It's the Verge's roundup of the best gifts to help graduates on the way to their next life adventure. Along with the usual choices, The Verge included some helpful gifts that I wouldn't have thought about on my own. Which gift idea do you like best?
This article points out that Huawei spends $11 billion dollars on components from the US each year. That's a hefty amount of income that will be lost due to the ban. Apparently they've stock piled components for the short term and have developed their own operating systems, CPUs, and GPUs in case it lasts longer than supplies do. With all the downsides of this ban it's hard to imagine what good it will serve if any.
More efficient internet communication tools have come and gone but the email, it seems, is here to stay. In fact, instead of going the way of Yahoo Messenger that got killed off just last year, the number of emails being sent and received is still climbing 6% per year. To put that in context, there were already 188 billion emails sent daily in 2013.
This is mostly because it has a low barrier to use. Even the elderly, most of whom are notoriously tech illiterate, have email addresses.
However, it’s something that not a lot of users have the time or the motivation to master. The end result is an avalanche of emails, both urgent and unimportant, left unread and unsent. The average user’s inbox has become an indistinguishable mix of spam, personal, and professional messages that might take years to read through.
So, we thought that it’s about time that we try to finally take back control and enhance our mastery of it. Here are some easy steps so you never have to miss an important email again:
Have Multiple Email Accounts for Specific Uses
Have you experienced missing an important email because it came jumbled in with other inconsequential ones? It’s a real problem with some people even missing lucrative job offers because of this disorder.
One way to introduce order to mess of an email account is to use specific emails for specific tasks. The one you use for logging on to apps and websites, for example, should be different from where you receive emails from your professional contacts. Segmentation is the name of the game here and it could help you make sure that you don’t miss another important email.
You should also use a different email for logging in to various websites and apps. These tend to come with an email list subscription that could potentially lead to a pile-up of spam and promotional emails that you didn’t ask for.
Unsubscribe to Websites You Don’t Really Want to Follow
Hidden in the fine print after the end of each spam mail is an unsubscribe button that can do wonders for your inbox and your sanity. It’s something that’s always been there but we just don’t notice. This is because we’re so quick to hit the delete button on spam and, of course, they’re usually written in a small font and can be located only after you’ve scrolled through the entire email.
Sure, the delete button is easy enough to click on every time you receive spam, but do you know what’s easier? – not needing to click on it again for the next round of spam mail from that website. Keep only the promotional materials from the subscriptions that you truly care about.
Turn Off Notifications
It’s not a good feeling when you miss an important email but it’s an even worse endeavour to work through an annoyingly steady amount of email notifications you get throughout the day. For this reason, it may be wise to turn it off.
Emails have become productivity tools more than anything. But, how can you be productive with notifications going off on you every other minute?
It is recommended that you check email only when you have time to respond. This way, you don’t have to craft emails in your head while you’re doing something else. Furthermore, you'll be able to give your response the emails the focus and attention it deserves. At the beginning of the workday and at the end of it before going home would be the best times. This way, you’ll be able to work on the most urgent emails in the morning and on the less urgent ones at night.
Use the Draft and Schedule Functions
For those ultra-important emails like a job application cover letter, you’ll want to take some precious time to craft the absolute version of it. You are selling yourself, after all, and you don’t want to short-change or oversell. A balance must be struck and that takes time, effort, and focus.
However, in the effort to make it as perfect as it can be, you can get way too focused that you forget to click the send button. In these cases, it might be best to schedule your response. It’s a new feature that I think should have always been there.
Another use case where scheduled emails might be applicable is when you’ve crafted an email on a Saturday. If you send it on that day, you’d end up looking like a workaholic. Recipients will then be pressured to reply or act on your email accordingly. This is frowned upon especially in a society where a work-life balance has become a prevailing ideology.
Delete Email Exchanges That You No Longer Need
One thing that has an immediate effect on your inbox is to delete your messages altogether. This immediately diminishes the visual clutter.
However, did you know doing so can also give you some extra space on your cloud drive? This is because deleting messages deletes attachments as well. This means that photos, videos, documents, and other media get deleted from your drives as well. While they may be small, accumulation of these can amount to a lot, especially on your expensive cloud storage services like Google Drive or OneDrive.
Email services like Google and Hotmail have recently made it easier for users to delete in bulk by letting you select all the messages in a certain category. Combined with the relatively well-categorized management system, you can accomplish this task quite easily. The promotions category is the usual victim of this method.
Don’t Use Email for Extremely Urgent Situations
You don’t email for a 911-worthy situation.
Not everyone is invested in email at the same level. Millennials and younger generations, for example, tend to use instant messaging applications readily available on smartphones such as Slack and even Facebook Messenger more than emails.
Emails are for important yet not too urgent tasks that don’t require a reply or some other action on the spot.
Vaping tech has come a long way since it's early adoption phase around 2004. I got started vaping about 5 years ago when it was on the cusp of becoming mainstream. It has certainly helped me quit a few times by easing the cravings and replacing (mostly) the act, and the better the technology gets the closer it resembles smoking and can help make the process easier.
Just when you thought we have reached the epitome of consumer electronics Google breaks boundaries again in their I/O Conference. Somewhat unsurprisingly it looks like the focus has been making ordinary household tasks easier by using clever gadgets.
May isn't usually a month we associate with tech releases, but there has been a lot of buzz this month already from several of the large tech providers. The mobile device market is showing no signs of decline and there are plenty of fun new gadgets to consume. Hopefully your mother is into smart watches!
The newest mobile phone releases such as the Galaxy S10 5G, Xiaomi 5G Mi Mix 3 are hyping up 5G connectivity but there’s an arguably more exciting connectivity upgrade on the horizon – Wi-Fi 6.
While it’s true that our demand for mobile data consumption has increased over the years, we’ve exponentially consumed more data on Wi-Fi vs mobile data. For example, our home internet, our favourite café Wi-Fi, or the cowork space connectivity that we rely on, all usually deal with Wi-Fi connectivity. Often, it’s a deal breaker when these places have slow or unreliable connectivity. After all, Wi-Fi could potentially mean the difference between getting work done efficiently or not getting any work done at all. Or if you don’t rely on Wi-Fi that much to work, it’s the difference between getting a nice streaming or gaming experience and a crappy one.
What’s difficult is that you can’t just pay your way to get better Wi-Fi. You have to do some heavy lifting such as a buying and configuring a better modem. That’s aside from paying for a high-bandwidth connection from your ISP. You also have to consider how many people are using Wi-Fi to get the maximum efficiency for your device.
Such is the importance of this new Wi-Fi innovation. Hopefully, the next device you need to buy already has this technology built-in.
Improved Throughput
Speed is probably the most basic parameter of Wi-Fi connectivity. In this aspect, there’s not a lot to be excited about because the current consumer fibre internet connectivity plans have a median speed of just around 72Mbps in the American household. That’s a fraction of the current standard in Wi-Fi technology which is pegged at 3.5Gbps.
Wi-Fi 6’s ability to give you around 9.6Gbps, then, shouldn’t have much bearing for you if your usage is just under the normal circumstances. However, as the 8K monitors and televisions start to become more readily available, internet speed requirements are pegged to rise soon. It’s good to be ready for these kinds of contingencies.
Moreover, for enterprise users that consume a lot of data, the 3.5Gbps distributed to multiple access points such as smartphones, laptops, and other devices connected to just one router might already be a little deficient. Having the 9.5Gbps capacity available for use from just one Wi-Fi 6 enabled router should help save some money on additional routers for high-density hotspots.
Better Multi-User Experience (OFDMA)
Wi-Fi 5 tends to get bogged down when a lot of people are logged in to the router. Which is often why crowded places don’t even bother getting a Wi-Fi connection. But, for cafes, malls, and cowork spaces or any other crowded areas that rely on Wi-Fi connectivity to thrive, Wi-Fi 5 rears its ugly limitations as it can only support a limited number of users.
These places often get an additional modem but that comes at the cost of speed and, more importantly, reliability. This is because multiple modems cause interference to each other. This is what causes lags and dropped connections in crowded networks such as your local malls.
Furthermore, there’s another limitation to Wi-Fi 5 that’s not often given much attention. It can only communicate with one access point at the same exact moment. Therefore, you may experience some lag if you simultaneously ask for a refresh of a webpage on your computer and ask your smart light to change its colour. This is because Wi-Fi 5 can communicate with just one device at a time. While it can accomplish these tasks so quickly that it’s difficult to notice, it’s easy to imagine how it can get bogged down when there are a mall-full of access points giving commands simultaneously.
Essentially there’s just one channel for data requests and deliveries to go through. It transfers huge amounts of data very quickly for sure but when it’s shared between multiple devices, it can get pretty cramped in there.
Wi-Fi 6 could change this paradox because aside from allowing more users to simultaneously connect to it, it has the capacity to answer their data requests at the same exact time. This new orthogonal frequency-division multiple access or OFDMA essentially makes Wi-Fi congestion a thing of the past if you have a Wi-Fi 6 enabled router and device.
We no longer just have a smartphone and a computer connected to our Wi-Fi these days. We also have smart lights, smart refrigerators, and other IoT devices. This makes this OFDMA feature such a welcome addition to Wi-Fi technology coming into the future.
Longer Battery Life for Your Devices (TWT)
Wi-Fi 6’s efficiency doesn’t only help with the speed and volume of data transferred; it also helps with lessening the battery consumption on your connected devices. Essentially, data transfers cost less power on the new Wi-Fi 6 standard.
It accomplishes this by communicating with devices exactly when to put your device’s Wi-Fi radio to sleep and when to wake it. This new feature is called Target Wake-up Time and it can help your device conserve energy by turning their Wi-Fi radios on only when they’re needed. This greatly helps both smartphones and IoT devices by letting users, through the router, to schedule check-in times for specific devices rather than having their Wi-Fi radios request data constantly.
Better Security Features (WPA-3)
When it comes to security, Wi-Fi 6 should also come with some improvements. From a tech support standpoint, the new connectivity standard can see more and manipulate more data from the connected device so it's easier to Technically, Wi-Fi 5 can also benefit from this but Wi-Fi 6's advanced capabilities help magnify this.
Aside from this, it also has WPA-3 protection. This makes it more difficult for hackers to crack network passwords. Furthermore, if ever the network becomes compromised, WPA-3 can automatically make some data less useful in getting into other access points once the network is breached.
Do We Need It?
Wi-Fi 5 isn’t terrible. It should be enough for the regular home even in the near future.
However, Wi-Fi 6 is a much-improved version of Wi-Fi technology that’s difficult to ignore. The fact that it’s gotten to the point that Wi-Fi 6 compatible hardware are becoming cheaper by the second is also a big reason why it’s such a compelling upgrade right now.
The ultimate question, however, is, “Do you need it?”
The short answer is no, normal users, don’t need it yet. Will you need it in the future? That’s a huge yes. It’s only a matter of time until we all do.
Razer's dedicated fanbase pushed hard for this product to be made. After a successful campaign (which included 12 people getting toaster tattoos...?) the CEO has agreed to start designing and engineering the toaster!
Apparently the whole thing started as a joke in 2013, but fans gave the project momentum. Toaster is usually pretty boring by default; it will be cool to see a souped up version.
This camera is an improvement on the older a6300. One remarkable upgrade is the camera's autofocus with real-time tracking capabilities. Does this camera provide enough value to get you to buy?
The article brings up a good point about facial recognition technology. Large corporations and governments will no doubt use this technology in ethically questionable ways.
When you think of how much technology goes into every industry it can be mind boggling. Something as simple as a dehydration unit specially fitted for Cannabis plants is worth millions of dollars and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the technology used to achieve high yields from the plants on a consistent basis.