Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

We love it when a company sneaks an Easter egg into an otherwise mundane program, especially when the little taps-the-nose trick does something wild and fanciful. And while Google’s latest hidden feature in Sheets isn’t quite as complicated as, say, playing Flight Simulator in Excel or firing up the Game of Life in Google Docs (or entering the Konami Code), it’s still super-fun and themed around this month’s Pride celebrations.

When you’re tagged in someone’s Instagram Story, you’ve always received a notification in Instagram letting you know. This week the app added another way for you to interact with that mention: you can reshare it in your own story.

You’re out on the town with your friends when some stranger takes a conversation from casual to creepy, then asks for your phone number. Give them one of these and get away. Recently, Twitter user @tricookingqueen went viral with a tweet filled with fake phone numbers to hand out to creeps. A great idea, but unfortunately, most of the numbers in the tweet are now defunct, including the hilarious “I am Groot” hotline.

So you have a new writing app you’re dying to try, eh? Well, before you sit down to take on that big writing project, consider giving that app a solid test run so you can learn all the ins and outs first. There’s this feeling that comes with a fancy new piece of writing software, or productivity software in general.

When you’re the hunt for a new job you can typically narrow down your search by things like city and salary, but your standard job search leaves one pretty important criteria out of the equation: commute time. While there are definitely some dream jobs out there worth picking up and moving for (or dealing with that hour-long commute both ways), there are also plenty of jobs that you might instantly regret accepting once you realize how brutal that drive really is.

Chrome and Firefox: There are plenty of reasons you might not want to give out your real email address when signing up for a site or service. Maybe you’re really big on privacy; or, more likely, you just hate spam, and figure the fewer places that know your real email address, the better.

Firefox unveiled a handful of new features this week via its Test Pilot program, and two caught our eye: a new Side View that allows you to view two sites within the same window side-by-side and Firefox Color, a feature that allows you to aggressively customize your browser’s colors. Before we get into these, a brief word: Mozilla is just testing both features. You can try them, but the company might never actually bake them into the browser—and could pull them at any time.

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 Meditations. Near the end of book 11, he goes over an interesting aspect of change: Grapes unripe, ripened, raisined: all changes, not into non-existence, but into not-yet existence.

Even if you don’t have many vacation days to use, a good day trip or weekend getaway can be enough to help you unwind and destress. If you want to save some cash on your mini-vacay, consider taking the train or bus. You don’t have to drive, and you’d be surprised how far you can get for very little. Over at budget travel site Wanderu, they’ve put together some data on cheap bus and train tickets leaving from major cities around the U.S.

This week Mary Meeker from the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers released her 2018 annual internet trends report. There were a lot of tidbits in there covering everything from what city is likely to be the next big tech hub to how people are shopping on the internet. It also tackled another interesting topic: where you’re better off using a ride-sharing service.

Speed reading is a skill that can be hard to master. There are a ton of books, talks, and articles dedicated to teaching people the “right” way to learn the skill. This week, Fast Company spoke to one of those experts who wrote a book on topic to get some quick and dirty tips on how to learn. One of her suggestions: use an index card. The idea behind this is pretty simple.

I’m a huge fan of fancy pools and beaches, but a writer’s salary isn’t typically one that can handle the hotel bill to stay at the hotel attached to those fancy pools and beaches too often. Daypass is an app lets poor schlubs like me get access to the wellness and fitness amenities at properties around the world and pay a day rate rather than for an entire night’s stay.

Oakland’s Golden State Warriors won Game 1 of the NBA Finals Monday night against the Cleveland Cavaliers, but it’s still anyone’s championship. Game 2 of the series kicks off Sunday evening at 8pm ET, followed by Game 3 at 9pm on June 6th, and Game 4 on Friday, June 8th. If the Warriors don’t win all four of those games (which they most likely won’t), then the series continues until one team has won four games.

Have an Audible subscription but not sure what to listen to next? I know the feeling well. My credits were starting to pile up to the point I thought about cancelling my subscription—until recently. Have you considered something educational? Audiobooks are hit or miss for me. I’ve never been a huge fan of them in general, but I drive a lot so an Audible subscription seemed like a good idea. It gives me something to pass the time that isn’t music or one of my podcasts.

If someone asked you to describe the entire global technology landscape, you’d probably just shake your head and declare the task as impossible. But Mary Meeker, from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, does that each year. Her report has been released and it details everything from global smartphone shipments, to how much time we spend online to the growth of China as a major global tech hub.