Calibrating the compass on Android, deep-linking in Chrome, and more

Learn how to calibrate the compass of your Android device in Google Maps. This 8-shaped motion takes seconds, and it can significantly improve location accuracy. Try it and let me know how it goes.

In the Google Maps app, the calibration narrows the direction your’re heading to from a wide fan to a narrow beam.

Do you frequently lose your phone at home? This tip will let you use your Google Home or Nest Mini devices to ring the phone and help locate it.

As of version 80, in Chrome you can use URLs that link to specific, arbitrary words or phrases in a web page. If you’re a blogger or writer, deep-linking is helpful for referencing sources and quotes.

If you have several Google Home or Nest Mini devices in different rooms, you can transfer playing music and videos from one device to another without using your phone. Here’s how.

I have only one device and can’t check. From what I heard, this doesn’t always work reliably. What’s your experience?

Google Stadia is a performance-critical platform. This guide discusses how to tune your setup to squeeze every bit of performance and get the best cloud gaming experience.

This unique clock app shows at a glance, along with the time, the duration of daylight and darkness, as well as when twilight starts and ends. If you’re a photographer, the app can also show the golden hour and the blue hour to help you plan your shots.

An online development environment for dozens of programming languages and frameworks.

As a Chrome OS user I love Repl.it, which runs fully in the cloud and doesn’t require downloading software. Far from a toy or a limited platform, it provides advanced features and tools such as Multiplayer Mode for collaborative development, GitHub support, and server deployment by just listening to a TCP port.

Repl.it is one of my favorite poster children of the cloud as it pushes the limits of what can be done online.