YouTube annotations are semi-transparent boxes of text that cover a video while you're watching it. They can be different colors and sizes, and can pop up or go away at any point during a video. Sometimes they are useful, but most of the time they aren't. YouTube gives you a way to turn them off on a per-video basis in video options, but not permanently or site-wide. Here is how you can achieve that using an ad blocker browser extension and a simple filter.

Curious how many images and files Imgur hosts? Some public information is available in the Imgur AMA and Imgur wiki, but it doesn't contain information specifically on how many files Imgur has in its archives currently.

Yahoo Mail sometimes uses inline advertisements that look similar to regular emails in your inbox. These are particularly obnoxious because they can't be deleted like a spam email and they sit there alongside your regular emails with a big, eye-catching thumbnail.

YouTube streams video and audio separately and the web player/app combines them on the fly. Due to this, the audio bitrate is not directly affected by video quality like in the past. Rather, YouTube can stream the video and audio it deems appropriate for a given device and connection. It can also adjust one during playback without affecting the other.

The audio you hear during a YouTube video will usually be 126 kbps AAC in an MP4 container or anywhere from 50-165 kbps Opus in a WebM container. Changing video resolution (360p, 720p, etc) in the video settings will probably not impact the audio stream, but it is likely that your connection performance will.

I created a simple image hosting website with speed and ease of use as the main goals. I felt that other image hosts are either too slow, have too many ads, or require too many steps to get to and upload images.

Yahoo recently started displaying a large advertisement for their Chrome extension when you try to access your Yahoo Mail inbox (mail.yahoo.com). This advertisement covers the entire screen, and is shown when you first access Yahoo Mail and are using Chrome. If your browser clears cookies each session, you'll see it every time you access Yahoo Mail with a new browser session. This is beyond obnoxious:

When selling your items on eBay, whether used or new, it is a great idea to build a photo studio to take your pictures. It will improve the chances of your items selling, reduce questions, and you may even be able to get a little higher price for them.

I purchase a great deal of electronics, computer components, house goods, and yard supplies online. I am very price and review sensitive so I cross-shop everything. My purchases tend to be split fairly evenly between Amazon, eBay, and Newegg. I'm going to share my personal pros and cons for each marketplace, and hopefully it can help you with your buying decisions.

If you want to remove the browser control buttons from the context menu in Firefox, it's a very easy tweak that doesn't require any add-ons. You just need to add a few lines to the userChrome.css file for your Firefox profile.

Here is a step-by-step guide with pictures showing you how to stop videos from auto-playing on the Facebook website. This is not applicable to the Facebook app, just facebook.com when accessed on a computer.

The current version of Yahoo Mail has a large 190 x 42 pixel button in the lower-left corner that shows the Themes window if you hover over it with the mouse.

Yahoo added little white snowflakes that flow over the screen on Yahoo Mail during the winter. If you want to remove them, you can do so using any standard ad blocker.

Yahoo added a News Feed button recently to the Yahoo Mail inbox, which has jumping notification numbers that pop up when there's something new in the feed. Here's an easy way to get rid of the number notifications, or the whole News Feed button if you want.

Curious what the average feedback rating for a seller on eBay is? Maybe you want to see how your selling account stacks up. eBay doesn't post this information publicly, so I wrote a script that samples a large selection of random eBay sellers to find the average feedback rating and some other stats.