Enjoy Podcasts with Overcast, the iPhone’s Best Podcast App

Every iOS podcast app takes a slightly different approach to podcast listening. Apple’s Podcasts app defaults to showing a list of unplayed episodes. Pocket Cast’s home screen shows a grid of your podcasts. Castro instead asks you to add an individual episode to your queue. Overcast takes a playlist-first approach. Once you’ve subscribed to a bunch of podcasts, what you’ll see first after opening the app is the Playlists section. An All Episodes playlist will already be created for you. In the UI, you’re strongly urged to create a playlist to manage your podcasts. It is the best way to...

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Roomba Wants to Start Mapping Your Smart Home

Your robot vacuum cleaner could be mapping your home. And the company who manufactured your robot vacuum cleaner could be planning to sell your floor plans to the highest bidder. This is according to the CEO of Roomba, the best-known brand of robot vacuums available right now. Robot vacuum cleaners are surprisingly popular. The Roomba has been around since 2002, and iRobot, the company which makes the Roomba, has a market value of $2.5 billion dollars. And now it’s in people’s homes, the company wants to make use of the data those Roombas are collecting… Your Roomba Know Where You...

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Is There Anything You Can Do About CIA Surveillance, Or Is It Game Over?

First, it was wiretaps and men in black sedans. Assassinations, “democratic” coups. Then came television and radio, and manipulating the press via cleverly inserted news items. It was all tinfoil hat stuff at first, but disclosures and declassifications have proved that the old conspiracy “theories” were anything but (and it seems tinfoil is actually useful). And now we have Vault 7 (a vast collection of data being released by WikiLeaks), which demonstrates the immense reach of the surveillance state across North America and Europe. Frankly, it’s an apparatus that the Nazis, Stasi, and KGB would have sold their souls for....

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6 Smart Interior Air Quality Monitors You Should Buy For Your Home

Not sleeping well lately? Poor air quality in your home can negatively impact your sleep, energy levels, and cause cold symptoms like watery eyes or sniffles; not to mention other dreadful possibilities like lung disease or cancer. Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) The air quality within our homes can be up to eight times worse than outdoors, and on specific occasions — say while repainting a wall — way more than that too. Our need for a more secure and confined environment has somehow contributed to this disparity in air quality indoors and outdoors. Indoor air quality can deteriorate due to activities like...

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Is Productivity Your Passion? You Should Become a Project Manager!

Project management covers five areas: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. If those topics sound familiar, you’ve probably been reading a lot of productivity blogs. These are very much the types of things that we focus on when we try to improve our own productivity. Project management, in fact, is very much about productivity. Project managers help ensure that project teams are as productive as possible. They organize, delegate, refine, communicate, and track — all things that productivity enthusiasts tend to do. So if you’re big into productivity, might project management be a good fit for you? And...

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How to Set Up and Use Your Kindle Paperwhite

Have you just got a a new Kindle Paperwhite? You’ve made a great choice — the Paperwhite offers the best combination of features and value for money and you’re going to love using an eReader. But if you don’t know how to start using your device, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to discover everything you need to know about using your Kindle Paperwhite, including how to set it up, how to get the most out of it, and how to fix common issues. 1. Unbox and Set Up Your Kindle Paperwhite Crack open the box and you’ll...

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10 Productivity Apps Every Chromebook User Needs

Chromebooks are quickly becoming the productivity laptop of choice for millions of people around the world. The operating system has overtaken both Windows and macOS in schools, businesses are issuing them to more and more employees, and they’re becoming an increasingly frequent sight among commuters. Sure, you can’t do heavy-duty tasks that require specialist apps. But for most people, the selection of Chromebook-specific productivity apps in the Chrome Web Store is more than sufficient. If you’ve just bought a Chromebook for the first time and you’re wondering which apps you should install to get started, keep reading. I’m going to...

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Supercharge Spotify With These 12 Android Apps

There’s already a surprising amount you can do with the official Spotify app on Android, from getting full GPS integration to navigating the interface like a boss. Yet it still isn’t perfect. Fortunately, third-party developers have set out to fill in all the gaps with apps of their own. You can add lyrics, use Spotify as an alarm clock, discover music you’ve never heard before, and a whole lot more — simply by installing a few apps freely available from the Play Store. Here’s our guide to 12 essential apps that will supercharge your Spotify experience. 1. Musixmatch Lyrics You’ll...

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Element Amazon Fire TV Edition Review: As Middling As It Gets

Our verdict of the Amazon Fire TV Edition Element 4K LED TV :The Fire TV integration is solid, but the quality of the display is just okay at best. The Fire TV part makes this TV woefully overpriced and not worth buying.610 We're giving away an Amazon Fire TV Edition Element 4K LED TV . Keep reading to find out how to win!When a new TV hits the market, the first thing everyone talks about is how mind-blowing the picture is. When the first OLED screens started releasing, every raved about the color depth, clear 4K, and HDR. The TV...

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Ready for the Fashion of the Future? Try On These 10 Wearables Today!

Tech companies aren’t content with turning your home into a sentient entity. Now they want to add your daily attire into the mix as well. Wearables are the next frontier in the increasingly fast-paced world of smart technology. And I’m not just talking about fitness bands and smart watches; the amount of wearable technology that’s out there would amaze you. Some of it is useful, some is unnecessary, and some is downright weird. Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve never been perturbed by the outrageous — after all, today’s wacky is tomorrow’s mainstream. If you want to see what the fashion of...

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Check Now to See Which of Your Apps Won’t Work on iOS 11

September is near, which means that a new version of iOS is on the horizon. We’ve rounded up the biggest new features coming to your iPhone in iOS 11, but there’s an important bit to note too: with the 64-bit-only iOS 11, old 32-bit apps won’t work any longer. In the current iOS 10, you may have already seen a warning that certain apps may slow down your system. That was a gentle push, but in iOS 11, they flat-out won’t run unless the developer updates them to comply with new standards. Thankfully, you can check and see which of...

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Are You an Emoji Addict? Grab This Chrome Wallpaper Extension

These days, it seems emojis are everywhere — you just can’t get away from them. If you live in a big city, you can’t go more than five minutes without seeing one grinning at you from the side of a bus or through a shop window. If you can’t stand emojis, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. But if you love them? You’re about to enter heaven. Why? Because The Emoji Movie is hitting cinemas across the United States on July 28. Erm, What? No, that wasn’t a typo. There really is a movie about emojis. Later this week, the 3D computer-animated...

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This Fun Photo Challenge Site Has Mentors Who Help You Improve

Photography challenges aren’t just good for awards. They’re wonderful for boosting your confidence. Try one some time. You may not go home with a prize, but even a few polite Likes on your photo will reinforce that you are a worthy shutterbug. You didn’t waste your time or money buying that expensive Canon. And GuruShots is just the right place to start out. It’s a system of open photography contests where you can pit your skills against photographers from around the world. For the budding hobbyist, it can even fill gaps in photographic education — but most importantly, it’s fun. Anyone Can Participate in...

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How to Convert Images and Doodles Into Vector Graphics With Adobe Illustrator

Converting clip art, hand-drawn doodles, and photos into vector graphics requires just one feature in Adobe Illustrator: the Image Trace. While it works flawlessly with simple drawings and hand lettering, it’s a much more challenging tool when used with photos. Why would you want to do this in the first place? Well, image files created in programs like Photoshop and photos taken with cameras are made up of tiny little dots (called pixels). When you scale a pixel-based image, it loses quality and can even become blurry. A vector graphic, on the other hand, is a scaleable image that you can...

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Tuesday Deals: Refurbished Amazon Echo, D-Link IP Camera, House of Marley Speakers, and More! [UK]

An interesting assortment of deals available today from Amazon UK. There is money to be saved on a Certified Refurbished Amazon Echo, a D-Link IP Camera, speakers, and household goods. Amazon Echo (Certified Refurbished) [29% Off] Certified Refurbished Amazon Echo, Black Certified Refurbished Amazon Echo, Black A Certified Refurbished Amazon Echo Buy Now At Amazon £99.99 Amazon’s AI powered wireless speaker is the best way to bring Alexa into your home. Aside from playing music and answering voice commands, add skills to Alexa for additional features. The Certified Refurbished Echo has been refurbished by Amazon and is sold as-new. D-Link...

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Love Coffee? 5 Essential Sites and Web Apps for Home and Office

Coffee is the nectar of the gods for some of us. The day can’t start without a cup. It’s what you catch up with friends over. It’s the little boost in the middle of a busy work day. If coffee is an essential part of your day, then you know how a bad cuppa can ruin it all. There are some excellent sites for an improved cup already, and with these apps, you’ll never have to drink a substandard cup again. 1. How to Brew Coffee: Tips and Techniques From NCA The National Coffee Association (NCA) has the most comprehensive...

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How to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar

It was 2014 when disaster struck. Yes, Ebola and ISIS took over the headlines. But, the discontinuation of Google Calendar Sync left behind two orphans — Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar. The global tribe of productivity zealots attended the wake. Don’t get me wrong. Both Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar are smart project management tools in their own right. So, there was something harmonious in banding them together. Why keep both Outlook and Google Calendars synced? Keeping two different calendars can be a time suck. But there are some situations which make this handshake necessary. Is it any one...

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Microsoft Paint Is Dead, Long Live Paint 3D

Microsoft Paint is officially being killed off, with Microsoft deprecating the program with the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. In layman’s terms this means Paint will no longer be updated and has been flagged for removal at some point in the future. Still, there’s always Paint 3D. Windows has been around since 1985, when Microsoft released Windows 1.0 unto the world. And residing on Windows 1.0 was a little program called Microsoft Paint. It has been helping people draw terrible digital art ever since, but the end is now nigh. Or so it would seem… Microsoft Paint Is...

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5 Things You Aren’t Using the Apple Watch For (But Should Be)

After more than two years on the market, the Apple Watch is still the best wearable device available for any iPhone user. Thanks to tight integration with iOS, the device can interact with a number of other Apple products and other services. With improvements to both software and hardware, the overall Apple Watch experience has become better with age. Starting with Series 2, Apple has positioned the device as the best way to track your fitness and help live a more healthy lifestyle. But there are a lot more features you might not know about, so here are five of our favorite things...

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