Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

For some reason I’m always the person in our group to make dinner reservations. I hate waiting in lines, so whenever my group of friends suggests we all head out for a meal I typically volunteer to make a reservation, more often than not through OpenTable where I earn 100 points for most of those reservations. When you hit 2,000 points, OpenTable will give you a $20 credit toward dining out.

Cash bail is one of the (many) elements of the justice system that disproportionately harms low-income people. It’s a hot issue for reform and activism, and two new apps help you contribute to the cause. Cash bail is meant to guarantee that defendants don’t disappear between arrest, arraignment, and trial.

My family isn’t great at gift exchanges. We tend to buy gifts too late (“Merry Christmas, here’s a print-out of what you’ll get in January!”) or misjudge each other’s tastes.

Global Entry is a traveler’s dream, but depending on the demand in your city, applying for it can take some time. To speed up the process, try Enrollment on Arrival if you’re already traveling. When you sign up for Global Entry, you fill out an application online and (hopefully) get preliminarily accepted. From there, though, you have to schedule an in-person interview to complete the application process, and this typically means driving out to your nearest airport.

Everyone knows that the holidays are huge when it comes to package delivery. Shopping online makes it easy to get gifts for everyone on your list delivered right to your doorstep, and all those Amazon boxes definitely come in handy again when you need to mail gifts to friends and family across the country.

Giving gifts that make a loved one’s face light up is always a great feeling, but when traveling during the holiday season, it can be tough to pack presents that won’t break, add too much weight to your luggage, or be too bulky.

Many people like the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase Sapphire Reserve credit cards for earning travel rewards, myself included. You can use the points you accumulate to purchase plane tickets through a ton of different airlines, but some of them won’t show up on their site. In those situations, here’s what you do.

The longer you wait to open that bottle of wine the better, right? Well, unless you actually bought some nice wine designed to be aged, not really. As certified wine sommelier Madeline Puckette at Wine Folly explains, most wines these days aren’t designed to age. In fact, Puckette says most wine you can buy in stores won’t last nearly as long as you think it will.

Gmail is one those things that I could never live without, but that’s also made my life a lot more annoying. I gave up on inbox zero years ago (I’d be happy with inbox 1,000 at this point) and I get dozens of useless, spammy emails every day, making it all the more difficult to find any important messages that are less than a week old.

Want to impress someone with your holiday gift but don’t have a ton of cash? Try buying something heavy. Charles Spence, head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford recently spoke to the New York Times about what to do to impress people with gifts this holiday season. His advice is simple: bulk it up. Spence’s research is focused on how our brains perceive the world around us.

VLC is one of the most popular media players around. It works on most platforms and can handle almost any type of file. It’s damn near perfect, but you could be getting even more out of VLC by using experimental nightly builds instead of the official version. What’s a VLC Nightly Build? VideoLAN, the volunteer-based organization that runs VLC, offers access to test versions of the software called Nightly Builds.

Waze announced a huge new update on Wednesday, bringing three of its top-requested features to the app for Android and iOS. Starting now, you can control Waze with your voice, get motorcycle-specific directions, and factor carpool lanes into your commute. Here’s how to setup all of Waze’s new features so you can start using them as soon as possible. Hands free controls To setup voice activation with Waze, first open the app and go into Settings.

As you drive along the road to grandma’s house this holiday season, safety should be your number one priority. No one wants their holiday marred by something like a totaled car or hurt family members. These are the types of accidents that happen to drivers the most, as well as how you can easily avoid them. Every year there are over 6 million car crashes with more than 40,000 fatalities linked to those accidents, and they’re on the rise.

Mac users running the latest version of Apple’s operating system, High Sierra, are susceptible to a pretty huge flaw that could grant anyone with physical access to your Mac unfettered access to everything on your machine. The hack seems to be affecting only macOS High Sierra 10.13 and 10.13.1 versions. Luckily, a little settings tweak can bolster your security and alleviate the issue until Apple fixes it properly.

It’s been just over three months since Google released Android 8.0 Oreo, but unless you’re using one of the company’s own devices, you still might be missing out on the latest version of Android. Phone-makers like Samsung, LG, HTC, and Sony often take months to bring each Android update to even their newest high-end smartphones. If you’re using a semi-recent phone and wondering when your Android 8.