Life Hacks – Spoken Edition
Summary: Daily weblog on software and personal productivity recommends downloads, web sites and shortcuts that help you work smarter and save time. A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com
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Over 7,000 furries are coming to Pittsburgh this weekend for Anthrocon, the annual convention for people who dress like wolves, dragons, and combination wolf-dragons. The convention includes a public parade, which last year featured 2,100 participants. Anthrocon rep John Cole gave the Incline some etiquette tips for interacting with furries. The advice boils down to two rules of thumb: Don’t be invasive, and remember that fursuits are hot as hell.
Congratulations, you’ve downloaded the iOS 11 beta! No doubt you’ve by now had your fun experimenting with Apple’s latest operating system packed with new features like a QR code-friendly camera app, a customizable control center, and a file manager app (named, unfortunately, Files). But you might also be experiencing a few growing pains as you use your new, not-too-stable OS.
Do you always install your air conditioner on a sweltering summer day, or rush to do your taxes in mid-April? For absolutely necessary tasks like these, a to-do list isn’t always enough. You need to block out time on your calendar, and treat these tasks like actual appointments. We’ve listed all the best to-do items to turn into calendar items.
Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker’s weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and how you can use its waters to reflect on and improve your life. This week’s entries comes from the Roman politician Cato the Younger, who’s famously known for opposing the emperor Julius Caesar. These quotes do not come from Cato’s personal writings, but from Plutarch, a famous biographer who spent time with Cato.
For years, my morning routine included one or two trips back into the house to grab stuff I’d forgotten to add to my bag. Then I realized the obvious solution, one that could also save me the dreaded walks from one end of my cozy apartment to the other: just buy another copy of everything. While some instances of this are obvious—tissue boxes, lip balm—there’s probably some extra item that you could double up on to improve your life.
I’ve got a problem with my MacBook’s poorly designed keyboard, one I know Apple isn’t going to solve for me. On older MacBook keyboards, the arrow keys were identical in size, with two empty spaces to the left and right of the top arrow key that provided a tactile reference point and clear delineator between full-size keys and the half-size arrow keys. On the newest MacBooks, the left and right arrow keys are full-size keys, and get rid of that handy empty space.
You lock yourself in a study room on the second floor of your college’s library, surrounded by dusty tomes and people who just love making out, and proceed to work on your graduate thesis. Unfortunately, you didn’t get rid of the biggest distraction to your studying: your smartphone. Turning it off might keep you from being distracted, but you’re better off throwing it out the window. On second thought, just leave it at home.
Let’s say you need to send a private message to a group of people, but you’re afraid one of them will leak the message elsewhere, and you won’t know who. Fast Forward Labs has a rough-and-ready solution that will expose anyone who publicly copies and pastes your message, without letting them know they’ve been caught.
If you’re the type to use blotting paper to sop up the sweat or oil on your face, you’ve perhaps wondered which ones are best. Are the most expensive ones better? Should you get the sheets that smell like flowers? Or should you just pass on oil blotting sheets altogether, opting instead for a hanky or a perpetually dewy glow? Celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker use toilet seat covers to blot instead of spending money on fancy papers at Sephora.
Verizon-owned social media platform Tumblr, along with a laundry list of other Yahoo services, is potentially locking users out of their accounts due to an ending partnership between Yahoo and AT&T, according to Techcrunch. If you’re a Tumblr, Flickr, or regular user of any other Yahoo service and have an AT&T-provided email address, it’ll stop working for those sites on June 30. Like, this Friday, June 30.
Catching a connecting flight means running for your life (or at least your gate) in most cases, dodging and weaving through slow-moving families and golf carts stuffed with luggage. But if you find your own suitcase flailing and flipping about behind you while you jog through LAX, slowing down to let it stabilize is the wrong answer. You might want to consider moving just a little bit faster.
Sage receptionists and break-room philosophers have long taught that every day has its own emotion. Your week progresses from a case of the Mondays through Wednesday Hump Days to Thank God It’s Fridays, looping around to the Sunday Blues, also known as the Sunday Scaries or the Sunday Sads. You survive that weekend anticlimax because you know everybody deals with it. Except some of them don’t.
Reader Paul says he's got a little trick that helps keep his headphone cables from getting tangled into knots: With your right hand make devil horns (third and fourth fingers tucked, second and fifth extended) Use your thumb to hold the earbuds against your palm Wrap the cable around your 2nd and 5th fingers using a figure-8.
If you use third-party travel sites like Expedia or Priceline to scout for low airfare, you might not want to jump at the lowest price you see. United’s zero-frills “Basic Economy” tickets are sometimes harder to spot than normal tickets. What Is “Basic Economy”? Basic Economy is a new tier of plane ticket United started offering late last year.
If you find your allergies are getting worse while you’re at a bar with friends, the issue might be what you’re drinking. Some wine and beer contains histamines that can add to your agony or even potentially trigger a gnarly allergic reaction. Histamines occur naturally in some alcoholic beverages and are the same thing your body releases when you inhale a ton of pollen on an afternoon hike.