. These "cassette tapes" were utilized to store sound recordings on either side of the ...more

There's no doubt going to be a lot of Steves running around this Halloween, as Minecraft still has a huge community, but those posers are probably just buying their Minecraft costumes. Isn't the best part about Minecraft creating? So why let someone else create your costume? ...more

If you're one of the people who make up the nearly 24% of Internet users on Internet Explorer, now is a good time to click on 'Check for updates.' Researchers have found yet another Metasploit Zero-Day exploit that leaves IE 7, 8, and 9 vulnerable for Windows users. Brought to ...more

I know, "Steamdown" conjures images of a hoedown, but "Steampunk prop breakdown" is a bit of a mouthful, I thought. Anyway, I'm going to show you how I made my very first Steampunk prop! It doesn't require any tools at all, just some glue and some parts from the hardware stor ...more

If you're at all like me, you constantly get frustrated that repeaters only boost redstone signals in one direction. It's annoying! Well, here's a design for a two-way repeater! This device functions like a continuous piece of redstone that can send power either way, albeit w ...more

Hate answering the door, but don't trust your friends with a set of keys? This RFID front door lock made by Steve Pomeroy will solve all your party-hosting problems. It reads the RFID tags in his friends' public transit cards and decides who's allowed in based on "groups" that ...more

Cropping images can be a huge pain if you have a bunch to do at once. Even if you have Photoshop or a similar program, the process of opening each individual photo and cropping them one at a time can take forever. A free web-app called Cropp.me makes that task a lot easier by ...more

Tabs are a beautiful thing. Without them, web browsing can be an incredibly tedious task. Tabs help organize all of your open pages in one window, saving you the time of constantly switching back and forth. And honestly, who wants to look at this? Want to add the convenience o ...more

For years, astronomers have been trying to figure out how our galaxy came to be. Even with the help of high-performance computers, no model of a spiral galaxy has ever been able to recreate the Milky Way, until now. An international team of researchers has created the first su ...more

We all know the dangers of logging on to our personal accounts on public networks, but we pretty much all do it anyway—especially when it comes to Facebook. But the next time you're in a public place and can't wait to check out your Facebook news feed, use this simple trick to ...more

We've featured unusual pinhole cameras before, but nothing at this grandiose scale. Presenting the world's largest mobile pinhole camera, the Cameratruck, creation of photographer Shaun Irving. The Cameratruck can take pictures approximately 3,000 times the size of a 35mm! T ...more

To say Steven Purugganan is fast is an understatement. The twelve-year-old from Longmeadow, Massachusetts has won two Cup Stacking world championships, and appeared in commercials for McDonald's and Firefox. According to Steven's Wikipedia page, he has been featured in "...a ...more

Widgets can display essential information from an app right on your iPhone's Lock Screen, but there's an even bigger reason you should be using them: fast access to your most-used apps. Thanks to iOS 16, you can add one widget above the time on the Lock Screen and up to four ...more

The Calculator app is probably one of Apple's most-used iPhone apps, yet I always meet people who don't know all the little tricks there are to using it more efficiently. You may know most of them, but there's a chance you don't or at least forget about some of them. What a " ...more

Your iPhone's Weather app received its biggest update yet. Apple finally incorporated its Dark Sky purchase into Apple Weather, so you'll see more information for each location's forecast. Plus, there are a few surprises to be excited about, such as the ability to add more tra ...more

Facebook's annual earnings call on Wednesday didn't come with any big surprises, that is, if you took everything at face value. However, if you read between the lines, and paid close attention to the very specific and intentional language the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, u ...more

In the creative world, Adobe products have become synonymous with the work you can do using them. Photoshop and Illustrator are staples in visual art, and every other program Adobe offers is similarly adored. However, as beloved as Adobe products are, they can have a steep lea ...more

If you lose your AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max, you can turn to Find My to locate them. But sometimes, things don't go according to plan, and many things can go wrong. For example: Nothing happens whenever you try to play a sound through your AirPods. Their location wo ...more

Among the various components of the emerging augmented reality space, the most lucrative is the advertising market. The prospect of turning every object, every location, ever signpost in the real world into a discount code or virtual transaction interface is why AR will ultima ...more

If you'd rather be gently relaxed out of bed instead of stressed out at loud alarm sounds, there are a few things you can do on your iPhone. One of your best options is to use carefully selected songs that start out calm and soothing and gradually increase in intensity and vol ...more

You know that you have the Gmail app on your iPhone. After all, you get Gmail notifications, you see it in the app switcher, it's in the Settings app, and there's an "Open" button in the App Store instead of "Get" or a download icon. But you cannot find the app on your Home Sc ...more

Google Drive has been a gamechanger in the business world. First launched in 2006, Google Sheets has become much more than an alternative to Microsoft Excel. The powerful spreadsheet program is a boon for efficiency that's accessible wherever you have an internet connection—or ...more

Let's say you're using your iPhone's Calculator app, and you're knee-deep into a complicated calculation with many steps. You type in a large number, for example, "123,466,789," but mess up. You meant to type "5" midway through but accidentally typed "6" instead. The only thin ...more

Whether you're binging "Friends," "Game of Thrones," or Harry Potter movies, if you want to watch HBO Max downloads in the highest quality possible, you can't just use the default settings. Without doing the legwork, the TV shows and films you download onto your iPhone or Andr ...more

Since Apple launched iOS 13, we've seen four major updates for iPhone, each of which added some cool new features. Between iOS 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, and all the minor updates in between, there's never been a better time to be on iOS. And now, we've got even more positive cha ...more

Hey, you, still stuck at home? Cheer up, today is the first day of spring. Yes, really. And since you're probably locked in on TV, we're guessing you need a break from some of the less than sunshiney news reports rolling in. Well, no worries, because there's actually some good ...more

You're reading this so you're probably already safely huddled up in your house or apartment, watching as the entire planet grapples with the unfolding coronavirus health crisis. But unlike some others, you're lucky enough to already have a couple of weeks of supplies and now i ...more