Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

Current gas prices nationwide are the highest they’ve been since 2014, meaning you might want to re-calculate your gas budget. This tool tells you how much you’ll spend on gas over the next year based on your car’s model and how many miles you think you’ll be driving. It also can tell you how much more you’ll spend in relation to last year. The calculator, from Time, uses numbers based on the Energy Information Administration’s estimates.

You’re looking for a new job, so it’s time to update the ol’ resume. But when you try to describe your last position, you stare off into space thinking, “Wait, what did I do, exactly?” Well, who’s better than describing the duties of your role than the employer itself? There’s no need to waste time deliberating the best words to describe what you were supposedly doing when you sat at your desk reading websites like this all day.

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 Seneca in his Cosolation to Helvia, or De Consolatione ad Helviam Matrem, in which Seneca consoles his mother Helvia on his recent exile to Corsica.

Are you using Google effectively as possible? If you’re just entering words into the search field without using these totally basic but totally essential tricks to improve your results, you’re missing out. We like to think of ourselves as Google ninjas at Lifehacker, but even we need a reminder of these crucial shortcuts now and then. Dashes If you want to exclude a word from your search results, put a dash in front of it.

If you’re tired of seeing all of those “on this day” posts on Facebook, you’re going to hate Facebook’s latest update. The social network launched a new Memories page this week, essentially an expanded version of its “On This Day” feature where you get the pleasure of reminiscing about that burger you ate one year ago today or that time you posted that drunk selfie. There are, however, things that all of us would prefer to not remember.

It’s good to have a schedule planned out each week, but having too many appointments set for each day might be be more harmful than helpful. A recent study suggests the more self-imposed deadlines we have in a day, the less deep work we can get done. The study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that people facing upcoming appointments—like meetings, family events, personal errands, etc.

Mac: Widgets? Old and busted. Filling your Notification Center full of apps and services? The more stuffed it gets, the less useful it is. At least, I don’t like having to scroll up and down through pages’ worth of items if I need a quick glance at my most meaningful data. This is why I like the recently released Infinity Dashboard for Mac. But before I get into a description, I’ll get the bad news out of the way first: It costs $15.

IHOP is now IHOB, and now it’s in a fight with all the burger chains, because nothing can stay pure in our decrepit world. Luckily Metafilter recently unearthed a charming blog called Broken Chains, which reviews the remaining locations of chain restaurants long past their prime, like Ponderosa, Lum’s, and the York Steak House. There’s a sadness to a dying chain.

Oh Bethesda, you trolls, you. I say that lovingly, as the trailer the company showed off during its E3 press conference Sunday was a nod to its wildly successful Elder Scrolls franchise. The joke, if you didn’t get it, was that Bethesda has dumped Skyrim, the series’ most recent installment, onto nearly every modern platform it can—minus your TI-83 calculator and your car (sort of).

Windows: Most computer geeks know about WinDirStat, an incredibly useful utility that shows which folders and files are taking up so much room on your drive. It’s a must-have app, because you’ll be surprised—heck, I’ve been surprised—how many times you might find some random, triple-buried folder on your desktop that’s using an unseemly amount of space. The problem? WinDirStat takes a while to work.

Do we all have that one friend who won’t stop talking about Reykjavík? “Ooh, I miss Reykjavík. Reykjavík changed my life. Maybe I’ll move to Reykjavík. Did you know I got stuck in Reykjavík for two months due to volcanic activity?” We get it, friend, you’re very sophisticated and Icelandic and swaddled in furs. Now give us some travel tips while you find some other centuries-old European capital to “discover.

I can remember intricate details about my friends and our conversations from 3rd grade, but if you send me out to pick up a pizza down the street and a 6-pack of beer there’s a good chance I’m going to come home without one of them, or at least text you and ask what that other thing was I was supposed to get at the store. And that person I met right before I left? Absolutely no clue what their name is anymore.

This week Google rolled out a few version of Gmail for Android and along with it a new feature that allows you to customize what happens when you swipe right or left on a message from your inbox. To customize yours, first tap on the hamburger icon (those three lines stacked on top of each other) at the top left side of the app and then scroll down to Settings.

The idea that you should answer "what's your biggest weakness" in a job interview with something that's really just a positive trait ("I'm a workaholic!" or "I'm a perfectionist!") is something you'll hear often from career coaches. The truth is, just stop. Every interviewer everywhere has heard it before, and would rather you just be honest. This is one of those job hunting tips that's often repeated.

I’ve lost over $300,000 worth of bitcoin so far. Now’s the bit where I’m supposed to tell you it’s all fake, and I only lost it in the cryptocurrency trading simulation game Bitcoin Flip. But no, I actually bought $400 worth of bitcoin back when it was cheap, then left it in the hands of the Mt. Gox online exchange, which then lost it. And yet I still recently bought another $210 worth of bitcoin, which has already dropped to $172. This is not investment, this is gambling.