How To

How to change the location and format of Mac screenshots

As a tech blogger, I take a lot of screenshots on my Mac and iOS devices to illustrate my posts. I use the built-in screen-capture tool on my MacBook Pro to snap a portion of my screen (Command-Shift-4) or the full screen (Command-Shift-3). These screenshots by default get saved to the desktop. Thus, after a busy day or three of blogging, my desktop begins to get a bit cluttered.

Thanks to a helpful tip on AddictiveTips, I am now saving these screenshots to a designated folder. All it takes is entering a bit of code to Terminal. And, if you more

Get notified when unauthorized users access your Wi-Fi

Unless you're a security pro, the odds are that you've at least wondered whether someone was stealing your wireless bandwidth. It's easy to check by examining your router's admin page, but that's hard to do with any frequency. Wireless Network Watcher is a free, lightweight app that pings when a new connection is made to your network. Here's how to use it:

Download Wireless Network Watcher.
Run the app. You may want to set Windows to run it automatically on booting if you find it handy, but for now, just fire it up.
The

How to get started with Mac RSS app MixTab

After using Newser on the iPhone, one of my all-time favorite apps, for years, I have found it hard to rely on RSS feeds on my Mac with their text-heavy design and truncated headlines. With MixTab, free in the Mac App Store, I get a quickly loading app that delivers my news, complete with engaging graphics.

Launch MixTab and you'll be asked to create an account. After providing an e-mail and password, MixTab opens with seven default topics. You can delete any topic that doesn't interest you by clicking on the Edit Tabs button at the top and more

How to privately stream video with VLC for Windows

How to build your own external hard drive

While there are a number of online services available for sharing documents, photos, videos, and other items on your system, unless you manage all of your content through these services then the data on your system is still fairly confined to your computer. For instance, if you create a movie project on one system using iMovie, while you may upload the final product to YouTube or another service to share, the files used to create the movie might be gigabytes in size and be scattered around various locations on your hard drive.

If you decide you would like to move more

How to extract high-quality icons from Windows files

Whether you need them to spruce up your presentation or you want to use them to help organize your files, large, colorful icon images can be handy tools. Many programs and files in Windows come packed with them, but it can be a pain to extract them -- especially the larger 256x256 size. BeCyIconGrabber is a free app that lets you pull them out of files and store them for later use. Here's how to use it:

Download the BeCyIconGrabber installer (or standalone portable app) here. It's about halfway down the page.
Run the app when you

How to manage Apple color panel favorites in OS X

Various applications in OS X support changing the color of elements such as text, annotations, and other markups or drawn objects. For instance, in Pages or TextEdit you can highlight a section of text and then set the color of that text using the color box in the toolbar.

This option is not uncommon, but while some programs offer a small selection of colors to choose from or have their own color settings implementations, those that use Apple's core technologies may give you access to the OS X color panel. This panel provides a variety of options for finding more

Miss the start button in Windows 8? This app will bring it back

People who just can't work in Windows 8 without the classic start button may want to check out a free app called Start8.

Designed by the folks at Stardock, Start8 tries to merge the convenience of the start button with the functionality of the new Metro environment. As such, it moves beyond the standard start menu with some unique features of its own.

You can download Start8 from its dedicated Web page and install it in the current beta, aka Consumer Preview, edition of Windows 8. Installation is quick and simple. After the app is installed, you'll see more