David Nield, Author at Gizmodo

Keep Your Chromebook Screen Awake With This Add-On

Part of the appeal of Chromebooks lies in their lightweight minimalism, but that does mean you miss out on some advanced OS features—such as being able to set a display time-out interval. If you want to stop your Chrome OS screen from dimming then there’s an extension that can help. The extension in question is…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 11

Fall Asleep to Music on iOS

Sure, iOS 9 is stealing all the headlines right now, but there’s a good three months until we’re going to be able to get our fingers on it, and in the meantime there’s plenty of usefulness in existing versions of iOS. Today’s tip from the ‘you-might-not-have-known-this’ drawer is falling asleep with iOS playing the soothing…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 10

How to Choose Your Next Laptop

So it’s time to choose your next laptop—your trusty companion for the next few years, the hardware that will keep you connected and handle everything from essay writing to Netflix binging. But how do you narrow down the wealth of options out there? With our short and simple guide, that’s how. Choose your OS Pick…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 9

Create a YouTube Playlist as a Modern-Day Mixtape

The art of mixtape making has sadly been lost in our transition to a digital era of on-demand music, but there are still places where you can practice this lost skill, and one of them is YouTube. Here are the steps to assemble your group of songs and share them with a special someone or…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 8

8 Handy Extensions to Tame Your Browser Tabs

The advent of tabbed browsing promised a future filled with super-efficient web wandering, where pages loaded up in a snap and we could all keep up with dozens of sites at once. In reality, many of us are getting bogged down by tab overload, but don’t despair—these third-party add-ons for Chrome and Firefox can help…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 5

How to Use Google Photos from the Desktop

Google Photos has got a lot of people excited about rediscovering their long-lost picture library—thousands of images that were previously doing nothing but gathering dust—and there’s more to the service than you might realize. Here we’ll guide you through the desktop tools Google has made available to sort the pictures that aren’t on your phone.…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 4

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a WhatsApp Master

Such is the popularity of all-encompassing messaging tool WhatsApp that Facebook was tempted to part with $16 billion to get ahold of it. It’s designed to be as simple and straightforward to use as possible, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some hidden tricks and features that you might not know about. Let us guide…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 2

Unlock Chrome OS With Your Smartphone

There are many limitations to Chrome OS, but seen from another angle its lack of bells and whistles is what makes it so appealing. It’s also a place where Google goes to test out some of its more forward-thinking ideas, including today’s topic: The ability to unlock a Chromebook with your Android smartphone. Here’s how…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 2

An App to Find the Quick Reads From Your Read-It-Later Lists

Saving online articles to read-it-later services like Instapaper or Pocket is a nice way of pretending to yourself that you’re eventually going to get round to reading through everything—but that’s easier said than done. Enter Short. Short is a small and simple app that surfaces articles by reading time so you can fit in articles…

Gadgets David Nield Jun 1

How to Track Your Travel Plans With Google’s Inbox App

Amid all the news and noise coming out of Google I/O yesterday, you might have missed the announcement that Inbox by Gmail is available to anyone who wants it, no invitation needed. There are a handful of new features to take advantage of too—and one of these makes it easier to keep an eye on…

Gadgets David Nield May 29

How to Change Between OS Channels on Your Chromebook

Just like the Chrome browser, Chrome OS offers several channels for you to choose between: stable, beta and development. Each one offers a different mix of new features and stability, so you can access updates earlier if you’re prepared to put up with a few bugs. Here’s how to switch between the available channels on…

Gadgets David Nield May 27

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Pinterest Master

What Pinterest lacks in user numbers it makes up for in aspiration: beautiful buildings, artwork, crafts, technology, outfits and landscapes. Whether you’re a keen Pinterest user or a newcomer who’s in the early stages of poking around, here are 10 useful tips to improve your pinning experience and get more from the platform. 1. Find…

Gadgets David Nield May 26

Put Windows on Auto Pilot With Task Scheduler

Windows 10 is set to mark a sea change in the way Microsoft’s OS works, but even the modern-looking Windows 8.1 carries a bunch of legacy tools and apps that you may not know about. One of those is the Task Scheduler, a built-in utility enabling you to automate a multitude of tasks with no…

Gadgets David Nield May 22

Find Out Which Android Apps You’re Really Addicted To

You know you spend a lot of time on your smartphone, but what are you doing with it? It’s a question QualityTime (Android 4.0+) attempts to answer, monitoring activity on your handset and revealing the apps that you just can’t pull yourself away from. Here’s how to get the app up and running on your…

Gadgets David Nield May 21

The Quickest Way to Send Photos in iMessage

A picture is worth a thousand words, so the old saying goes, so you’ll often want to snap a photo of what you’re seeing or looking like rather than try and describe it using old-fashioned text. If you’re on iMessage on iOS, there’s a shortcut you can use to get your images sent faster. It’s…

Gadgets David Nield May 20

6 Reasons to Use Plex to Create Your Own Personal Netflix

Plex is a free software package for your computer that lets you stream your local movie or music files to other devices free of charge. Whether you’re watching from a laptop downstairs or from a smartphone in another city, it gives you the ability to create your own personal Netflix (and Spotify) service. If you’ve…

Gadgets David Nield May 19

How to Add Customized Gesture Controls to Your Android Phone

Get yourself an Android phone or tablet and you can hack it to work in pretty much whatever way you want—and that extends to input as well. All In One Gestures is one of several apps on the Google Play Store that let you create customized gestures for controlling your apps and the OS itself.…

Gadgets David Nield May 18

Three Handy Uses for Chrome Beyond Web Browsing

You probably think of Chrome as a web browser—and so you should—but it has a few more tricks up its sleeve than you might have realized. Here are three of our favorite alternative uses for the software, which to a large extent work the same in Mozilla Firefox too. 1. Play music and video Chrome…

Gadgets David Nield May 15

Check Flights, Reservations and Events in Google Maps for Android

Version 9.8 of Google Maps for Android didn’t exactly make the national news headlines earlier this month—and rightly so—but there are a couple of new features worth flagging up for you to make use of. One is the ability to access your upcoming travel plans (pulled from Gmail and Google Calendar) more easily. Tap the…

Gadgets David Nield May 14

10 Tricks to Make Yourself an iMessage Master

Apple’s iMessage is an all-in-one messaging solution that stays with you across mobile devices and laptops—assuming they’re all made by Apple of course. Even if you rely on the service every day, you may not know about some of the features and tricks you can take advantage of, so we’re here to help put that…

Gadgets David Nield May 13

David Nield

Keep Your Chromebook Screen Awake With This Add-On

Fall Asleep to Music on iOS

How to Choose Your Next Laptop

Create a YouTube Playlist as a Modern-Day Mixtape

8 Handy Extensions to Tame Your Browser Tabs

How to Use Google Photos from the Desktop

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a WhatsApp Master

Unlock Chrome OS With Your Smartphone

An App to Find the Quick Reads From Your Read-It-Later Lists

How to Track Your Travel Plans With Google’s Inbox App

How to Change Between OS Channels on Your Chromebook

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Pinterest Master

Put Windows on Auto Pilot With Task Scheduler

Find Out Which Android Apps You’re Really Addicted To

The Quickest Way to Send Photos in iMessage

6 Reasons to Use Plex to Create Your Own Personal Netflix

How to Add Customized Gesture Controls to Your Android Phone

Three Handy Uses for Chrome Beyond Web Browsing

Check Flights, Reservations and Events in Google Maps for Android

10 Tricks to Make Yourself an iMessage Master

Ozempic Shreds Bones? How a Small Study Turned Into a Big Health Myth

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