Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

Our Homehackers video series is back to help you convert your typical casa into a super cool smart home. In this episode, we cover the basics of smart home stereos and talk about your best entry-level options for listening to music in any room at your place. I meet up with household tech expert John Quain at Homehackers HQ once again to learn about the smart sound systems most people are rockin’ these days.

Between credit cards, debit cards, mobile payment apps, and even Bitcoin, it’s getting easier than ever to go totally cashless. Unfortunately, doing so leaves a lot of people who rely on small cash tips out in the cold. Cash is king, especially around the holidays. It’s not all that surprising that people don’t carry cash anymore. It’s flat out convenient.

Android: We keep hearing about 5G, the super fast network set to replace our current LTE service, but in the meantime there’s a way to get significantly faster data speeds on your smartphone right now. All you need is the right Android phone and Qualcomm’s Gigabit LTE. What is Gigabit LTE? Gigabit LTE gets its name from its top speed of 1 gigabit per second.

Changing career paths, getting an idea for an app out of your head, or just learning something new and useful are all great reasons to get started programming. Learning a programming language might sound as intimidating as learning an actual foreign language, but with the right tips, hints, and resources (conveniently provided below), you can go from bumbling bash user to the viscount of vim.

If you have two-factor authentication set up on your Twitter account (which you absolutely should and if you don’t you should set up right now), then now you don’t have to have to use SMS to get access to your account. Now you can use a third-party app such as Google Authenticator, Duo Mobile, or Authy instead.

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker’s weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and a guide to using its waters to reflect on and improve your life. This week’s selection comes from Marcus Aurelius’s personal notes. He highlights an important truth about the nature of opinions: What It Means You do not need to have an opinion on anything.

Just because you took two years of Spanish in high school doesn’t mean you still know how to ask where the bathroom is. In fact, if you can’t remember a single word of the language, it might be a good time to get your brain in gear and add some new, foreign words and phrases to your vocabulary.

Hanukkah is almost over, but you can still celebrate even if you weren’t able to get your hands on any latkes this year. As long as you have access to Apple, Google or Amazon’s AI assistant you can enjoy a high tech version of one holiday tradition: the dreidel. Just get your artificial intelligence’s attention with its respective hot words and then say “Spin the Dreidel.

Gather your family around the laptop screen: it’s time to give them the gift of better online security. While you can’t exactly give a presentation explaining everything from why your password shouldn’t be your birthday to why you shouldn’t open every email, you can help your loved ones learn about what security methods will best protect them.

You know those corny movie scenes, where someone hacks their boss or girlfriend or enemy’s password by looking around the room and making two guesses? In real life, that would work way more often than it should. Check out this list of the 25 most-used, and thus most hackable, passwords of 2017. SplashData, makers of the password managers SplashID, TeamsID, and Gpass, built their list from over 5 million passwords leaked in data breaches this year.

It was quite a year for Lifehacker’s podcast, The Upgrade. In this episode, we talk about (and listen to) our favorite moments from the past year’s episodes. In 2017, we learned how to turn our awkwardness into a social asset; how to be brilliant (while being bored); how to find real love; how to get smart about microdosing… and more. So much more. Oh, but we had fun.

If you’ve ever encountered a “phantom traffic jam,” or traffic slowdown that doesn’t seem to have an apparent cause, it was probably some jackwagon tailgating somebody. Researchers at MIT found that not only does tailgating not get you anywhere faster, it actually creates traffic jams that shouldn’t exist.

Tip-top and cheerio to London, the city named after its famous bridge! It’s well-known that all English people are from London, that everyone in the city is rich and friends with the queen, and that they all set their watch by Big Ben while riding double-decker buses and holding onto their derbies. This week on Hack Your City, we’d like the few Londoners still reading to give their best tips on living, working, or going on holiday in the city.

In my six semesters as an English major, this is the best thing I learned: When in doubt, put the best bit of a sentence at the end, the next-best bit at the beginning, and the rest in the middle. So in order of bestness, that’s 2, then 3, then 1. What’s the “best bit”? It might be the bit that sounds prettiest. It might be the bit that gets at your larger point. It might be the most specific or surprising word.

No matter where you live, gas is expensive. GasBuddy has been one of those app people have used for years to find the cheapest place to fuel up, and now it has a new feature to help you make that fuel last a little longer. This week it launched a new Trips feature that pinpoints exactly where and when you’ve been guilty of fuel-inefficient driving.