Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

JetBlue is selling a board game starting today that comes with a pretty epic prize: a free roundtrip JetBlue flight certificate. The limited-edition game, called Get Packing!, will be sold on Amazon starting today at 12pm ET for $19.99. As far as actual gameplay goes, with Get Packing! you gather together 6 players and each try to fill up your “Packing Board” with the appropriate items to go on a trip.

It’s rare to purchase something that will actually increase the value of your smartphone, but there’s one item that offers more value per dollar than any insurance plan: a screen protector. The thin piece of plastic or glass could save your fancy-pants iPhone X from a fall that would leave it shattered into countless pieces. Even better, it could boost your device’s resale value a few hundred bucks.

Apple’s one-size-fits-all AirPods design may work for most people, but if you have particularly large ears you may be struggling to keep your wireless earbuds secure. Don’t worry, you’re not alone—and one Apple fan found a clever way to fix the problem. Over on the MacRumors forums, AirPods owner NewZealandMatt walked us through his creative process. After finding that the earbud kept falling out of his left ear, he tried a few of the currently recommended solutions.

Last week with the launch of iOS 11.2, Apple officially launched Apple Pay Cash. When you update your phone to 11.2 the app will automatically be installed on your phone, which means it’s not in the App Store. Just like Apple’s other preinstalled apps, it’s also not meant to be removed from your phone, but a bug in the operating system appears to be allowing people to do so.

Last week Google announced that Android Oreo was starting to roll out to Android Wear devices. The update includes a new notification vibration strength setting, touch lock option for wet conditions, new notification channels and battery saving background limits, and support for seven new countries. But it won’t be available for all smartwatches.

This week we’re tackling the topic of urban cycling. Our guests include Eben Weiss, author of The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual: The Universal Guide to Bikes, Riding, and Everything for Beginner and Seasoned Cyclists; Rosemary Bolich, the Director of Community Outreach at We Bike NYC; and Doug Gordon, better known as Brooklyn Spoke—a TV producer and outspoken cycling advocate.

This week, Apple finally made Apple Pay Cash available, it’s Venmo competition for the iPhone. With it, you can send and receive cash from friends, much like you can with services like PayPal, Square, and Venmo using iMessage on your iPhone. Its super simple to use, but can be a bit confusing if you’re not sure what you’re doing. To use Apple Pay Cash you need to have iOS 11.2 downloaded onto your phone. If you don’t have it yet, now’s a good time to go ahead and update.

Whenever a large group of friends and I are planning a big trip, I typically volunteer to purchase the plane tickets. Credit card points are serious business, and throwing a few friend on my itinerary means they get to take advantage of my airline status, depending on our which one we choose to take. It’s always seemed like a no-brainer, except as Thrillist points out this week, I might have been overpaying.

The key to remembering something may be saying it aloud. Called the “production effect,” Canadian researchers have reconfirmed (it’s been proven by them before in 2010) that saying something aloud is the best way to remember something, CBC News reports.

Okay, yes, pinning your charitable work to holidays can be a problem. But also, this time of year there are lots of people in need—both for seasonal gifts that make life feel good and for winter necessities—and Operation Santa is one solid way to help. With Operation Santa, the USPS collects letters addressed to the big guy in red and connects them with people looking to give. We think of kids’ letters to Santa as pie-in-the-sky wishing. Dear Santa, I want a pony.

The dating app swipe can be addictive and satisfying, but it also rests on snap judgements that aren’t necessarily the things that make a relationship work—you know, common interests and a shared worldview? Yes, it’s a balance. You ideally want to find someone who’s hot and loves the works of Margaret Atwood. But maybe loving Margaret Atwood is what’s going to make someone seem really hot to you.

You know the sleep hacks. You’re laying off caffeine in the afternoon, avoiding blue light, maybe taking a warm bath and having a little stretch before you get between the covers. And yet, even when you get to bed with the right number of hours before your alarm, it can still somehow not be enough.

Most of us end up getting a ton of email during the day. As it turns out, I see a lot of that email via the notification bar on my phone. I want to know what emails have come in, but not enough to go into the Gmail app on the phone, and so browsing them in Notifications is a quick and easy solution. When I see something in there I want to read or respond to, I launch the app.

So you ordered that cool new doodad from Amazon and it was supposed to arrive today, but it didn’t. Yet you’ve been sent a delivery confirmation telling you it made it there on time. Was it stolen? Maybe! But here’s another possible explanation. https://twocents.lifehacker.com/extend-the-life-of-your-free-amazon-hulu-or-netflix-t-1820621443 According to a CBS Atlanta report, USPS supervisors are giving mail carriers direct orders to misrepresent delivery times.

At a dinner party or a family-style meal out, who gets the last piece of food? In this excerpt of the dinner party how-to book Brunch Is Hell, Rico Gagliano and Brendan Francis Newnam lay out the three typical bad solutions (no one eats it, everyone shares tiny bites, an “alpha guest” hogs it), then present a witty five-point plan for awarding the last piece. Perhaps a guest brought, as their contribution to the meal, a single white truffle worth $10,000.