Stop Complaining That Your Browser Uses Lots of RAM: It's a Good Thing

Did You Know? During World War I, the United States sent approximately one million horses to Europe to supply Allied forces. Only 200 of the horses returned to the U.S., creating a significant shortage at home. Geek Trivia Which Of These Performers Promoted An Album Release With Giant Statues Of Themself? Michael Jackson → Mariah Carey → Kanye West → Bono → Advertisement Uncover the Secrets of H.265, x265 and HEVC Encoding 4K videos keep growing in popularity. To realize the UHD playing of 4K movies, you will have to unlock a series of 4K video codec puzzles – H.265/HEVC. This guide explores the relationship between H.265/HEVC and x265 and introduces a tool to help you encode video into HEVC or convert HEVC to other formats. Read the full guide and get the best HEVC encoder 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 How to Use a Custom Background in Gmail How to Pin WhatsApp Conversations to the Top of the Chat List Stop Complaining That Your Browser Uses Lots of RAM: It’s a Good Thing How to Change Your Snapchat Password Four Alternatives to YouTube Kids (That Aren’t Full of Creepy Fake Videos) How to Monitor (and Reduce) Your Data Usage on Android How to Make Your Windows PC Use “Mono” Audio (So You Can Wear One Earbud) How to Turn Your PayPal Balance Into a Debit Card You Can Spend Anywhere How to Block Cryptocurrency Miners in Your Web Browser How to Stop Your iPhone From Showing Your Number on Other People's Caller ID How to Increase Your Windows Laptop’s Battery Life Today's Review Geek Articles Facebook Isn’t Spying On Everything You Say You Can Charge Your iPhone in Half the Time with a Fast Charger Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Snake Oil Snake Oil is a term from the 1800s that has been repurposed to refer to computer security and cryptography software that makes exaggerated claims about what it is capable of doing, but falls far short of actually achieving. 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. Amazon is working on a self-dismantling drone to keep you safe Potential future: your package is late because a drone sacrificed itself to save a human life. [Quartz] Microsoft Edge browser now available for all Android and iOS users Loyal Edge user, you can now sync things to your phone. [The Verge] Prepare for the New Paywall Era Advertising isn't paying the bills for many big media organizations, and more paywalls are the likely outcome. [The Atlantic] Google will lock down Chrome on Windows Anti-malware software injects code into Chrome, and this causes a lot of crashes. Google is locking the browser down to stop this from happening, which anti-malware companies are sure to be upset about. [ZDNet] Get local help with your Google Assistant Google Assistant is the new Yelp. [Google Blog] How to Use a Custom Background in Gmail If you spend as much time with a Gmail window open as I do (thanks, Multiple Inbox feature!), you’re probably over the rather dull default theme. And even if you’re using one of the many custom themes available, maybe you’d prefer something else. Good news, everyone! You can use a photo from the web or your own computer as the background image, just like on your computer desktop. Read This Article → How to Pin WhatsApp Conversations to the Top of the Chat List WhatsApp has a neat feature where you can pin certain people to the top of the app. This means you can keep the important people in your life in the same place, above the rest of your chats. Here's how to do it. Read This Article → Stop Complaining That Your Browser Uses Lots of RAM: It’s a Good Thing It’s been a complaint about Chrome for years: “it hogs so much RAM!” And now that Firefox Quantum is here, the fire rages on—some users see less RAM usage than Chrome, while others see similar amounts. And it seems to have a big hand in what browser people are using. Read This Article → How to Change Your Snapchat Password Snapchat has come along way from its slightly seedy, vanishing photo roots. Now you can actually save images to Snapchat's servers indefinitely. With more potential personal information at stake, though, you've got to start taking your password security more seriously. If you used a really weak password when you first signed up, it's time to change it. Here's how. Read This Article → Four Alternatives to YouTube Kids (That Aren’t Full of Creepy Fake Videos) So you don’t want your kids on YouTube. That makes sense. There’s a lot of garbage on that site, and that’s before you even get to the comments. Read This Article → How to Monitor (and Reduce) Your Data Usage on Android Increasingly sophisticated phones and data-hungry applications make it easier than ever to blow through your cellphone plan’s data cap…and incur nasty overage charges. Read on as we show you how to manage your data use. Read This Article → How to Make Your Windows PC Use “Mono” Audio (So You Can Wear One Earbud) Most audio you listen to is in “stereo”, which means that different things are played in through both the left and right speakers. However, you can have your PC mix the sound to mono, playing everything combined through both speakers. Read This Article → How to Turn Your PayPal Balance Into a Debit Card You Can Spend Anywhere PayPal is a useful service for sending and receiving money, and it’s just about everywhere…at least, on the internet. But what if you have a bunch of money in your PayPal account and want to use it somewhere PayPal isn’t offered…like an actual brick and mortar store? Read This Article → How to Block Cryptocurrency Miners in Your Web Browser Cryptocurrency miners are a new scourge on the web. Web pages can now embed JavaScript code that runs in your web browser to mine themselves Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies using your computer. The website keeps the cryptocurrency, and you get higher electric bills, 100% CPU usage that drags down your computer, and reduced battery life. Read This Article → How to Stop Your iPhone From Showing Your Number on Other People's Caller ID There are plenty of reasons to not want your phone number showing up when you call someone else. Maybe you just don't like giving it out to strangers, or perhaps you don't want the person you're calling realizing you're ringing from a foreign number. Read This Article → How to Increase Your Windows Laptop’s Battery Life We often fixate on smartphone battery life, but most laptops still don’t have all-day battery life. Rather than tethering your laptop to an outlet, here are some ways to squeeze more life from your laptop's battery. Read This Article → Advertisement Dashlane - Never Forget Another Password Dashlane has a slick Web 2.0-type interface with a host of similar features--like syncing, password auditing, assisted automatic password changes, and alerts in case of security breaches. Dashlane has definitely led the pack in the good interface department Click here to download