Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

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. He thinks you’re wasting time trying to get to the bottom of the things that bother you. What It Means Basically, stop wasting your time trying to understand and deal with known nuisances and just move on. Food is bad? Don’t eat it.

Stuck on a packed subway with no room to wrangle an actual book, I’ll often pull out my smartphone to catch up on articles I’ve saved in my Pocket reading app. Unfortunately, being unsure whether it’s a 400 or 14,000-word article means that fate dictates whether or not I finish what I’m reading before I’m off the train and walking to work.

If your friend goes through a difficult time, do you feel bad for him, or do you feel badly? Correct answer: You feel bad for him. This is one of those cases where the incorrect grammar is so widely used that the correct construction sounds wrong. Or maybe people feel like the longer word is...fancier, kind of like how one might say utilize instead of use. Quick primer: Bad is an adjective; badly is an adverb.

Thinking of spending a pretty penny on that shiny new gadget? Well, you might want to take a look at some Amazon reviews first so you know what you’re getting into. If the thought of digging through hundreds of reviews sounds like a chore, though, this free tool will make it easy. The Review Index is a neural network-based tool that scans Amazon user reviews for electronics and gadgets, looks for recurring patterns in reviews, then displays them all to you in easy to read charts and graphs.

We all keep private information on our smartphones in the form of photos, text messages, and even access to our financial information. Apple claims that the iPhone X makes all that data even more secure thanks to Face ID, but there’s one group of people this may not apply to: your family. Specifically, Face ID seems to have a tough time telling apart siblings. It can also be fooled by your kids.

Apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps and Waze have taken almost all of the guesswork out of driving (at least until self-driving cars become mainstream). Just plug in your destination and follow the turn-by-turn directions until you arrive—simple as that. But there are ways to make your drive even better if you’re willing to dive into the settings of your favorite navigation app.

Setting up a new Android phone means you’ll be spending more than a few minutes in the Google Play Store, downloading apps. It also means you’ll be dealing with more than a few annoying pop-ups in the form of notifications from all these new apps. It’s easy to deal with the overwhelming amount of vibrations, dings, and dots if you know what to turn on (and off).

So, you want to learn to speak and write a new language, huh? Not just “hello” and “thank you,” but really learn it well enough that you could live in the country of origin? Hope you’re ready to commit. If you’re a Native English Speaker, these are the languages that will take the most and least time to become proficient in. According to the U.S.

If you’re buried under unanswered email, and find yourself constantly starting your replies with “Sorry for the delay,” do what BuzzFeed reporter and creative miscreant Katie Notopoulos did: Answer your emails right away, with just a couple of words. She calls it “emailing like a CEO,” the same phrase used in a 2001 New York Times piece about how high-tier executives tend to send terse, misspelled emails.

If your smart home gadget can’t be controlled with a voice command, is it really smart at all? The rise of Amazon Echo and Google Home means every new connected device needs to work with voice-based AI assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend a ton of money on the upgrade. There are cheap development boards that can give your latest creation the ability to respond to voice commands through a smart speaker.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Senate passed a new tax bill, the biggest rewrite of the individual and corporate tax code in the United States in 30 years and one that offers huge tax cuts to banks, developers, and the oil industry, amongst other corporate interests. How that tax code will potentially impact you as an individual depends a good bit on how much you make.

If you notice that your AirPods are getting quieter, they might not be dying a slow death—no, it may be your own natural earwax clogging up the works. Lovely! Quartz has a tip for cleaning them, but it’s not for the squeamish.

If your iPhone or iPad was crashing all day Saturday, you’re not alone. An iOS bug appeared to be triggered Saturday that caused iPhones to crash whenever they receive a notification, specifically one that was autogenerated from the app. For instance, a notification from a game that “We haven’t seen you in a while” would trigger the bug, while one saying “Bob liked your tweet” based on a specific action would not.

Sure, you’ve heard of binge-watching shows on Netflix, but how about binge listening? Netflix has a category of programs that it offers audio descriptions for, where a voiceover explains to you what characters are doing in a scene.

Next time you go to book a flight you might want to look at the early-morning options first. Getting out of bed to make that 6am might be a struggle, but Travel and Leisure suggests that you should exclusively fly in the early morning. The reason? You’ll have a much better chance of getting to your destination. Early morning flights are less likely to be delayed than those that happen in the afternoon or evening.