Google has released an iOS app that makes it possible to access your Mac or PC from any iOS device with an Internet connection.
An iPhone 6 Plus controlling a MacBook Air using Chrome Remote Desktop.Jason Cipriani/CNET
Chrome Remote Desktop is hardly a new service from Google. It's been around for years, allowing users to access a Windows or Mac computer from another computer or an Android device. When it came to this Google service, iOS had been left out.
Then on Monday Google unceremoniously released the iOS Chrome Remote Desktop app into the App Store, making it super-easy to access your computer (or a family member's computer) from your mobile device wherever you have a connection.
Before we dive into setting up the iOS app -- or lack of required setup -- you'll need to make sure you have two things installed on the computer you plan on connecting to.
Chrome Remote Desktop app in the Chrome Web Store.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
The first is, naturally, Chrome. Second, you'll need to install the desktop version of the Chrome Remote Desktop app from the Chrome Web Store.
Once you have those two items installed, launch the app on your desktop and follow the prompts to complete the setup process. A video walking you through it all can be found here. Trust me when I say, you need very little technical expertise to get it installed.
The most important aspect of setting up the service is to remember your PIN. You did write it down, didn't you? OK, good.
Chrome Remote Desktop on an iOS device.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
Now that you have a PIN and the app is installed on your computer, download the iOS app from theApp Store here. After its installed on your device, sign into the same Google account you used in Chrome and your computer should show up in the list. Tapping on the computer name will launch a remote session, where you'll be prompted to enter your PIN. After successfully entering it, you'll gain complete control over your computer.
Good news! Reverse password lookups are totally possible.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
This happens to me often, especially when I'm visiting relatives' houses: My computer knows the Wi-Fi password from when I last connected to the network -- two years ago -- but I've completely forgotten it, though my mother is about 65 percent sure she wrote it down on a Post-it note seven months ago.
A forgotten Wi-Fi password isn't a problem for me and my omniscient laptop, but it is a problem for, say, my brother, who needs the password if he wants to jump on the network with his Japanese iPhone. My mom is hunting for the Post-it, but prospects are lookin' bleak.
Luckily, there's an easy way to reverse-lookup your Wi-Fi password on a computer that already technically knows it. Here's how to find saved network passwords in Windows 8.1:
Step 1: Make sure you're connected to your Wi-Fi network. If you're not connected, open the Charms bar by swiping in from the right side of the screen, or by moving your mouse into the upper right corner of the screen, and click Settings. Tap or click the network icon, find your network and click Connect.
Your PC should connect to your Wi-Fi network automatically, with the saved (but forgotten) password.
Step 2: From the desktop, open the Charms bar, click Settings and then open the Control Panel.
Step 3: Under Network and Internet, click View network status and tasks.
Step 4: Next to the word Connections, you should see a Wi-Fi icon and the name of your Wi-Fi network. Click your Wi-Fi network and a Wi-Fi Status window will pop up. Click Wireless Properties.
Step 5: A new window will pop up. Tap or click the Security tab and you will see your Network security key displayed as a series of black dots. Check the box next to Show characters and voila -- there's your Wi-Fi password!
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET
Now you know your network password. Write it down -- or don't; you can always just look it up again.
Five ways to lower your smartphone data consumption
Which apps and services are the worst offenders when it comes to chewing through your data plan?
Data usage on a smartphone.James Martin/CNET
In the early days of cell phones, it was all about the minutes -- voice minutes, that is, because people used their phones to call each other. (Weird, right?) You had to limit your conversations or suffer the horrors of overage charges.
Today, it's all about the data. Even if your plan is "unlimited," there's almost always an asterisk. After you burn through the first couple gigabytes, your high-speed connection throttles back to something closer to dial-up. (Talk about horrors!) And if you're with a pay-as-you-go service like Ting, unchecked data consumption could leave you in a higher-priced tier when the bill comes due.
Whatever your plan, it makes sense to conserve data. And what's the easiest way to do that? Connect to Wi-Fi wherever and whenever possible. Sure, it takes a few extra taps to connect to a network in, say, a coffee shop or airport lounge, and you make feel like it's not worth the hassle if you've got five 4G bars showing.
Depending on what you're planning to do with your phone, however, it may absolutely be worth it. Here are five of the biggest data hogs you want to avoid (or at least reduce) when there's no Wi-Fi available:
1. YouTube uploads
Just can't wait to share that epic video of your friend wiping out on his skateboard? Or your totally legit Bigfoot sighting? Upload at your own risk: Depending on settings and various other factors, each minute of HD video you shot can be as large as 200MB.
So if you upload just five 1-minute videos per month, that would eat a full gigabyte of your data allotment. Wait till there's Wi-Fi!
2. Video chats
Stop the Skyping! And the FaceTiming. And all the other video calling -- if you want to save data. Though the rate of consumption varies depending on the app you use and resolution of your chat, a Jetsons-style phone call can cost you up to 3MB per minute.
3. Online gaming
Don't worry, Trivia Crack addicts, turn-based games like this and Words With Friends aren't heavy data-users. However, real-time action games like Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5: Blackout are a different story, with some estimates pegging their data use at 1MB per minute of play.
4. Music streaming
It's so easy (and awesome) to plug into Pandora or Spotify when you're, say, riding the train home from work, you might not realize what it's doing to your data plan.
What it's doing is killing your cap. If a music service streams at a 320Kbps bit rate, that's 2.4MB of dataper minute, or a whopping 115MB per hour. Even if you tune in only a couple times per week, it's easy to rack up big data numbers. Fortunately, a lot of mobile apps let you downshift to a lower bit rate, a very advisable move if you must listen on the go.
Pandora, it's worth noting, never streams at more than 64Kbps on mobile devices, even if you're a Pandora One subscriber.
One other option: if your music service allows it (and most do nowadays), download your tunes (via Wi-Fi, of course) for offline listening.
5. Video streaming
If music streaming is bad, video trumps it by an order of magnitude. Awesome though it may be to binge on episodes of "Black Mirror" or trending YouTube vids when you're on the treadmill at the gym, streaming can swallow as much as 50MB per minute.
That's according to Netflix, which estimates 3GB per hour for HD video. Of course, those numbers can and will vary across different services (Hulu, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), but there's no question that video does the most damage to your data plan.
Turn your iOS burst photos into videos, animated GIFs
If you find yourself taking a lot of burst photos on your iOS device, Burstio is an app you're sure to find useful.
Burstio app iconJason Cipriani/CNET
My favorite kind of apps aren't entire platforms or services. Instead, they're much simpler apps that fill a hole in the feature set of an operating system. For example, Apple created a Burst Mode in its Camera app that takes photos in quick succession as long as you hold in the shutter button.
Once your burst is captured, Apple uses software to pick what it feels is the best shot out of the group and displays it for easy sharing. It's a feature I use often, but it's also one I've always felt was incomplete.
For me, it only made sense for Apple to provide a quick mechanism to turn a series of burst photos into an animated GIF, or a silent video (audio isn't captured when you're taking photos, naturally).
That's where Burstio comes in. This small app scans your Camera Roll for burst photo sets, and then allows you to export them as a video or GIF with just a few taps.
Burstio for iOS.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
After installing the app, you only need to grant it permission to access your Photos. Once you've done that, you'll be presented with a list of the burst sets stored on your device. Tap on one, preview and trim the clip, then export it as an HD video or an animated GIF.
Additionally, you can adjust the playback speed or opt to have it replay on a loop.
Here's a GIF I created from a wedding I recently attended:
Who doesn't want to dance with a few dozen glowsticks?Jason Cipriani/CNET
Due to lighting and movement, the photos turned out pretty poor. I had planned on exporting all of the photos in the particular set and creating a GIF, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.
Receive a gift this holiday season you can't stand? Not sure what to do with it? Here's some ideas to get the most out of the gifts you hate.
Jason Cipriani/CNET
Every year there's always one or two gifts that prompt you to ask yourself "what were they thinking?" You know it's something you'll never use, and you're left with the question of what to do with it. This year, don't let it sit in your closet collecting dust, and most certainly don't throw it away. Turn that unwanted gift into something you do want, be it cash, a gift card, or another item you'll actually use. Here's a few different ways you can deal with the gift you loathe.
Sell physical goods
Selling a gift is a great way to turn it into cash. Craigslist, eBay and Amazon are all great places to take into consideration when selling.
When selling on Craigslist, you'll want to make sure you make the item look great in the ad. You'll also want to be prepared to negotiate with potential buyers and make sure to keep your safety in mind. Ed Rhee did a fantastic job of walking you through the selling dos and don'ts of Craigslist.
Selling on eBay will allow your item to be seen by more people, which can lead to a high sale price. Then again, it's an auction site, and depending on when your item was listed, the length of the auction and numerous other variables, the final sale price may be lower than what you'd hoped for.
Before listing an item on eBay make sure to check the dollar amount that similar auctions have earned. This will help you in determining if it's going to be worth listing your item. You can find out how to check an value of an item on eBay in this post by Nicole Cozma.
Amazon is another option for you to sell your item. You can quickly sign up for a free individual seller's account and list your item in just a few minutes. The fee for selling on Amazon is determined by the item category for whatever it is you're selling. Keep in mind, shoppers come to Amazon looking for the lowest prices on the Internet, so if you're hoping for a high payday, you might want to look elsewhere.
Conversely, you can always trade-in an item on Amazon, receiving a gift card for the site in return. From my experience with trade-ins, you're going to give up 10 to 20 percent of a sale price on Craigslist, but you don't have the hassle. You simply submit the item, send it in and wait for your payday. For some, the ease of use is worth taking a hit on your bottom line.
One benefit to selling on Craigslist over eBay or Amazon is the lack of fees. Since you're doing the legwork when selling on Craigslist, you don't have to share your earnings. With eBay, you can expect to pay fees to both eBay and PayPal (should you use it to process payment).
Gift cards
What do you do with a gift card you won't use? You sell it! You can sell any gift card to a site like Card Pool to get a percentage of its face value. If you happened to receive a prepaid Visa card, you can always use a Square reader to pay yourself the balance.
Return it
One of the easiest ways to deal with an unwanted gift is to simply return it. Most retail locations will accept returns without a receipt, providing you with a store credit (read: a gift card). You can then take that gift card and purchase something at the same retail location or sell it.
It's a good idea to do your research before returning an item to a store. The first thing you'll need to know is where the item was purchased. The easiest way to determine this is to ask the gift giver. Or if you're afraid you'll offend someone, simply search the probable store's Web site. If you're unable to find it on the site, try calling the store to double-check. Sometimes items are available in a few stores and never added to the Web site.
Walmart's return policy for an item without a receipt is to issue a store credit. Target's policy only states that "returns without a receipt may be denied." Best Buy's policy clearly states you'll need to have some form of receipt in order to return an item. Most retailers will have a link to their return policy at the bottom of their Web site.
Donate it
Donating an unwanted gift is a feel-good way of getting rid of the gift. Not only do you free up space in your closet, but you also get to help someone else out. Depending on what the item is, you'll want to find a proper service or individual to donate it to. Dennis O'Reilly wrote a thorough piece on vetting charities to make sure your item is going to be used. It's easy to get caught up in the giving spirit and give your item(s) to a charity that isn't all that charitable.
Have some items perfect for the classroom? Call the local school district or library and ask if they accept donations. Receive a coat or blanket? Call your local shelters and/or churches -- they all accept donations.
Five ways to lower your smartphone data consumption
Which apps and services are the worst offenders when it comes to chewing through your data plan?
Data usage on a smartphone.James Martin/CNET
In the early days of cell phones, it was all about the minutes -- voice minutes, that is, because people used their phones to call each other. (Weird, right?) You had to limit your conversations or suffer the horrors of overage charges.
Today, it's all about the data. Even if your plan is "unlimited," there's almost always an asterisk. After you burn through the first couple gigabytes, your high-speed connection throttles back to something closer to dial-up. (Talk about horrors!) And if you're with a pay-as-you-go service like Ting, unchecked data consumption could leave you in a higher-priced tier when the bill comes due.
Whatever your plan, it makes sense to conserve data. And what's the easiest way to do that? Connect to Wi-Fi wherever and whenever possible. Sure, it takes a few extra taps to connect to a network in, say, a coffee shop or airport lounge, and you make feel like it's not worth the hassle if you've got five 4G bars showing.
Depending on what you're planning to do with your phone, however, it may absolutely be worth it. Here are five of the biggest data hogs you want to avoid (or at least reduce) when there's no Wi-Fi available:
1. YouTube uploads
Just can't wait to share that epic video of your friend wiping out on his skateboard? Or your totally legit Bigfoot sighting? Upload at your own risk: Depending on settings and various other factors, each minute of HD video you shot can be as large as 200MB.
So if you upload just five 1-minute videos per month, that would eat a full gigabyte of your data allotment. Wait till there's Wi-Fi!
2. Video chats
Stop the Skyping! And the FaceTiming. And all the other video calling -- if you want to save data. Though the rate of consumption varies depending on the app you use and resolution of your chat, a Jetsons-style phone call can cost you up to 3MB per minute.
3. Online gaming
Don't worry, Trivia Crack addicts, turn-based games like this and Words With Friends aren't heavy data-users. However, real-time action games like Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5: Blackout are a different story, with some estimates pegging their data use at 1MB per minute of play.
4. Music streaming
It's so easy (and awesome) to plug into Pandora or Spotify when you're, say, riding the train home from work, you might not realize what it's doing to your data plan.
What it's doing is killing your cap. If a music service streams at a 320Kbps bit rate, that's 2.4MB of dataper minute, or a whopping 115MB per hour. Even if you tune in only a couple times per week, it's easy to rack up big data numbers. Fortunately, a lot of mobile apps let you downshift to a lower bit rate, a very advisable move if you must listen on the go.
Pandora, it's worth noting, never streams at more than 64Kbps on mobile devices, even if you're a Pandora One subscriber.
One other option: if your music service allows it (and most do nowadays), download your tunes (via Wi-Fi, of course) for offline listening.
5. Video streaming
If music streaming is bad, video trumps it by an order of magnitude. Awesome though it may be to binge on episodes of "Black Mirror" or trending YouTube vids when you're on the treadmill at the gym, streaming can swallow as much as 50MB per minute.
That's according to Netflix, which estimates 3GB per hour for HD video. Of course, those numbers can and will vary across different services (Hulu, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), but there's no question that video does the most damage to your data plan.
Fortunately, with a little advance planning, you can watch on the go without using any data at all. Consider a service like PlayLater, which allows you to "record" streaming video from the likes of Hulu and Netflix for offline viewing on mobile devices. Likewise, a smattering of YouTube apps let you save videos right to your phone so you can rewatch them later -- no connection required.
Home networking explained, part 9: Access your home computer remotely
editor Dong Ngo points you in the general direction of how to access your home network remotely using a Dynamic DNS service.
Knowing the difference between LAN and WAN will do you a lot of good.Dong NgoEditors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. Check out the related stories for previous installments.
If you've been following this series, you'll know that I explained the LAN and WAN ports on a home router in part 1. And now, I need to tell you how you can use this information to remotely access your device at home. For example, if you know how to use Remote Desktop, a built-in feature of Windows, to control a computer in a different room of your home, how about doing that from somewhere away from home, and save yourself from having to pay for similar services such as LogMeIn or GotoMyPC?
That and a lot more are totally possible if you know how to configure your home router. And to do that, there are a few things that you need to understand, including, WAN, LAN, Dynamic DNS, and Port forwarding (aka Virtual Server). While all this might seem overwhelming and technical, it's quite easy if you're familiar with a router's Web interface. Indeed, it makes a great weekend project, and the result is rewarding. Just make sure you always back up your router's settings before making any changes.
It's easier to access your home computer remotely than you might have thought.Dong Ngo/CNET
WAN
WAN stands for Wide Area Network and is the IP address given to you by the Internet service provider. This address is unique on the Internet at any given time. At home, when you have a home network with multiple devices, such as tablets, computers, and so on, the WAN IP address is assigned to your router, which explains why all routers have a WAN, or Internet, port. This is the port that takes in the WAN address. So in other words, the WAN address is unique for each home (or office) network. In most cases, for a home or an office, a computer doesn't get to use the WAN IP address, which stays with the router.
Note: it's IPv4 that I'm talking about here. While IPv6 is available, virtually all consumer-grade Internet applications and services still use or support IPv4. And this is going to be the way things are for the foreseeable future.
LAN
In order for each device, such as a computer, to connect to the router (and from there the Internet) it has to have an IP address of its own. This IP address is a LAN (or Local Area Network) address that the router has assigned to the connected devices. The router retains the WAN IP for itself and shares that Internet connection to all devices connected to it. It does this using a function called NAT (or network address translation). You don't need to know about NAT -- it's just a methodology primarily used today to conserve the limited amount of IP addresses of the IPv4. With NAT, a home router can use just one WAN IP address to bring the Internet to up to 254 clients.
To understand the different between a WAN and a LAN IP address, just imagine WAN is the street address of an apartment building and LAN is the number of an apartment within that building. Different apartments in separate buildings can have the same apartment number, but their street addresses (WAN) are always unique.
Dynamic DNS
If you are at home right now, from your computer go to whatismyipaddress.com -- what you see there is your WAN IP address. Now if you travel away from home, that IP address is what you can use to access your home. In fact, if you have your router's remote management feature turned on, that IP address is what you need to access your router remotely.
For security reasons, if you decide to turn on the remote management feature of your home router (also known as Web Access from WAN), which is generally accessible in the Administration or System part of a router's Web interface, make sure you change the default admin password to something secure, and also consider changing the port number to something other than the default (which is 8080). It's generally a good idea to change the default port numbers for known services/applications.
Now remembering that WAN IP address is not easy, and on top of that, most residential broadband plans come with a dynamic WAN IP address that changes periodically. It's better to translate that address into something constant and easy to remember. To do this, you use a Dynamic DNS (DynDNS or DDNS) service. A lot of vendors, such as Asus or Synology, offer this service for free, and it can be activated from within their networking devices. You can always use DynDNS.org, too.
Dynamic DNS from Asus.Dong Ngo/CNET
A DynDNS service allows you to create a custom domain, such as myhome.homefpt.net orcnettemp.homeip.net, something much easier to remember than a string of numbers and dots. The actual name of this domain depends on availability and, like all domains, once created is unique on the Internet. After a custom domain has been created, there are a few ways you can associate it to a WAN IP address: by running a DynDNS client on a computer within your home network; attaching it to a NAS server within your home network; or assigning it to the home router. Most, if not all, home routers come with the ability to host a Dynamic DNS address, which can be managed using its Web interface (for more, check out part 5.)
That said, for example, if you have picked myhome.homefpt.net as your DynDNS address and use the 8080 port for your router management feature. When you're away from home, you can just point a browser to myhome.homefpt.net:8080 to access your router's Web interface and manage your home network remotely. This works with almost all home routers, except for those from Apple.
configured properly with a Dynamic DNS serviceDong Ngo/CNET
Port forwarding
Now that you can access your home router, the second part is going past the router and accessing a particular client on your home network (i.e., a computer). In reality, this means remotely accessing a service hosted by that computer. To do this, first you need to activate that service on the particular computer (that is, make sure the Remote Desktop feature is enabled on the computer), and then configure the router to forward that service's port to that computer involved. Most services have their own default port. As mentioned above, the default port number of a router remote management is 8080. Similarly, the default port for the Remote Desktop service is 3389.
In many routers, the port forwarding feature is also called Virtual Server. It basically requires you to type in the computer's local IP address, the port number (or port range), and save that configuration. To continue with our example of Remote Desktop, if your Windows computer has the local IP address of 192.168.1.100, then forwarding the port 3389 to this IP address will allow you to control it using Remote Desktop from anywhere in the world, using the DynDNS address the router has been associated with. Note that while the Remote Desktop client software is available for all Windows (and downloadable for Macs), only machines running the Pro, Business, or Ultimate editions of Windows can be used as the target for a Remote Desktop connection.
Here's a typical example of the Port forwarding setting for Remote Desktop within a router's Web interface.Dong Ngo/CNET
That said, with DynDNS, you can run a lot of services from home. Here are a few default ports and their services: 80 (HTTP, for a Web server), 3389 (Remote Desktop), and 21 (FTP, for a FTP server).
Note that, a computer's local IP (LAN) address can also change after a restart. To make it remains the same, you can use the IP (or DHCP) Reservation feature of the router.
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