Robot Vacuums Aren't as Convenient as They Seem (or Why I Returned My Roomba)

Did You Know? Despite their association with Chinese food, the “modern” fortune cookie was created by a Japanese-American in the 1890s to serve at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Geek Trivia A Significant Amount Of Wine Is Shipped Around The World In? Wood Casks → Giant Bladders → Specialized Tanker Ships → 55 Gallon Drums → Advertisement Free eBook: The Data and Internet Security Guide, Vol 2 (FREE eBook!) Regularly $9.95 This eBook takes computing security to the next level. It starts with a quick review of security basics and then delves into advanced topics such as encryption, password recovery, and malware removal – important knowledge for anyone who wants or needs to keep sensitive information truly secure. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Sign Documents and Mark Up Attachments in iOS Mail How to Set Up Google's New Code-Less Two-Factor Authentication Robot Vacuums Aren’t as Convenient as They Seem (or Why I Returned My Roomba) Why Do Some Emails Have Nonsensical Strings of Characters as Headers? How to Arm and Disarm SmartThings Automatically How to Save Big Money on PC Games How to Share iWork Documents from iCloud How to Set Up SIM Card Lock for a More Secure Android Phone How to Reverse a Numbered or Bulleted List in Microsoft Word How to See Previous Logon Information on the Windows Sign In Screen How to Control Your PlayStation 4 with Your Smartphone How to Disable “Facebook Live” Notifications Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Evergreen Browser An Evergreen Browser is a browser that is capable of automatically keeping itself up to date with the latest version without user intervention. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Driverless Cars Will Face Moral Dilemmas Autonomous vehicles may put people in life-or-death situations. Will the outcomes be decided by ethics or data? [Scientific American] Netflix Queues Up Video Downloads Following similar moves by Amazon, Comcast and others, Netflix is now working on a feature that will allow subscribers to download certain programs for offline viewing, industry insiders purport. [Light Reading] Remember When AOL Wrote a How-to Internet Book? Looking at the early online experience through the lens of AOL manuals. [The Ringer] Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too. A little operational security is good for everybody. [NYT] How to Sign Documents and Mark Up Attachments in iOS Mail As of Mac OS X Yosemite, you can mark up email attachments, including PDF files and image files, in Apple Mail on the Mac, making Mail a powerful productivity app. Now, that feature is also available in the iOS 9 Mail app. Read This Article → How to Set Up Google's New Code-Less Two-Factor Authentication Two-factor authentication is an excellent way to make sure your account is secure, but having to input a code every single time you need to log in can be a real pain. Thanks to Google's new code-less "Prompt" authentication, however, getting access to your Google account can be a lot simpler—you just need access to your phone. Read This Article → Robot Vacuums Aren’t as Convenient as They Seem (or Why I Returned My Roomba) Robot vacuums sound great. They do the vacuuming for you, saving time and hassle. And they’ve come down in price, too–you can get a decent Roomba for a little over $300. But while plenty of people seem happy with their Roombas, but I decided to return mine. Vacuuming still isn’t fun, but a solid cordless vacuum is more useful to me than a gimmicky robot. Read This Article → Why Do Some Emails Have Nonsensical Strings of Characters as Headers? Most of the time, our email arrives without problems or quirks, but why do some arrive with nonsensical strings of characters as headers? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a puzzled reader’s question. Read This Article → How to Arm and Disarm SmartThings Automatically If you’re tired of having to open up the SmartThings app to arm and disarm your setup every time you leave or come home, here’s how to do it all automatically without even touching your phone. Read This Article → How to Save Big Money on PC Games Thanks to the frequent sales, PC games just cost less than console games. If you’re patient and know the tricks, you can save quite a bit of money. Almost every game seems to regularly go on sale. Read This Article → How to Share iWork Documents from iCloud Being able to share documents so as to collaborate is an invaluable, understated ability in today’s office applications. Apple’s iWork office suite is no different, which includes the ability to share not only from OS X but iCloud as well. Read This Article → How to Set Up SIM Card Lock for a More Secure Android Phone There are a few things you can do to make sure your Android phone stays as safe as possible should it stray from your hands—a good lock screen password is a solid start. What you may not realize is that there's a way to take that security a step further by enabling SIM Lock. Read This Article → How to Reverse a Numbered or Bulleted List in Microsoft Word You've created a really long list of items in Word, and now discover you need to reverse the order. Do you manually move each item? Luckily, no. We'll show you a trick for reversing a list in Word that works on numbered and bulleted lists. Read This Article → How to See Previous Logon Information on the Windows Sign In Screen By default, most versions of Windows record an event every time a user tries to log on, whether that log on is successful or not. You can view this information by diving into the Event Viewer, but there’s also a way to add information about previous logons right on the sign in screen where you can’t miss it. To make it work, you’re going to have to dive into the Windows Registry or, if you have a Pro or Enterprise version of Windows, the Group Policy Editor. But don’t worry. The changes are pretty simple and we’ll walk you through them. Read This Article → How to Control Your PlayStation 4 with Your Smartphone Sony’s official PlayStation app, available for both Android phones and iPhones, allows you to remotely control your PS4. Use it as a playback remote or a keyboard for quickly typing without relying on the PS4’s controller and on-TV keyboard. Read This Article → How to Disable “Facebook Live” Notifications Facebook recently introduced “Facebook Live”, a live video streaming function that allows Facebook users to broadcast events in real time to their friends and followers. It seems innocuous enough, but by default, it sends notifications to all of someone’s friends whenever they start a stream–which means you end up with a bunch of notifications you don’t want. Read This Article → Advertisement Free eBook: The Data and Internet Security Guide, Vol 2 (FREE eBook!) Regularly $9.95 This eBook takes computing security to the next level. It starts with a quick review of security basics and then delves into advanced topics such as encryption, password recovery, and malware removal – important knowledge for anyone who wants or needs to keep sensitive information truly secure. Click here to download