Android home screen shortcuts

A great guide to home screen shortcuts to increase productivity and do more. You’ll get icons for hidden pre-installed apps, Google app features, widgets, Assistant routines, and custom shortcuts.

One of the Chrome OS features I love is seamless system updates. Things were not so rosy when I used Linux, where updatting the operating system or the installed software could break the system. So it’s understandable you may not want automatic updates, including Chrome’s. Here’s why you shouldn’t disable them instead.

The internals of Chromebooks are mostly a black box. The battery is a black box within a black box, which we know little about. This article sheds some light on how to care for this component. It discusses when you should charge the Chromebook, how to check the health of the battery, do power management, and more.

The upcoming end of Google Photos’ unlimited free space is making many aware of the importance of locally saving copies of your photos. Even if the output is often impractical to use, Google Takeout is the most straightforward tool to export all your photos and videos in bulk. Here’s an introduction to this arcane tool.

You’re probably familiar with YouTube’s video visibility options: public, unlisted, and private. Did you know you can share private videos, assuming you want to? Learn how to share a private video and what limitations it involves.

Are you worried about the clickbait headlines on asteroids coming close to the Earth? The Asteroid Radar app shows how common — and not so concerning — these events are.

The app lists the upcoming close approaches of asteroids and comets to the Earth. It’s easy to use for those not familiar with astronomy. Its strength is it provides only key data such as the object’s size, speed, and closest distance expressed as multiples of the Earth-Moon distance (LD, Lunar Distances).

Google Sheets can send you notifications when anything in a spreadsheet changes. But it may not be immediately clear what, exactly, changed. Check Sheets sends you email or Slack notifications when a spreadsheet changes. What sets it apart from the built-in feature is Check Sheets lets you decide what conditions trigger the notifications, such as when the value of a cell is below a certain value.