12 Phone and Browser Settings That Save Time, from Official Help Pages
Each setting removes a step you repeat often. On a phone, text replacement, Do Not Disturb, scheduled summaries and app time limits cut typing and interruptions.
Section · 50 articles
Tools & Tech
AI, software, design, security and the tools that make work easier and faster, digital and physical, with prices, licences and versions dated.
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HACKS VITAE ARTWORK (AI-ASSISTED)
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Our reading: tools matter because they are methods of making and doing, used by our ancestors for millions of years.
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15 Free Tools and Sites for Students, Described and Linked
Your library card can open free ebooks and audiobooks through Libby, and Project Gutenberg holds more than 75,000 free older books. Khan Academy, OpenStax and MIT OpenCourseWare share courses and textbooks.
5 Free Clipping Tools: Vizard, DaVinci Resolve, Edits, YouTube Studio and Twitch Clips
Vizard uses AI to pick clips for you. In DaVinci Resolve and Edits, you cut each clip yourself.
Free Website Components for Client Work: 14 Libraries and the Licence Terms to Read
Nine of the fourteen libraries use the MIT licence, which asks that its copyright and permission notices stay in all copies.
No-Code AI Builders: What You Can Make and What to Check Before You Build
A no-code AI builder lets you describe what you want in plain words and get a working thing back.
Tools That Turn Code Into Video: HyperFrames, Remotion, Motion Canvas, Manim and More
HyperFrames uses HTML, Remotion uses React, Motion Canvas and Revideo use TypeScript, and Manim uses Python.
What Happens to Your Work When You Upload It: Ownership, Licences and AI Training on 11 Platforms
Every terms page we read says the platform does not take ownership. You give it a licence to use your work.
Where to Host a Design Portfolio: Showcase Sites, Portfolio Builders and Your Own Site
A design portfolio can live on a showcase site where people browse, a portfolio builder, or a site at an address you own.
AI Tools by What They Do: From Chat Assistants to Coding Agents, and the Terms to Know
AI tools now run from chat assistants anyone can open in a browser to coding agents that edit files and run commands on your computer.
Europe by Travel Style: Where to Look for Budget Cities, Beaches, Mountains, Castles, Food and Smaller Towns
Start from the kind of trip you want, then use an official page to plan it.
Free Public Websites Worth Knowing: Official Sources for Data, Records and Services
Governments and international bodies run free websites where you can find data, records and public services yourself.
AI Coding and Agent Tools That Changed Their Names or Owners: What Each Is Now and How to Start
Windsurf, once Codeium, is now Devin Desktop from Cognition, and Cursor is part of SpaceX.
AI Inside Your Browser and Spreadsheets: What These Add-ons Can See, and How to Use Them
Before you install an AI add-on, check what it can read, which AI company gets your text, and whether that company trains on it.
AI Tools That Turn Meetings and Talks Into Notes: How to Use Them, and What They Do With Your Recordings
To get AI notes from a meeting, use a notetaker that joins the call, like Otter, a tool for recordings you already have, like Descript, or notes built into Google Meet.
AI Tools for Short Videos and Visuals: How to Use Them, and Who Owns What You Make
Pick the tool by what you start with: Magnific or Dezgo for a prompt or picture, Kaiber for a song, Fliki for a script, Descript for a recording.
Build Something Without Code: AI Tools for Apps, Sites, Prototypes, Guides and Logos, and What You Own
These tools turn a description, a sketch or a screen recording into an app, a clickable prototype, a how-to guide or a logo.
Dribbble vs Behance in 2026: What Each One Is For, What It Costs, and the Rules You Agree To
Dribbble is a design marketplace that belongs to Tiny Group, and work that starts there must be paid through it.
Free Tools for Cutting Clips: What Each One Does, Its Free-Plan Limits, and What It Does With Your Footage
Shotcut, Kdenlive and OpenShot are free and open source; Clipchamp exports up to 1080p with no watermark; OpusClip and Kapwing add a watermark on free plans.
How to Make 3D-Style Motion Graphics Videos with Claude and AI: The Steps, the Prompts and the Tools
Claude writes the script, lists its claims for you to check, and writes one picture prompt per line.
How to Research and Script a History Video with Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM)
Put a Style Sheet and good fact sources in one notebook, then ask for a script with a source after each fact.
AI vs Machine Learning vs Deep Learning: What's the Difference?
Deep learning is a kind of machine learning, and machine learning is one way of building artificial intelligence.
Chatbot vs AI Agent: What's the Difference?
A chatbot talks with you, and an AI agent acts for you.
Travel Refunds and Compensation: The Official Pages for the EU, UK, US and Australia
All four regions' official pages on delayed and cancelled trips send you to the airline or travel provider first.
Where to Find Travel Deals: A Directory of Sites, Alerts and Discount Cards
Travel deals come from a few kinds of source: search sites with price alerts, deal newsletters, member rates, rail and discount cards, and city passes.
What Size Is a Business Card? Sizes by Country, Print Terms and What to Put on One
There is no single business card size: it depends on the country.
Does Opening a JPEG Lose Quality? 12 File Format Beliefs and What the Documentation Says
No: opening a JPEG does not change it; quality is lost when a JPEG is saved again, because each lossy save compresses it once more.
YouTube's New Creator Features from Made on YouTube 2026: What's Live, What's Coming, and How to Use Them
A few of the features YouTube showed in 2026 are live: Shorts series and image posts in the Shorts feed, alongside the older title and thumbnail A/B tests.
The Dead Internet Theory, Checked: What's True, What Isn't, and What the Numbers Measure
The strong version doesn't hold up: we found no evidence that any campaign makes most of what is online.
How Cybersecurity Is Built: The Layers, the Tools and Who Does What, in Plain Words
Security is built in layers, so that attacks missed by one technology are caught by another.
Website Security Crash Course: The Terms, the Common Mistakes and a Checklist, in Plain Words
Many website attacks are automated, so being small does not keep a site out of the way.
AI Design Tools and Component Libraries, Checked: 7 Tools, Their Licences and Their Traps
Most of the seven are built for AI coding agents, telling an assistant how to design or test a page.
Cybersecurity Crash Course: Everything You Need to Know, in Plain Words
Our reading of the official advice: four habits matter most — two-step verification, unique passwords kept in a password manager, automatic updates, and a backup that is not plugged in.
Google Flow Explained, and Whether Those "Product Ad Commands" Are Real
Flow is Google's AI filmmaking tool, launched on 20 May 2025; it now runs on Veo 3.1 and Gemini Omni Flash 1.1.
AI Benchmarks Explained: What the Scores Measure and Why They Can Mislead
A benchmark scores models on the same fixed tasks, such as MMLU's 57 tasks; once nearly every leading model passes, the test can no longer tell them apart.
AI Glossary: 22 Terms Explained in Plain Words
A large language model is the engine inside a chatbot; it reads and writes in tokens, and its context window is how much text it can handle at once.
AI Music Generators and the Lawsuits, Explained: What Was Filed, Settled and Still Open
Record labels sued the AI music generators Suno and Udio in June 2024, alleging they copied the labels' recordings to train their models.
AI Myths Checked: 10 Things People Believe About AI Chatbots
None of the ten beliefs is simply true as usually stated: 2 are myths, 4 partly true, 2 unverified and 2 disputed.
DAWs Compared: Free and Paid Music Production Software, With Real Limits and Prices
"Free" means three different things: free with no time limit but with tracks or features capped, time-limited trials of 3 to 60 days, and FL Studio's trial, which never expires but cannot reopen saved projects.
The Free Music Production Toolkit: Synths, Effects, Sample Licences, Notation and Stem Separation
"Free" means four things: open source, free but closed, a free tier of a paid product, and licences for the sounds, not the software.
How Large Language Models Work, in Plain Words
A large language model is first trained to predict the next piece of text; to write an answer, it repeats that prediction.
Music Visualizers Compared: Free and Paid Tools for Live Shows, Videos and Players
Free options are real but limited: TouchDesigner's free licence is for unpaid work only and caps resolution, Resolume's demo adds a logo watermark and a robot voice, and Synesthesia's trial watermarks its output.
Open-Weight Is Not Open-Source: What "Open" AI Models Actually Let You Do
Open weights means you can download and run a trained model; it does not, by itself, make the model open-source.
Website Visualizers Compared: Sitemaps, Crawl Maps, Device Previews, Heatmaps and AI Site Builders
"Website visualizer" is not an established category; we use it for tools that show a website's structure, its look on different screens, or how visitors move through it.
What Is a Frontier AI Model? 8 Definitions That Don't Agree
There is no single definition of a frontier AI model: the eight here turn on capability, danger, training compute or a classified test.
Who Makes Today's Leading AI Models? The Main Labs and Their Current Models
The main labs are Alibaba's Qwen, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral AI, Moonshot AI, OpenAI, xAI and Z.ai.
Why AI Makes Things Up: What "Hallucination" Means, Why It Happens and How to Catch It
A "hallucination" is a confident answer that is not true; OpenAI researchers argue it happens because tests reward guessing over admitting uncertainty, and rare facts cannot be predicted from patterns alone.
Design Styles Explained: 12 Movements and Where Their Names Come From
Of twelve design labels checked, four popular beliefs don't hold up, six are partly true and two hold up.
The Web Design Resource Library: 150+ Tools, Components and Libraries, Reviewed
Facts are as read on 30 September or 26 October 2026, when every source a script can reach was rechecked.
Prompt Engineering 2026 Prompting Manual: Architecting High-Performance AI Outputs
The labs' own guides agree on two basics: mark out the parts of a prompt and give plain, direct instructions.
Clawdbot AI: A Leap Towards Sovereign Agentic Workflow
Clawdbot is now OpenClaw, an open-source AI assistant that runs on your own computer and that you talk to through chat apps.