All posts tagged: how-to

Google Now Lets You Change Your Gmail Address. Here’s How

Google Now Lets You Change Your Gmail Address. Here’s How

Published by skeptic

I was in middle school when I set up the personal Gmail account I still use today. Luckily, my still-developing brain picked a bland, straightforward option. At the time, I had no clue that this account would become so central to my digital identity years later. Not as happy with your choice, UnicornLover69? Google just dropped a major update for Gmail users in the US who want to try something new. You can finally change your Gmail address. Hallelujah. Google calls this your “account username,” but don’t let that confuse you. The company is referring to your email address. The process of changing your Gmail address is quite simple. First, you need to be logged in to your account. Then, open the email’s settings page and find the Personal info section. After that, go to Email and Google Account email. Here’s where you’ll find the option to make the switch. In the Gmail mobile app, go to Settings, choose your email, then tap Manage Your Google Account. The steps are the same as the desktop …

The Best Time to Drink Coffee for Productivity (and When Not To)

The Best Time to Drink Coffee for Productivity (and When Not To)

Published by skeptic

“Right when your adrenaline hits, it kind of boosts the release of sugar stores from your liver, and then you get a crash,” Akkerman says. “And if you haven’t eaten anything, you can get hypoglycemic, which can make you really shaky on top of everything else.” The solution, says Akkerman, is to have a little complex carbohydrates and proteins. This might be anything from granola to peanut butter toast. The extra energy from the food will stop your body from crashing out mid-morning. This, I learned from Akkerman, is the root of my mid-morning shakes. It wasn’t the caffeine. It was adrenaline and hypoglycemia. I’m not much of a breakfast person, but on Akkerman’s advice, I now eat a handful of peanuts each morning before my morning brew, to avoid an unexpected sugar crash. Moderate Your Caffeine Dose Some people process caffeine quickly and well. Some people don’t. Some people are also bigger than others. But the general rule of thumb from the US Food and Drug Administration is that 400 milligrams of caffeine per …

Backup Files and Your Entire Digital Life (2026): Hard Drives, Cloud-Based Tools, and Tips

Backup Files and Your Entire Digital Life (2026): Hard Drives, Cloud-Based Tools, and Tips

Published by skeptic

Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has considerable experience with hard drives, periodically publishes its drive statistics, which have some helpful numbers to consider. Unfortunately, what jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate and Western Digital. Still, even brand-name drives fail. I had a big-brand-name drive fail on me once and it was only four months old. What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. In my case, the company replaced the drive without question. Even within brand names, some external storage drives are better than others. Several of us here on the Reviews team have had good luck with Western Digital hard drives. I like the 8-TB model above, but if you want something smaller and more portable, the 5-TB My Passport Ultra has also been a reliable drive in my testing. One nice thing about buying a drive for backing up …

This App Makes Even the Sketchiest PDF or Word Doc Safe to Open

This App Makes Even the Sketchiest PDF or Word Doc Safe to Open

Published by skeptic

Word documents, and even PDF files, aren’t necessarily safe. These normally innocuous files can be injected with malicious “poison” code or simple scripts of code that can be a serious security risk. You probably already know it’s dangerous to open files from sources you can’t necessarily trust. If you’re an activist or journalist—or anyone who occasionally depends on anonymous tips to do their jobs—you might run into a situation where potentially useful information is inside a Microsoft Word document or PDF file that you can’t exactly vouch for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could open those files and read them without exposing your device to potential security risks? Dangerzone is a free and open source tool built for this purpose. Originally built by journalist and security engineer Micah Lee, this application opens files in a sandbox environment with no internet access, then converts the file to an image-based PDF with no scripting enabled. The resulting PDF has any malicious code stripped out and should be safe to open—at least, as safe as anything can …

Your Photos Are Probably Giving Away Your Location. Here’s How to Stop That

Your Photos Are Probably Giving Away Your Location. Here’s How to Stop That

Published by skeptic

Take a photo on any digital camera or smartphone and it’s not just the pixels that are saved. The image also gets a bunch of metadata appended to it, also known as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data, including details of when it was taken, the device that was used to capture it, and the camera settings that were used. If your phone or camera has a GPS chip and is tracking your location, then this gets invisibly stamped on to the photo as well. That’s good if you want to look back at all the pictures you’ve ever taken in New York City or at Lizard Point, but not so good if you’re sharing pictures of your pets and don’t want to give away your home address at the same time. Any time a photo goes beyond the audience of just you, it’s important to think about the metadata attached to it—and if needed, you should delete the location stamp. How to View Photo Metadata A location-stamped photo in Google Photos on Android. Photograph: …

How to Back Up Your iPhone to iCloud, MacOS, or Windows (2026)

How to Back Up Your iPhone to iCloud, MacOS, or Windows (2026)

Published by skeptic

Courtesy of Apple You can also manage previous backups from here and choose to sync different types of media with your computer while you’re at it. Backing Up to MacOS Mojave 10.14 or Earlier iTunes is not dead yet. The service is still available on older OS versions, so you can still back up everything there. Here’s how: Once your phone is plugged into your Mac, open iTunes and click the Device button at the top left of the iTunes window. Click Summary below your iPhone. Select Back Up Now under Backups. This creates a backup of everything on your iPhone, including all your app data, so you don’t have to log in to all your accounts again. It also saves your home screen arrangement, so you don’t have to drag a bunch of icons around. If you want to encrypt your backups, click on Encrypt iPhone backup and type a password, then click Set Password. Pro tip: New backups now overwrite the old ones, but if you click Manage Backups, right-click on a backup, …

The Best Digital Wall Calendar (2026): Skylight, Apolosign

The Best Digital Wall Calendar (2026): Skylight, Apolosign

Published by skeptic

I won’t lie to you: I hated the first digital wall calendar I tried. I tried the Hearth Display last year and was left unimpressed, but to my surprise, digital wall calendars as a whole have only picked up in popularity and options. Digital wall calendars take your online calendar—think your Google Calendar, the Calendar app on your iPhone, or your corporate Microsoft calendar account—and put it on a digital screen that you can mount on the wall or prop up on a stand on a countertop or table. These devices usually also double as digital yet physical chore charts, meal planners, and sometimes even a digital photo frame. I usually have smart displays all over my home, especially in my kitchen and living area, but they’ve all been replaced for the past two weeks with digital wall calendars that I’ve set up in tabletop mode. And you know what? I don’t miss talking to those annoying AI-powered assistants. Instead, as someone who already lives and breathes by her Google Calendar to manage her family’s …

Washing machines ‘sparkle’ and ‘smell fresh’ if you add 2 cheap items

Washing machines ‘sparkle’ and ‘smell fresh’ if you add 2 cheap items

Published by Sam Flores

People say the two-item hack makes their machine smell great (stock image) (Image: Getty) A homeowner has impressed thousands with her straightforward washing-machine-cleaning trick that requires only two items. Lifestyle blogger Kerry, known on TikTok as Kerriemariehome, shared her “quick and easy” technique, which costs ‘very little’. The video commences with Kerry holding two halves of a lemon, onto which she squeezes a dollop of toothpaste. She then tosses them into the washing machine and initiates a rinse cycle. “I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out,” she states in the clip. “For a quick and easy washing machine clean, just cut a lemon in half, add toothpaste, and throw it into your washing machine to eliminate odours and leave your washing machine absolutely sparkling.” In the caption, Kerry added: “Does your washing machine smell? Use this quick hack – toss lemon halves into your empty washer and run the washer on speed wash with very hot water. After the cycle is finished, you have a fresh-smelling washer – and for very little cost.” …

How to Use Apple’s Live Translation on Your AirPods

How to Use Apple’s Live Translation on Your AirPods

Published by skeptic

At the same time Apple announced the AirPods Pro 3 last year, the company also introduced a new feature called Live Translation. It makes the idea of the Babel fish, so evocatively described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a reality: Something sitting in your ear that can instantly translate between languages, on demand. Rather than an exotic fish though, here we have wireless headphones from Apple. This isn’t actually exclusive to the latest earbuds, despite the launch timing—it’ll work with the AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation and the AirPods Pro 2, as well as the AirPods Pro 3. It also works with the recently updated AirPods Pro Max, but just the 2026 version, not the original version of the Max. There are some requirements on the iPhone side too: an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 or iPhone 17 model, are needed. You also have to have downloaded and installed the latest iOS 26 software update on your phone. With those prerequisites out of the way, …

How to Back Up Your Android Phone (2026)

How to Back Up Your Android Phone (2026)

Published by skeptic

There are some premium apps for MacOS that offer more of an iTunes-like experience, but nothing that I vouch for. Backing Up to Your Chromebook Here is how to back up files from your Android phone on a Chromebook: Plug your phone into a USB port on your Chromebook. Drag down the notification shade and look for a notification from Android System that says something like Charging this device via USB, Tap for more options and tap it. Look for an option that says File transfer and select it. The Files app will open on your Chromebook, and you can drag any files you want to copy over. Backing Up to Another Cloud Service Maybe you have run out of Google storage, or you prefer another cloud service. There are Android apps for Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, MEGA, Box, and others. Most of them offer some cloud storage for free, but what you can back up and how you do it differs from app to app. We looked at how to back up mobile photos on …