Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Facebook is a huge time-suck. It’s a lot of work, keeping your profile alive by updating statuses, liking people’s photos and wishing everyone you went to high school with a happy birthday! But you can make your Facebook life easier, and way more efficient, by activating a few key IFTTT recipes. IFTTT, …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Keeping your Twitter followers happy is tough, especially since tweets come and go in the blink of an eye. You need to be on top of your Twitter account to grow your following, even if you’re not a social-media marketing manager or an Internet celebrity. Here’s a whole slew of IFTTT recipes you can use to track, …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET The standard QWERTY keyboard layout may not actually be your friend. According to popular legend, the QWERTY keyboard was created in the 1860s by a man named Christopher Latham Sholes in response to a very specific problem: Early typewriters jammed up when they were used too quickly, and so a special inefficient keyboard layout had to be …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Your PC probably came with a standard English QWERTY layout, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it. Switching between keyboards in Windows 8 is a cinch, once you’ve added the keyboards you want to toggle between. Here’s how to add additional keyboard layouts in Windows 8, so you can switch up your language or try an …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET You’ve been tracking your sleep schedule for a couple of weeks now, and you know that you don’t always get the highest-quality sleep possible. But…now what? Sleep data, like all data, is useless when it lives in a vacuum. In order to really figure out why you sleep like a log some nights, and why you toss …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Google’s free, collaborative office tools are great for a variety of things, such as planning everything from work schedules to class reunions. But if you’ve been using a multi-tab Google Sheets workbook for your planning needs, you may have noticed that every time you click on your bookmark, the spreadsheet opens to the same tab. The wrong …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Searching text messaging threads for old messages, photos, and videos isn’t easy — it usually involves scrolling, scrolling, and more scrolling. But if you’re an iPhone user, there’s an easy trick for finding everything your texting buddies have sent you. To find a photo or a video from a texting thread, open the Messages app and tap …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET That unlimited data plan that you’re fighting tooth and nail to keep — is it really unlimited if your wireless carrier cuts back the speed once you exceed a certain data allotment? Not really, no, but such an experience is far from uncommon. Last year, Verizon announced ( and then quickly rescinded) plans to throttle, or slow …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET No matter how securely you’ve locked down your Facebook account, you can’t make your profile pic and cover photo private. Whatever Facebook’s reasons for the policy — maybe it’s just so you could verify an acquaintance’s identity before adding them as a friend — it’s long been a part of the social network. But as a privacy …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Last year, I picked up a new iPhone 6 for my main Verizon line while keeping my grandfathered unlimited data plan with mobile hotspot access. I’m not too proud to admit that was a major coup on my part. Like most carriers, Verizon is now doing all it can to switch longtime customers to more lucrative tiered …