Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

We all use our phones for a ton of routine tasks that require a few steps to implement. For instance, if you’re going to video chat a family member you might have to find the video app on your phone, tap to open it, then scroll through your contact list to find the person you want to talk to.

The next time you need to think critically about something—whether you’re considering a new idea, weighing the pros and cons of a potential decision, or evaluating whether you can trust a particular news source—it’s worth asking yourself a few simple questions.

Signal’s new PIN feature adds an extra layer of security to the encrypted messaging app and makes moving your account between multiple devices less of a hassle. While all text and voice communication in Signal is end-to-end encrypted locally and never stored on Signal’s servers, period, your PIN can be used to encrypt certain Signal profile information that can be shared between devices—stuff like your contacts and account settings. (Your PIN itself is not saved on the servers.

As a card-carrying introvert (I laminated it myself!) with a severe aversion to talking on the phone, teleconferencing and looking at my own face on camera, our move to the 100 percent work-from-home lifestyle has been a true delight. And there’s nothing about it I love more than that point at the end of every Zoom meeting, after everyone has said goodbye, when all of our faces go slack as we fumble with our trackpads or touch bars in an attempt to exit the call.

You vacuum. You dust. Every so often, you get a bee in your bonnet and decide to clean your windows. And right now, you’re probably spending some extra attention on cleaning your doorknobs and light switches. But wait—go back to the doors for a minute. When’s the last time you wiped down your interior doors? Have you ever done it? You might perform a cursory wipe-down of the handle on both sides of your interior doors—bedrooms, bathrooms, closets. But next time you’re making the rounds, take a damp cloth and actually wipe down the doors. You know, the flat part. The door part. You’d be amazed what accumulates here: Dust. Hair spray residue. General grime from who-knows-where. I’ll admit, I never cleaned my doors. But that changed recently when I noticed something on the exterior side of my bathroom door. My best guess was that I had splattered hair dye the last time I touched up my roots, which took place more than two months ago. But I didn’t linger on the cause for too long: I sprayed the door lightly with

Google recently unveiled tab groups in Chrome. As I wrote in our guide to setting them up ahead of their full rollout, they’re an incredibly useful way to keep your sprawling browser tabs slightly more organized. If nothing else, adding a little color to Chrome doesn’t hurt; I love how tab groups look. Now, let’s make them better. The one drawback of group tabs—in its current implementation—is that you’ll still see a lot of tabs crowding your browser window.

If you’ve done a group FaceTime lately, then you’ve likely experienced the feature that makes participant’s windows change see based on who is talking. The idea is similar to what Zoom does by default, in that it will make the speaker the center of attention, but if you’re in a spirited conversation with multiple people it can also get annoying pretty quickly. With the release of iOS 13.

Wendy’s may not be serving up as many of their iconic square-shaped hamburgers right now thanks to a beef shortage, but they want you to know that they’re still open for business—and they’regiving away free chicken sandwiches to do it. Specifically, if you order any menu item via the Wendy’s app, you can get a spicy chicken sandwich for $0.

The imminent iOS 13.5 update includes a new feature that could save your life. Once the update drops, you’ll be able to opt into automatically sharing your medical ID with 911 dispatchers and first responders, which will thenprovide you with the best care. In order for this to be useful in the slightest, you’ll need to have set up your Medical ID in the iOS Health app first. If you haven’t done this—there’s really no reason not to—do it now.

If you’ve ever tried to upload a panorama picture to Instagram—or if we’re being honest, any interesting horizontal picture—then you’ve likely run into issues. Yes, you can include the whole photo in a single post, but in most cases, you have to zoom out so far to fit it all in that it’s impossible to see all the amazing detail you were trying to preserve in the first place. Turns out, there’s an easy way around the problem: a multi-post panorama.

In March, Facebook started rolling out its new redesigned desktop site as something you could choose to opt-into once it was available to you. Friday the company announced that the rollout is complete and that the new site is available for everyone globally. While it will eventually become the default for everyone, you can go ahead and proactively make the swap to the new design now if you’d like, a swap that comes with a new “Dark Mode” option.

Leave it to a bored adolescent to come up with one of the most ingenious ways to appear “present” in a Zoom chat I’ve ever seen—especially if the chat is on the larger side and someone isn’t paying much attention to your webcam in the grid view. Now that we’re in week who-knows-what of the quarantine for most people, I feel like most of us would rather do just about anything else than suffer another videoconference.

The Sumida Aquarium in Japan is inviting people to have a short Facetime call with their tank of garden eels. This is no livestream; it’s a two-way call, and they specifically want the eels to see your face. The aquarium writes that the eels are normally very shy, and hide in the sand, but that in their tank they are used to seeing visitors pass by. Now that the aquarium is closed to visitors, the eels are starting to get shy again.

Mac users who like to multitask: there’s a keyboard shortcut to turn on text dictation so you can talk instead of type. Just place your cursor where you want to enter text (it’ll work in any app where you can type), double-tap the Fn key, and start talking. The microphone icon will pop up to let you know that dictation is active. When you’re done with your message, double-tap Fn again. You can also click Done below the icon or press Return.

I don’t think it’s possible to cheat in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Or, rather, I don’t feel any guilt whatsoever about taking advantage of the game’s quirks to outfit your single-player island however you want. From time-traveling to Turnip Exchanges, there are plenty of methods you can use to circumvent the game’s slow, methodical intentions—including a brand-new duping hack that lets you clone as many items as you want. Again, do I feel bad? No.

Google is about to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) for all Nest users. That’s a good thing! Most people shouldn’t experience any difficulties with this security-enhancing measure, but there are a few quirks you should know about. Nest users will need to authorize who they are each time they log in to Nest using a verification code sent to the email address linked to their Nest account.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you block someone on your iPhone? What really happens? You can block contacts through your Messages, FaceTime and Phone apps. Blocking a contact in one app will block them across the board. However, blocking doesn’t prevent someone from trying to reach you. They won’t get a pleasant “your number has been blocked” notification from Siri, but they might start to wonder why you aren’t answering their messages.

Accidentally summoning an AI helper like Google Assistant by inadvertently speaking the wake word (or something that sounds enough like it to fool a computer) has become a fact of life ever since Siri was first introduced. It can be a chronic problem too, depending on your living situation and how you use your smart devices: Sometimes the things can be... overzealous in their desire to serve you and will assume any vocalization means you’re trying to activate them.

Now that we’re all spending a bit more time streaming television shows and movies at home, maintain a robust “what to watch” queue is more important than ever. If you’ve signed up for a few new streaming services to keep you entertained in quarantine, it might also be a lot harder to manage—but a new feature in Google’s mobile search can help make the process easier. Sure, assembling a list of things you’d like to see is simple when you’re just using one streaming service, but if you’ve doubled down on your options or have taken advantage of a free trial or two, keeping track of what interests you on all of them can be a bit overwhelming. Yesterday, Google added a new feature to its mobile search that allows you to create a watchlist as you browse the internet: Now when you search for a movie or TV show on Google on your phone, you’ll see a “Watchlist” button beside it in search results. Tapping on it will add the program to your own personal Watchlist within the search engine. Next time you’re looking for so

Staying at home more and the pandemic, in general, has changed a lot of our habits. Maybe you’re taking an ivy league course online, or working out on your exercise bike a little more. Or, maybe you’re like me and you’re just drinking a lot more than you usually do. If you’ve been making a few trips to that essential liquor store over the past few weeks, Flaviar is offering a free way for you to learn a little more about what you’re shopping for.