Justin Pot

2 days ago | au.lifehacker.com | Justin Pot

Let's be clear: smart TVs are a privacy nightmare. Almost all of them keep track of everything you watch, even when you're using an HDMI cable, and send it off to analytics firms, advertisers, and who knows who else. In capitalist America, TV watches you. A common piece of privacy advice, given this, is to disconnect your smart TV from the internet and use an Apple TV to do your streaming instead.

3 days ago | au.lifehacker.com | Justin Pot

The Weather Channel, for the most part, looked like a normal TV station—until the local forecast would show up. Then it became a pixelated data dump of weather information served over a funky piano soundtrack. There's nothing like it on the internet—well, until. now. WeatherStar 4000 is a free website that recreates the look and feel of a vintage Weather Channel local forecast, complete with accurate visuals and optional CRT scanlines.

4 days ago | au.lifehacker.com | Justin Pot

Here's an all-too-familiar scenario for me: I'm listening to music using my phone when, for some reason, my headphones connect to my sleeping MacBook. The music stops. I bet you've run into some version of this problem—it's frustratingly common, plus you're reading an article about how to solve it. And here's your solution: a free, open source application called Bluesnooze.

1 week ago | au.lifehacker.com | Justin Pot

It's a sad fact of life: Sometimes you have to work when you'd rather be watching the game. I can't fix that problem for you, sadly, but I can give you a way to keep track of the score on your Mac. Apple offers a great sports scores app for the iPhone, which is the best way to keep track of the score while you're doing something else. There's nothing like that from Apple for the Mac, though, which I find a little disappointing.

1 week ago | au.lifehacker.com | Justin Pot

You just set up your brand new Mac and are about to scroll through a long document. You press the middle button on your mouse, expecting to be able to scroll by moving your cursor the way you can on Windows or Linux. Nothing happens. What gives? It turns out macOS doesn't support this feature, sometimes called auto scrolling. There are all kinds of little annoyances when you switch from one operating system to another, even if you prefer the operating system you're switching to.