Articles by Ara Wagoner

Whether the weather you need to weather is coming by land or by sea, we’re here to help you prepare for it.

Hurricane Season is still a few months off, but tornadoes and flash flooding can strike during any season. While we don’t yet have the technology to stop powerful storms from wreaking havoc, we do have the technology to help prepare us for them. Your Android phone is a tool that helps you through most major events in your life, and severe weather is no exception, so long as you properly prep your phone and have a plan in place to follow with it. We are here to help you, so let’s batten down the hatches and get the barn doors shut.

Weather Essentials
Severe Weather Accessories
Hurricanes
Tornadoes and Severe Thunderstorms

Weather Essentials

Regardless of the kind of weather you’ll face when you step outside your door, there are some weather essentials everyone should have on their phones, and that starts with a reliable weather app. Whether you check your forecast once a…

Whether the weather you need to weather is coming by land or by sea, we’re here to help you prepare for it.

Hurricane Season is still a few months off, but tornadoes and flash flooding can strike during any season. While we don’t yet have the technology to stop powerful storms from wreaking havoc, we do have the technology to help prepare us for them. Your Android phone is a tool that helps you through most major events in your life, and severe weather is no exception, so long as you properly prep your phone and have a plan in place to follow with it. We are here to help you, so let’s batten down the hatches and get the barn doors shut.

Weather Essentials
Severe Weather Accessories
Hurricanes
Tornadoes and Severe Thunderstorms

Weather Essentials

Regardless of the kind of weather you’ll face when you step outside your door, there are some weather essentials everyone should have on their phones, and that starts with a reliable weather app. Whether you check your forecast once a…

From settings and Smart Lock to apps and extensions, make this Chromebook home!

A Chromebook is amazingly quick to set up, but there’s a difference between setting a laptop up and really settling in with it. I’ve been working full-time from a Chromebook for three years and after leapfrogging from review unit to review unit last year, I think I’ve gotten it down to a science. If your new Chromebook feels new and awkward and not as fun as you were expecting, let me help you make this your new computing home.

Adjust your keys and trackpad
Turn on Smart Lock
Customize your dock
Install a text expander
Learn the secrets of your keyboard
Change up the browser’s look
Avoid overworking with Night Light
Get h-appy with Google Play
Expand your Chromebook with microSD
Make each new tab an adventure

Adjust your scroll and function keys

This first tweak is going to sound a little weird, but bear with me for a minute. See, when you’re using a touchscreen and a touchpad on a Chromebook, it …

When words are not enough, emoji are always there to help us say what we mean through complex symbology! Emoji are awesome little glyphs that can be combined, communicated, and interpreted a million ways and counting. Whether you just want to send a to your grandkids or prod your kids to clean their rooms, here’s how to open the emoji on the keyboard you’re most likely to encounter on an Android phone.

Keyboards used in this guide

Google’s own: Gboard (Free at Google Play)
Great alternative: SwiftKey (Free at Google Play)

How to access emoji on Gboard or SwiftKey

Open any communication app like Android Messages or Twitter.
Tap a text box such as a texting conversation or Compose Tweet to open the keyboard.

Tap the smiley face symbol next to the space bar.

If you don’t see a smiley face, long-press the comma for Gboard or the enter for SwiftKey.

The first page of emoji you normally encounter is recent emoji or the face emojis. You can drag your finger up or dow…

We wish all phones came with unlimited storage out of the box, but at least many Android phones have the option to expand that storage with microSD cards. Not every phone supports a microSD card — looking at you, Google Pixel 4 — but for those that do, the microSD card can give you more space for your app data, your music and movies, and, of course, your photos! That said, you can only reap these benefits if you take the time to set up your device to take advantage of it.

Products used in this guide

Best card for photography: Samsung 256GB EVO Select microSD ($50 at Amazon)
Third-party file manager: Solid Explorer File Manager (Free w/IAPs at Google Play Store)

How to change directories in the camera app

Your camera app picks a spot to save photos based on the available storage. In most cases, the default is typically the phone itself. Changing that will make your life a lot easier, especially after you have a microSD card installed.

This will ensure that any new photo…

An improperly coded image can somehow crash the Android System UI.

WARNING！！！Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users!It will cause your phone to crash!Don’t try it!If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

What you need to know

There’s a photo of a sunset making the rounds because when set as a wallpaper, it will brick some Android phones.
The image has an improperly coded Google color profile, which causes the Android System UI to crash from an out of bounds error.
For some phones, you can reboot into safe mode and reset the wallpaper to something else, but for others, you’ll have to go into the bootloader and completely factory reset the phone.

Today in “2020 is just the weirdest timeline”, there’s a cursed wallpaper making the rounds and crashing the Android phones of fools idiotic enough to not heed the warnings that accompany the image, seen to t…

Driving is an excellent time to charge your phone up, especially if you tend to have long commutes. However, plugging and unplugging your phone every single time you get into the car is a pain, especially when so many of our phones have wireless charging that’s perfect for this. Qi chargers have been slowly creeping into our offices and homes. If you’re using a Qi-enabled phone, you should absolutely grab one of these chargers and go wire-free in the car.

Most dependable

iOttie Easy One Touch Wireless Qi Fast Charge Car Mount Kit

Staff pick

$50 at Amazon
$55 at Best Buy

iOttie makes the most popular mounts on the market, and the most reliable of the Qi mounts around that’s compatible with fast Qi charging Samsung and Apple phones. There are certainly flashier mount styles or more cutting edge mechanical mounts, but the iOttie’s old-school spring-loaded clamps get the job done and usually last a while.

BYOC

Anker PowerWave Fast Wireless Car Charger with Air Vent Phone Holde…

An improperly coded image can somehow crash the Android System UI.

WARNING！！！Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users!It will cause your phone to crash!Don’t try it!If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

What you need to know

There’s a photo of a sunset making the rounds because when set as a wallpaper, it will brick some Android phones.
The image has an improperly coded Google color profile, which causes the Android System UI to crash from an out of bounds error.
For some phones, you can reboot into safe mode and reset the wallpaper to something else, but for others, you’ll have to go into the bootloader and completely factory reset the phone.

Today in “2020 is just the weirdest timeline”, there’s a cursed wallpaper making the rounds and crashing the Android phones of fools idiotic enough to not heed the warnings that accompany the image, seen to t…

Gboard

Google greatness

Free at Google Play

Pros

Syncs to Google account automatically
Excellent prediction and layout
Easy-to-navigate settings
Wider support for sticker packs

Cons

Swipe to delete words is great, but could use an undo button when it goes too far
Slower to get symbols beyond , and .

Google’s keyboard is beloved by millions of users on Android and iOS, and while it’s great for getting your words out quickly and accurately, getting non-standard symbols out will slow any great thought or Twitter rant to a crawl. Gboard’s predictions are top-notch, but the prediction layout takes getting used to.

Microsoft SwiftKey

For particular typists

Free at Google Play

Pros

Better customization of size/layout
Swipe from the period key for quicker punctuation
More expansive theme gallery
Clipboard copy-paste of multiple recent items

Cons

More convoluted settings menu
Doesn’t support outside sticker packs
Searches using Bing

SwiftKey has had a long and stori…

Only Android version 9 and below could be exploited by this new method, but it’s been fixed in the latest Android monthly security patch.

What you need to know

Security researchers have found another exploit similar to the original Strandhogg discovered back in December.
This version is more sophisticated, allowing it to pose as a legitimate app that users are putting their passwords into permission hijacking.
This exploit does not work with Android 10 and has been patched in the latest Android security fixes.

Looks like Strandhogg is back with an even more evil twin — and this is coming from someone who is an evil twin herself. Strandhogg 2.0, announced today by security researchers, once again tricks users into thinking that they’re putting their passwords into a legitimate app when they’re actually putting it into malware. The exploit is a more sophisticated version of the original Strandhogg exploit found back in December that made users think they were interacting with a …