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Supercharge Gmail with these 5 simple but useful extensions

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Gmail has been part of our lives for what seems like forever, and while it works well enough on its own, there are plenty of ways to make it more useful. These five extensions require very little setup or tweaking, most are free, and all of them do a great job of helping you wring every little bit of utility out of your email sessions. Add notes to messages and threads For those times you need a little more context than a giant email thread can give you, there’s the free Simple Gmail Notes extension. Available for Chrome , Firefox , Edge , and Safari , this handy little tool lets you leave yourself little sticky notes inside individual messages and threads. Notes are stored in your Google Drive, can be color-coded, and will show up next to their respective subject lines in your inbox as well. Declutter and beautify If Gmail feels a bit busy to you, do yourself a favor and check out Simplify Gmail . Built to make Gmail more visually appealing, easier to use, and less distracting, this $2-per-month Chrome extension offers up an almost Zen-like experience as you hack and slash your way through mountains of messages every day. The guy behind it, Michael Leggett, knows his stuff, too: He’s the former design lead behind Gmail and Google Inbox. If anyone’s got the chops to gussy up the world’s most popular webmail service, it’s him. Turn labels and searches into tabs Don’t let hunting for a specific Gmail label slow you down. Add the label as a quick-access tab above your inbox instead with the free Gmail Tabs extension for Chrome. With the extension installed, you simply click the little three-dot menu button next to an oft-used label and select “Add to tabs” to give it a more permanent home. You can do the same for searches, too, making it easier to quickly drill into messages from specific senders, messages with attachments, or anything else you’d otherwise normally have to search for manually. Quickly share links The handy, free Send from Gmail has been built by Google itself to solve a couple of challenges. The extension pulls double duty by setting Gmail as your default email app when you click on an email address, and lets you share interesting web pages via Gmail with a single click. While the extension hasn’t been updated since 2013, neither feature is really rocket science. You won’t give the Gmail-as-default feature too much thought, it just works. And the send-a-link feature is refreshingly simple; find a cool webpage, click the extension icon, and a message composition box pops up with the page’s title as the subject and the URL as the first part of the message itself. One cool little extra: If you highlight some text on the page first, that text will get copied into the message above the URL. See who’s sending you email We’re visual creatures. Read More …

We expect our emails and texts to send instantly. Why not our money?

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Recent events such as the Robinhood-GameStop controversy and financial hardships brought on by the pandemic have cast light on a pressing underlying issue: The U.S. financial infrastructure is too slow. The snail’s pace of the system is denying consumers and businesses access to their money when they need it, with crucial tasks such as collecting a salary payment or transferring money to family members taking far too long. In a confirmation hearing earlier in March, Rohit Chopra, the newly appointed director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, advocated for a “real time system” as a tool to achieve equal access. So, what’s holding us back? Of the many policy debates that arose in February when Robinhood became a household name due to the GameStop controversy, CEO Vlad Tenev cited the two-day trade settlement policy as a key reason for the slowdown of trading. While multiday settlement might be a burden for investors, the slow speed of the U.S. payments infrastructure also negatively impacts millions of consumers and businesses every day. Though payment technology companies are leading critical innovations, they continue to be bogged down by the archaic system in place. Read More …

26 great free streaming services for cord cutters

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The best thing about cutting the cable cord is that you get a lot more control over your monthly TV bill. Instead of spending $100 per month or so on a bloated bundle of TV channels, you can throw together a few streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu and save a lot of money. Alternatively, you can take things to the extreme and trim your TV bill to zero dollars per month. These days, there are so many free streaming services that you can watch hours of TV every night and spend nothing. Whether you’re chasing that mythical $0 TV bill, or just trying to pad out your paid subscriptions with a few more things to watch, here are 26 free streaming TV services you ought to know about. Tubi Tubi may not have the name recognition of Netflix or Hulu, but that hasn’t stopped it from hitting 33 million monthly active users last year and being acquired by Fox . In addition to a vast library of movies and shows, the service also offers free news channels and local newscasts from Fox affiliates around the country. And if you create an account, you can synchronize your watchlist across devices. [ Tubi ] Notable programming: The Infiltrator , Hell’s Kitchen , Alias , Stop Making Sense . Read More …

Google’s latest Nest Hub promises to help you sleep better

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Google is announcing a second edition of its Nest Hub smart screen. The most flashy upgrade? Sleep tracking. The new Nest Hub will be available for preorder on March 16 and on shelves on March 30 for $100. It will come in four colors (chalk, charcoal, a bluey mist, and a reddish sand). Among the other updates will be a new machine-learning chip, so it can better remember your various gestures and favorite commands, and a third microphone, so it can hear you shouting across the room. And it will come with support for Thread, a protocol that will one day make Nest Hub interoperable with devices from Amazon, Apple, and other smart-home players. But today’s announcement is really about sleep. The Nest Hub launched in 2018 as the Google Home Hub and was rebranded the following year . It’s tried to stand apart from competitors such as Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook’s Portal by being ultra-useful. Its most beloved feature is that it can conjure recipes (and really any tutorial) on demand. In concert with other smart-home gadgets from Google and others, it can do all the basic things you expect from a home hub, such as control lights and show you video from your surveillance system. But Google wanted to make it even more useful. In this update, the company added its Soli motion-tracking technology to the Nest Hub, giving it the ability to read gestures. (A creation of Google’s ATAP lab , the Soli technology debuted in 2019’s Pixel 4 phone .) Users will now be able to use gestures to halt an alarm or pause music. The technology is also the basis for the Hub’s new sleep feature. [Photo: courtesy of Google] The Nest Hub has previously introduced some features to help you go to sleep and wake up, such as white noise at bedtime and an alarm that gradually nudges you awake. Now the radar-based Soli technology can follow your movement as you slumber, allowing you to track your sleep. Google product manager Ashton Udall says the Soli technology can detect big body movements and is capable of “sub-millimeter detection of movements like your chest moving in and out while you’re breathing.” Nest Hub also tracks coughing and snoring, and is equipped with a temperature gauge and an ambient light meter, so it can see how your environment changes while you sleep. The company has taken care to ensure the Nest Hub tracks only you, even if you share your bed Read More …

How youth in Senegal are using digital tools to safeguard a democracy under threat

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On the evening of March 4, 2021, the day following one of the biggest series of protests in Senegal’s modern history, the African nation’s government switched off the internet. Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube, and other social communication channels were restricted. By shutting down one of the most important means of communication in Senegal, the government aimed to suppress the magnitude of the protests against President Macky Sall and his regime. This practice of restricting the internet and social networking channels isn’t singular to Senegal. Internet shutdown and throttling has been a long-standing practice employed by governments to prevent protests and control information spread, especially in South Asia and Africa. But in an increasingly digital world, internet access has become a human right, and governments and internet service providers shouldn’t have the ability to shut it down, especially in countries with a fragile democracy. In Senegal, where 70% of the electoral population is below the age of 40, where internet penetration is at 46% and rapidly increasing, and where a sizable part of the electorate is in the diaspora, access to the internet is necessary to uphold democratic values. As a Senegalese technologist in the diaspora, I am inspired by how the country’s young people have leveraged technology to fight for their democracy. A shaky democracy While Senegal has been touted as the last standing soldier when it comes to democracy in Africa, the country’s status as a stable democracy is increasingly in doubt Read More …