If you leave your Roomba to do its thing unattended—which is the whole point, after all—every once in a while it can get stuck in a corner or under furniture. If you can’t figure out where it went, and you have a Wi-Fi connected model, you can ring it from the app to help you track it down.
How to Find You Wi-Fi Connected Roomba When It Gets Lost
If you leave your Roomba to do its thing unattended—which is the whole point, after all—every once in a while it can get stuck in a corner or under furniture. If you can’t figure out where it went, and you have a Wi-Fi connected model, you can ring it from the app to help you track it down.
If you had a computer in the early 2000s and didn’t have a ton of common sense (or proper antivirus software), you probably ended up with an allegedly helpful purple ape named BonziBuddy crowding your desktop. He could talk, tell jokes, “sing,” and generally annoy you. He promised to help you use the internet, but mostly he just got in the way.
iRobot has a few different models of Roomba vacuums, but the Wi-Fi connected Roombas are definitely some of the most convenient. You can start or schedule cleaning jobs from your phone, ring your Roomba from your phone if you can’t find it, and even start cleaning using Alexa or Google Assistant. If you just got a Wi-Fi capable Roomba, here’s how to set yours up.
Amazon uses your shopping and browsing history to give you recommendations and show you products that you might like. Unfortunately, that also means your recommendations get screwed up when you clicked on that link for a dumb product on Amazon you thought was funny. Here’s how to selectively remove items from your Amazon browsing history.
Amazon tracks your browsing history, which it then uses to advertise products to you across the web. Whether you’re tired of seeing ads for stuff you just bought, or you just don’t want Amazon creeping on you, there’s a way to turn of personalized ads. Here’s how.
The Amazon Echo is packed with tons of useful voice commands, but not all of them are obvious. You can also interact with Alexa from other devices or services, which is even less obvious. Here are some of the most useful features you can try out both on the device and while you’re away from your Echo.
When your kids move away to go to school, they’ll probably phone home every once in a while to ask for money. If they shop a lot on Amazon (and they probably do), you can expedite that process by setting up an automatically recurring deposit into their Amazon Gift Card balance. Here’s how to set yours up.
It’s pretty easy to edit Facebook posts. While that’s handy when you’re doing the editing, it can trip you up if you’re replying to someone who will edit their post later. To avoid embarrassment or trolling, Facebook lets you see the edit history of any post that’s been changed.
Amazon recently rolled out a feature that lets you ask Alexa for music based on what you’re doing. Amazon even announced that it would be able to “play music for baby-making.” Okay, Amazon. Sure. But what else have you got? I decided to see what other activities I could get Alexa to play music for.
You can ask Alexa to play music from a particular artist or genre, but finding the right music for your work out or for falling asleep to is a little more complex than justpicking a genre. Fortunately, you can ask Alexa for music based on what you’re doing. Here’s how it works and what you can use it for.
Most people don’t carry a ton of cash around anymore. That can be super inconvenient if you’re an independent artist or a small business owner. Fortunately, Square offers a free credit card reader (though it does charge transaction fees) that you can plug into your phone. Here’s how to get your free reader and start taking credit card payments from your customers or clients.
Amazon’s 1-Click Ordering can be handy for ordering things quickly, but maybe it shouldn’t be quite that easy to spend a ton of money without leaving your home. Here’s how to turn off 1-Click Ordering if you’d rather keep a couple extra steps between Amazon and your wallet.
Amazon’s Dash Buttons are a handy way to order supplies you need to buy regularly. Push a button and a couple days later a package shows up at your door step. However, it would be nice to know that the button worked. Here’s how to get a notification when your Dash Button places an order.
Amazon became a household name by letting you order almost anything you could possibly want from a single website. Naturally, Amazon wants to make it as easy as possible for you to buy stuff. Arguably, their greatest innovation towards this end is 1-Click Ordering. The company has probably tried to push it on you already, but it’s worth knowing what it is and how it works before you do.
If you spend a lot of time on Facebook, you can burn through your mobile data pretty quickly just scrolling past pictures and autoplaying videos. To limit the damage, turn on Facebook’s Data Saver tool.
Being able to turn your lights on and off with your voice is one of the best things about having a smart home. If you don’t have an Amazon Echo or Google Home, though—or just prefer keyboard shortcuts—you can use an AutoHotkey script to control your Philips Hue lights from your computer.
Like the IRC chat of old, Discord comes with a set of slash commands that you can use to express yourself or do useful things like search for GIFs or read text aloud. Better yet, you can add bots to your Discord server to get even more functionality out of your server. Here are the most useful chat commands and bots for Discord.
Discord is an excellent, free chat application that was built for gamers, but is useful for anyone. It comes with Slack-style text chat, group voice chat channels, and plenty of tools to manage your users. It’s a great tool for getting a community together or talking with friends while you play games. Here’s how to set up your own server.
Google seems to think there’s a good reason to have a shortcut that will kill every single one of your tabs at once. We disagree. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Q will close every Chrome tab or window you have open and ruin your work. If you’d rather keep your work where it is, here’s a workaround to make sure that doesn’t happen.
For years, I’ve dreamed of having an Emergency Pizza Button that will automatically order a pizza for me with a single tap. I’m not the only one with this dream. There have been countless innovations in pizza ordering technology in recent years…but they’ve all been from Domino’s. Which sucks, because they have the worst pizza. Why can’t other pizza companies catch up?
When you chat with people on Facebook, each conversation appears at the bottom-right corner of the site as a chat tab. Now, Facebook is using the same tool for posts you’re following. Any time someone comments on your posts, or posts you’ve also commented on, a tab will pop up in the bottom-right corner. This can get overwhelming. Here’s how to turn that off.
Google Home lets you listen to music from Spotify, Pandora, Play Music, and even YouTube Red. You can also share your Google Home with other members of your household. If you don’t have a music subscription, but someone else in your house does, you can set Google Home to use their account for your music needs. Here’s how.
Everyone needs to find a Wi-Fi hotspot every once in a while. Almost everyone has Facebook. If you have the Facebook on your phone, you can use it to find local businesses that offer public Wi-Fi. Here’s how to use this tool.
In Facebook’s endless quest to make your life “better” (where better has a very subjective meaning), it has added a feature to its mobile app that will automatically play sound when a video starts. If you’d rather turn this annoying feature off, here’s how.
Amazon adjusts prices on its products all the time. If you have time to wait for a good deal, you can track prices on stuff you want (and even get alerts) using a web site called CamelCamelCamel, and its browser extension The Camelizer.
