Life Hacks – Spoken Edition

If you use WhatsApp’s Click to Chat feature, your phone number may be showing up in Google search results.

Removing books you’ve finished from your Kindle has always been possible, but with one catch. Whatever you remove from your device persists in your account. It’s not gone forever, it’s simply gone from the specific Kindle device you’re using. You likely caught on to that caveat the first time you pressed-and-held your finger on a book on your Kindle and tapped the “Remove From Device” option.

Protests against racism and police violence are occurring in pretty much every city across America, but you don’t have to be in a big city for the issue to affect you. Wherever you are, you have a local police department, and as a resident you can start pushing for the change you want to see.

When you need something delivered or need to call for help you probably give the person on the other end of the line your street address. What do you do if you’re somewhere you don’t know the address, or a place that doesn’t have one? Google is currently rolling out a new Google Maps feature called “Plus Codes” that makes it easier to share your location data with anyone on the planet—even if you location happens to be a cabin in the woods. The tool essentially creates an “address” for you based on the latitude and longitude coordinates of where you are. You can use these coordinates to mark the location of a house, but also something like a tent or a boat. To create one, you’ll tap the blue dot on Google Maps that represents where you are right now. When you do, a new page will launch with your Plus Code at the top. For instance, you might see “FWM8+V9, Ibadan, Nigeria.” It’s a lot like an address except instead of a street name and number you have “FWM8+V9.” Plus Codes can be acquired through the blue location dot as well as tapping and holding the Map to drop a pin somewhere. Once you have one, Plus Codes are searchable both in Google Maps and Google Search. They also stay the same for individual locations forever, so you could print them on a poster or sign or pass them out to an invited guest, and if they search them in Google Maps, they’ll always be able to find you—even without a street address.

As travel begins to slowly reopen, many of us are wondering what changes will be made to the check-in and boarding experience going forward. Last week, the Transportation Security Administration announced that there would be new rules and guidelines for all passengers traveling through airports in order to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. In the event that you may need to travel in the coming weeks, here’s what you need to know.

If you’ve got something that’s zip-tied together that shouldn’t be zip-tied together—whatever it is, for whatever reason—a broken bobby pin can be an excellent release tool. Yes, I know that in most cases (if you’re opening a package, for example) you’re going to want to use a pair of scissors to cut the zip tie off.

Being trapped with your significant other 24/7 is not a recipe for relationship success. That’s why this week we’re talking with divorce attorney James J. Sexton about how to save our marriage and avoid becoming a statistic in the post-pandemic “divorce boom.” Hear James talk about the ways couples can remind themselves of when they were first falling in love and the best strategies for finding distance without losing connection.

If, more than two months into the coronavirus pandemic, you’ve thought to yourself, “hmmm, living in isolation kinda works for me,” NASA may have just the job for you. The space agency is seeking applicants for a social isolation study to develop methods and technologies for future spaceflight missions to Mars and the moon. Here’s what you need to know about the job we’re now all suddenly much more qualified for than we were a few months ago.

We all use our phones for a ton of routine tasks that require a few steps to implement. For instance, if you’re going to video chat a family member you might have to find the video app on your phone, tap to open it, then scroll through your contact list to find the person you want to talk to.

The next time you need to think critically about something—whether you’re considering a new idea, weighing the pros and cons of a potential decision, or evaluating whether you can trust a particular news source—it’s worth asking yourself a few simple questions.

Signal’s new PIN feature adds an extra layer of security to the encrypted messaging app and makes moving your account between multiple devices less of a hassle. While all text and voice communication in Signal is end-to-end encrypted locally and never stored on Signal’s servers, period, your PIN can be used to encrypt certain Signal profile information that can be shared between devices—stuff like your contacts and account settings. (Your PIN itself is not saved on the servers.

As a card-carrying introvert (I laminated it myself!) with a severe aversion to talking on the phone, teleconferencing and looking at my own face on camera, our move to the 100 percent work-from-home lifestyle has been a true delight. And there’s nothing about it I love more than that point at the end of every Zoom meeting, after everyone has said goodbye, when all of our faces go slack as we fumble with our trackpads or touch bars in an attempt to exit the call.

You vacuum. You dust. Every so often, you get a bee in your bonnet and decide to clean your windows. And right now, you’re probably spending some extra attention on cleaning your doorknobs and light switches. But wait—go back to the doors for a minute. When’s the last time you wiped down your interior doors? Have you ever done it? You might perform a cursory wipe-down of the handle on both sides of your interior doors—bedrooms, bathrooms, closets. But next time you’re making the rounds, take a damp cloth and actually wipe down the doors. You know, the flat part. The door part. You’d be amazed what accumulates here: Dust. Hair spray residue. General grime from who-knows-where. I’ll admit, I never cleaned my doors. But that changed recently when I noticed something on the exterior side of my bathroom door. My best guess was that I had splattered hair dye the last time I touched up my roots, which took place more than two months ago. But I didn’t linger on the cause for too long: I sprayed the door lightly with a gentle all-surface cleaner and gave it a good once-over with a rag. The next thing I knew, I was hitting every door in the house for a quick once-over. I did the part around the doorknob that can get grimy. I did the bottom of the front door, which I tend to close behind me with my foot if my hands are full. I did the tops of the doors that rarely get shut. The amount of stealth-gunk I got off my doors was satisfying. A cleaning enthusiast would tell you not to stop there. For the same level of satisfaction (and possibly even greater satisfaction), you can wipe down your entire walls. You can take a dust rag to your baseboards, getting in all those nooks and crannies your vacuum doesn’t even come close to reaching. But wiping walls takes time, and if you have a lot of them ... well. It could take a minute. And reaching your baseboards requires moving furniture and contorting yourself in order to do a good job. But doors? Your doors are right there. You can do them all in five minutes. It’s the gateway drug of stuff you didn’t think you needed to clean, but really should.

Google recently unveiled tab groups in Chrome. As I wrote in our guide to setting them up ahead of their full rollout, they’re an incredibly useful way to keep your sprawling browser tabs slightly more organized. If nothing else, adding a little color to Chrome doesn’t hurt; I love how tab groups look. Now, let’s make them better. The one drawback of group tabs—in its current implementation—is that you’ll still see a lot of tabs crowding your browser window.

If you’ve done a group FaceTime lately, then you’ve likely experienced the feature that makes participant’s windows change see based on who is talking. The idea is similar to what Zoom does by default, in that it will make the speaker the center of attention, but if you’re in a spirited conversation with multiple people it can also get annoying pretty quickly. With the release of iOS 13.

Wendy’s may not be serving up as many of their iconic square-shaped hamburgers right now thanks to a beef shortage, but they want you to know that they’re still open for business—and they’regiving away free chicken sandwiches to do it. Specifically, if you order any menu item via the Wendy’s app, you can get a spicy chicken sandwich for $0.

The imminent iOS 13.5 update includes a new feature that could save your life. Once the update drops, you’ll be able to opt into automatically sharing your medical ID with 911 dispatchers and first responders, which will thenprovide you with the best care. In order for this to be useful in the slightest, you’ll need to have set up your Medical ID in the iOS Health app first. If you haven’t done this—there’s really no reason not to—do it now.

If you’ve ever tried to upload a panorama picture to Instagram—or if we’re being honest, any interesting horizontal picture—then you’ve likely run into issues. Yes, you can include the whole photo in a single post, but in most cases, you have to zoom out so far to fit it all in that it’s impossible to see all the amazing detail you were trying to preserve in the first place. Turns out, there’s an easy way around the problem: a multi-post panorama.

In March, Facebook started rolling out its new redesigned desktop site as something you could choose to opt-into once it was available to you. Friday the company announced that the rollout is complete and that the new site is available for everyone globally. While it will eventually become the default for everyone, you can go ahead and proactively make the swap to the new design now if you’d like, a swap that comes with a new “Dark Mode” option.

Leave it to a bored adolescent to come up with one of the most ingenious ways to appear “present” in a Zoom chat I’ve ever seen—especially if the chat is on the larger side and someone isn’t paying much attention to your webcam in the grid view. Now that we’re in week who-knows-what of the quarantine for most people, I feel like most of us would rather do just about anything else than suffer another videoconference.

The Sumida Aquarium in Japan is inviting people to have a short Facetime call with their tank of garden eels. This is no livestream; it’s a two-way call, and they specifically want the eels to see your face. The aquarium writes that the eels are normally very shy, and hide in the sand, but that in their tank they are used to seeing visitors pass by. Now that the aquarium is closed to visitors, the eels are starting to get shy again.

Mac users who like to multitask: there’s a keyboard shortcut to turn on text dictation so you can talk instead of type. Just place your cursor where you want to enter text (it’ll work in any app where you can type), double-tap the Fn key, and start talking. The microphone icon will pop up to let you know that dictation is active. When you’re done with your message, double-tap Fn again. You can also click Done below the icon or press Return.

I don’t think it’s possible to cheat in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Or, rather, I don’t feel any guilt whatsoever about taking advantage of the game’s quirks to outfit your single-player island however you want. From time-traveling to Turnip Exchanges, there are plenty of methods you can use to circumvent the game’s slow, methodical intentions—including a brand-new duping hack that lets you clone as many items as you want. Again, do I feel bad? No.

Google is about to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) for all Nest users. That’s a good thing! Most people shouldn’t experience any difficulties with this security-enhancing measure, but there are a few quirks you should know about. Nest users will need to authorize who they are each time they log in to Nest using a verification code sent to the email address linked to their Nest account.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you block someone on your iPhone? What really happens? You can block contacts through your Messages, FaceTime and Phone apps. Blocking a contact in one app will block them across the board. However, blocking doesn’t prevent someone from trying to reach you. They won’t get a pleasant “your number has been blocked” notification from Siri, but they might start to wonder why you aren’t answering their messages.

Accidentally summoning an AI helper like Google Assistant by inadvertently speaking the wake word (or something that sounds enough like it to fool a computer) has become a fact of life ever since Siri was first introduced. It can be a chronic problem too, depending on your living situation and how you use your smart devices: Sometimes the things can be... overzealous in their desire to serve you and will assume any vocalization means you’re trying to activate them.

Now that we’re all spending a bit more time streaming television shows and movies at home, maintain a robust “what to watch” queue is more important than ever. If you’ve signed up for a few new streaming services to keep you entertained in quarantine, it might also be a lot harder to manage—but a new feature in Google’s mobile search can help make the process easier. Sure, assembling a list of things you’d like to see is simple when you’re just using one streaming service, but if you’ve doubled down on your options or have taken advantage of a free trial or two, keeping track of what interests you on all of them can be a bit overwhelming. Yesterday, Google added a new feature to its mobile search that allows you to create a watchlist as you browse the internet: Now when you search for a movie or TV show on Google on your phone, you’ll see a “Watchlist” button beside it in search results. Tapping on it will add the program to your own personal Watchlist within the search engine. Next time you’re looking for something to watch, you can just perform a Google search for “My watchlist” to pull up all of the options you’ve put together. If you’re looking for help figuring out what to add to the queue, last year Google launched a TV and movie recommendation engine within Search that can help with a few suggestions. To get recommendations, search for “what to watch” within Google. The first time you try it, click the “Providers” link at the top of results to specify what streaming services you subscribe to. Google will save your settings and recommend things going forward based on what services you use and, now, what movies and television shows you’ve added to your watchlist. If you already know what you want to watch but just don’t know how to watch it, I’m a big fan of the app Just Watch, which allows you to type in the name of movie or television show you’re trying to watch and discover what services are currently offering it for free or where and how much it will cost you to rent it.

Staying at home more and the pandemic, in general, has changed a lot of our habits. Maybe you’re taking an ivy league course online, or working out on your exercise bike a little more. Or, maybe you’re like me and you’re just drinking a lot more than you usually do. If you’ve been making a few trips to that essential liquor store over the past few weeks, Flaviar is offering a free way for you to learn a little more about what you’re shopping for.

If you’ve been using some of your at-home time to learn how to draw, Disney Parks has a number of videos that might help. The Park’s “How to Draw” series on YouTube offers videos on how to draw everyone from Elsa and Anna from Frozen to classic characters like Donald Duck and Goofy. Each video is hosted by an actual Disney animator. Some of the videos are around five minutes, while other more complicated characters can take over 20 minutes to learn.

Last September, Disney offered a “Bedtime Hotline” for two weeks where the young and young at heart could call to listen to a bedtime message from their favorite Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, or Pixar character. Now, the free hotline is making a brief reappearance to help kids staying at home off to dreamland. Between now and April 30th, you can access the hotline by calling 1-877-7-MICKEY. When you do, you’ll be prompted to select the character you’d like to listen to a message from. Options include Mickey himself as well as characters like Goofy and Donald Duck. Unlike September’s offering, your options are just traditional Disney characters this time rather than Marvel or Star Wars characters. Once you’ve made your selection, a recorded goodnight message from your selected character will play, and then the service will hang up. If you’d like to listen to another message, you’ll have to dial in again to select another character. The prompts at the beginning are definitely geared more towards parents than little ones, so you also likely want to go through those yourself and then put the goodnight message on speakerphone rather than just dialing and handing over your phone.

Apple’s upcoming second-generation iPhone SE is available for preorder from several online retailers, but if you’re a Verizon or AT&T customer and your account is eligible for an upgrade, Walmart’s preorder deal can save you half the price of the device.

The last time I got groceries, it only happened after a solid seven days of refreshing my cart periodically, sometimes constantly, in order to secure a delivery window. A new web-based tool could make the process a lot less painful for you, provided you live in an area where curbside pickup is an option. I have bad asthma that makes it difficult for me to wear thick masks for a prolonged period of time, transforming every grocery aisle into a potential war zone. Food shopping still has to happen though, a fact that has resulted in some creative dining at my house, courtesy of the local bodega that stocks a limited selection of grocery items. Getting a delivery or pickup window on grocery store sites is increasingly difficult, so much so that Amazon has started a waitlist for new customers to sign up to use its service in order to control the demand. If you’re like me and need to get groceries from a larger store without going inside, the new service Curb Run might be able to help. After you sign up and agree to receive texts, the site will let you know when a curbside pickup option is available at a grocery store near you. The idea here is that you’ll already have filled your cart on the grocery store website of choice, including your payment info. You can then set up an alert on Curb Run indicating how far you’re willing to travel for groceries, what store you want to get them from and what day you’d ideally want to pick them up. Enter your phone number you’ll receive an automated text when the site locates a curbside pickup option available. Unfortunately, the site only works with large chains—and not all of them—but it supports a pretty healthy list of familiar brands, including Wegmans, Safeway, Albertsons, Food Lion, Vons, Smith’s Fry’s, Ralphs and Fred Meyer. I gave it a test drive this morning and received a text about available curbside pickup options 20 miles from my house roughly 15 minutes later. That text doesn’t save you a spot, it’s merely lets you know one exists. Once you get that notification, it’s up to you to quickly load up that grocery store’s site and complete your transaction—hopefully before someone else snags the available pickup time. That means the best way to pull this off is to have the page open and ready to go and keep your eye on your phone so you can pounce quickly as soon as the text alert chimes. It’s not a foolproof system, but if you’ve been trying for a while, it might be just what you need to finally make eggs and milk happen.

Gaming is great and all—especially during a pandemic, and especially now that you can play a souped-up version of Minecraft with real-time ray tracing—but you can now use your Nvidia graphics card to create real-life magic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us spending a lot more time at home, and many companies offering options for things to do while you’re there. This week Google announced that it’s offering free access to its cloud gaming service Stadia right now. Additionally, it’s giving anyone that signs up 2 months of free access to Stadia Pro, which scores you free access to nine different games.

Social and physical distancing has a lot of us spending more time in front of screens and communicating with friends in different ways than we normally would, often through social media. Instagram, in particular, has offered a lot of interesting live shows to entertain us. One thing it hasn’t offered: a way to DM your friends from the web. Instagram DMs have historically only been available via the social networks app; however, this week Instagram brought the feature to the web as well. If you haven’t tried sending a DM from the web, you can get to it by going to your profile on Instagram from your browser, logging in, and then clicking the paper plane icon at the top right side of the page. You can also load your DMs directly by going to this page. It’s a small thing, for sure, but if you’re someone that’s been using Instagram as a way to communicate with friends then being able to access those messages on the web will definitely come in handy. Sadly, one thing Instagram hasn’t added into the mix just yet is the ability to watch all those Instagram Live videos on the web. Last week we told you about a Chrome extension that will definitely help you get the job done, but it would be great to see Instagram add that support natively in the future.

Microsoft’s big office communication app, Microsoft Teams, is getting a fun new feature that makes it just as wacky as Zoom. You’ll now have the power to pretend you’re on a beach, in some faraway city, on the moon, or sitting in front of your favorite meme when you’re on a video call—yes, custom backgrounds are rolling out, and it’s a silly feature that all videoconferencing apps should have.

If you were thinking about trying Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods Market delivery or pickup services for the first time, be aware that you might have to spend some time on a waiting list before you can use either service to shop for groceries—so you might want to put yourself on that list right now.

Downloading a Windows update can be a gamble these days, but this week’s Windows 10 “Update Tuesday” patch feels more important than most. The update includes plenty of important security fixes, including patches for two actively exploited vulnerabilities in the Windows Adobe Type Manager that affect all Windows 10 users.

One of the few silver linings to come from the big coronavirus quarantine is that a number of app developers are doing their part to be generous in times of self-isolation and unhappiness. Daylight Studios, developer of the popular “Holy Potatoes!” simulation games for Android, iOS, PC, and Mac, is offering up iPhone and iPadOS versions of all three games in its franchise for free.

I don’t know about you, but I am running out of toilet paper. I only have two rolls left in my cabinet, and my local grocery store has nothing but empty shelves. There wasn’t any toilet paper when I last visited the grocery store in person, two weeks ago—and when I put in an online order this week, which gives me the option of requesting any available item in a certain category, there were no items available in the toilet paper category.

If you’re looking for something fun to do with the family while you’re all staying at home, Cards Against Humanity has a new family-friendly version of the game available that you can download and print at home. Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition is designed for kids ages 8 and up. The site notes that “We’ve never met your kids, but we designed the game for people ages 8 and up.

If you’re looking for something new to read, Marvel is making 12 comics available to download for free right now through the Marvel Unlimited app for iOS and Android. Getting the comics doesn’t require you to sign up for the service, and the free comics are also available through Amazon’s Comnixology platform. Here are the comics it’s offering for free: AVENGERS VS. X-MEN CIVIL WAR AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: RED GOBLIN BLACK PANTHER BY TA-NEHISI COATES VOL.

If you watch a lot of Disney+ on Windows or macOS, consider installing the website as a Progressive Web App (PWA) for speedier access to your favorite films and shows. PWAs split the difference between a website and a full-on app. Installing Disney+ as a PWA creates an easy-to-access desktop shortcut for a standalone version of the website.

If you’re using your time physical distancing to learn guitar, Fender is offering free guitar, bass, and ukulele lessons to the first 500,000 people to sign up for Fender Play. It’s a free trial, but you don’t have to handle over any payment details to get access, so you won’t run the risk of getting charged if you forget about it. Once you sign up, you’ll need to tell the site which instrument you’d like to learn. As you learn, the site will track your progress.

If you’re getting a little bored with your board games (sorry, I had to), the team behind the Board Game Remix Kit—which, as the name implies, provides instructions for new games stitched together from the pieces of others you may already own—just made all of their remix resources free to download. Here’s one of their many Monopoly remixes, in case you’re curious about what they have on offer: Once, Twice, Five Times a Winner The game lasts for 5 circuits round the board. Stop playing as soon as the the last player has passed GO for the fifth time and then finished their turn (this means they do get to claim their £200, and they do pay rent if they land on someone else’s property). At this point, the player with the most money wins. There’s also a Monopoly variation that requires you to correctly answer a Trivial Pursuit question before proceeding around the board, a Clue variation that invites you to hide the tiny murder weapons around your actual home and a Scrabble variant that tasks players to determine which word might beat the other words in a fight. The Board Game Remix Kit is available for free download in PDF or EPUB. The team requests that if you enjoy the kit and can afford to make a donation, you should consider contributing to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

If you’re hoping to use your physical-distancing time to pick up a new skill, Skillshare is offering a free three-month Premium account on its service to help you make it happen. To get the deal, go to this page and click the “Join For Free Today” button at the bottom of the page. The promotion requires you to create an account, but you don’t have to hand over any payment details, so you’re not at risk of getting charged later on if you forget about it. A Premium account is typically $19 a month. The free offer is being made through a partnership with Bombay Sapphire’s “Create at Home” program. That program also includes a collection of instructions for different DIY projects on Hunker. On Skillshare you can take classes on everything from cocktail making to web development. There are courses on creative writing, photography, and graphic design, and even productivity, If you’re having a little bit of trouble adjusting to your new WFH life. Courses are taught by professionals in each field and are video-based. Some courses only take a few minutes to watch, while others might involve a video an hour or longer. You can also search the site and create a playlist of sorts of all the courses you want to take, so you can just sit down and watch them when you find yourself with a little free time and nothing to do. Depending on what you want to learn, you can probably find a class (or 20) worth checking out.

If you’re having network connectivity problems on your Windows desktop or laptop—and you’ve ruled out user error or a crappy wireless connection—there’s a small chance that Microsoft might be to blame. There’s a bug affecting users connecting with proxies or VPNs, and it’s serious enough to warrant Microsoft issuing an off-schedule update to patch the problem.

Humble Bundle has an incredible deal if you need a boost to your self-quarantine/social distancing entertainment backlog while also supporting charities on the front lines of the coronavirus fight.

Good news and bad news for WhatsApp fans. We’ll start with the former: The app, in all likelihood, is going to soon receive a fancy little feature that will let you automatically delete messages—group and private—after a set period of time. And here’s the fun part: You decide how long that time is going to be. Well, sort of. According to screenshots from WABetaInfo, you’ll get to set your messages to disappear after an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year. While I’d like to see a bit more granularity for times within 24 hours—in case you’d want your message to be automatically deleted after a few hours, so people see it but it doesn’t linger forever, the feature’s existence is still better than nothing. About that. As WABetaInfo reports, WhatsApp is currently testing the auto-deletion aspect. So odds are good that you aren’t going to find the feature in the app if you’re using its regular version. If you’re lucky enough to be a beta tester, you might see it, but you also might not; I grabbed the beta version of the app that supposedly had the feature (2.20.84) from APKMirror, and still no dice. So, while it’s annoying that you’ll have to wait, odds are good that this feature should be arriving for everyone shortly. When it hits, accessing it is easy. Pull up a WhatsApp group chat or private message, and then tap on the group’s name to open up its options. You’ll see a new “Delete messages” option after Media visibility, as shown in WABetaInfo’s screenshot: And once this is enabled, all messages will have a little clock icon appended next to the time. That’s meant to indicate that the message, like all things in life, will eventually disappear forever.

Nightclubs around the country are closed due to coronavirus, but in their absence, a new virtual club has opened its door, and it has a pretty A-List guest list. You may know DJ D-Nice, Derrick Jones, as a member of the 90s hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions. He was also the DJ for Barak Obama’s farewell party at the White House. DJ D-Nice launched “Club Quarantine” last week, and on Saturday the “club” was open for nine hours with guest appearances from celebrities like Michelle Obama, Naomi Campbell, Chaka Khan, Halle Berry, Rihanna, Kerry Washington, Diddy, and Jamie Foxx. Tonight’s virtual club doors are already open, and more than 100,000 people are currently watching him spin tracks, presumably from his apartment. Spike Lee, Vanessa Williams, and Donnie Wahlberg all popped in while I was writing this, and there’s bound to be more names you recognize popping by. You can watch and dance along at home by going to his Instagram page on your mobile phone and then clicking his profile picture to join the live stream. Once you’re inside, you can comment to chat with other people watching the stream or just hook your phone up to some speakers and have a little solo dance party.

Grocery stores are a madhouse right now. The bottled water is gone, staples like milk, eggs and bread are flying off the shelves, and there’s barely a roll of toilet paper to be found anywhere. Added to this equation is the risk factor of navigating a crowded store. To counteract exposure, a lot of people are shifting to curbside pickup or delivery. Before you hit click on that list of groceries, take a moment to consider those who depend on grocery delivery.