Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

Under normal circumstances, Tuesday isn’t the miraculously cheap ticket-buying day that Travel Blog Wisdom has long made it out to be. But today is not just any Tuesday. It’s Travel Deal Tuesday,the post-Cyber Monday period in which airlines tend to offer significant deals and discounts, per number crunching from travel app Hopper.

The holiday season means you’ll probably be sending or receiving a few packages, whose delicate (or lively) contents might require a little more love and affection during transit than your average UPS delivery. Slapping a bunch of “Fragile” stickers on it might grant you a sense of security, but a former parcel sorter has some bad news for you: those don’t work. What does work is a slightly more eye-catching method you can employ to protect your mail: packaging decorations.

Amazon Echo has a head start when it comes to the skills and software support needed to control the rest of your smart home gadgets, but Google’s competing voice-controlled speaker is quickly catching up. A recent update to the Google Home support site (spotted by Android Police) reveals how the gadget is set to make it even easier to control your other connected devices and appliances around the house.

Apple’s Home app makes it easy to control all your smart home tech right from your iPhone, but because this is Apple we’re dealing with, it also comes with some restrictions. The biggest drawback is that Home only works with a small subset of HomeKit-approved smart lights, switches, and other gadgets. That often means paying extra to stay inside Apple’s ecosystem, but there’s a way to get around HomeKit’s restrictions.

Traveling to see the world doesn’t have to mean taking risks and visiting dangerous places. There are plenty of major cities around the world that are much safer to be in than most places here in the U.S. Here are some great examples. Using data based on 44 specific indicators in 60 major cities around the globe, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) put together their Safe Cities Index 2017.

Evernote has a bit of a malware problem. For the past few years (starting in early 2014) spammers have been sending fake emails that claim to come from the note-organizing service but include links to install malicious software on your computer. Here’s what you need to know to avoid those phony Evernote emails or filter them out of your inbox completely. How to Spot a Fake Evernote Email The simplest thing to do is to screen all your Evernote emails.

Anyone that has spent any time on Slack or any other messaging client with me knows that I love using the shrug emoji. Not the regular emoji, this one: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s great way to respond to a number of things. There’s just one problem: It’s a huge pain to type out. The first few weeks I used it I would meticulously type it out each time I wanted to use it. Then I got smart and copied it into the Notes app on my Mac so I could quickly copy/paste it.

Instagram Live doesn’t have to be a one-way street. If smashing that heart button isn’t enough, if commenting isn’t satiating your need for interaction, now you can join the stream yourself. Bringing a guest to share the screen isn’t exactly new, but it used to be at the broadcaster’s discretion. The livestreamer still controls who gets to join the stream, but, TechCruch reports, viewers of a livestream can now request to join.

Short power naps are a great way to refresh your mind in the middle of the day. They give you a mental boost without making you too groggy. But if you don’t want to use an alarm for your super short snooze fests, you can use this classic nap timing trick instead. A while back I recommended that everyone should make an afternoon routine.

Traveling with a group can be exhausting. There’s always a danger that you’ll end up trapped for hours in a store or museum that no one wants to be at, because you’re all politely waiting for each other to finish browsing. It’s a form of the Abilene paradox, where everyone goes along with a bad plan to please each other. In this case, it happens because we’re not used to telling people “I’m ready to go, but I don’t have to go.

There’s a lot to love about the new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL smartphones, from a powerful new camera to a squeezable frame that launches Google Assistant, but one feature that hasn’t received much attention is the phone’s calendar widget. Google’s new Pixel launcher (the extra software that comes on top of Android 8.

Simply floating in water might look easy, but it’s actually pretty difficult if you don’t have a flotation device, and treading water is an essential safety skill for anyone who plans on spending time on or near the water, well, ever. Here’s the best way to do it for as long as possible in an emergency situation. Who knows more about staying afloat in water longer than the U.S.

Google’s Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are the company’s newest smartphones, but they don’t exactly break the mold. Both run Android 8.0, ditch the headphone jack in exchange for IP67 water and dust resistance, and feature an aluminum body, all table stakes among high-end Android smartphones. But one cool feature inside the Pixel 2 is absent from every smartphone released so far: embedded SIM (also known as eSIM) support.

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 selection comes from Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations. He believes that doing the right thing should come freely from within ourselves, not be forced out by outside circumstances: “You should take no action unwillingly, selfishly, uncritically, or with conflicting motives.

You might be knee deep in organic chemistry textbooks and the cheapest ramen you can find, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the perks of toilet paper and Twix bars delivered to you in a timely fashion. Amazon, which already offered discounted Amazon Music Unlimited service for college students in the past, is now discounting its Prime service, as well.