Here are our recommendations for apps that help you stay focused on the task at hand. And with attention spans crumbling in the TikTok era, we now have an entire category of apps dedicated to helping you stick to what you're supposed to be doing. These apps all work more or less in the same way, giving you a straightforward method of tracking how long you're spending on a task, and offering some sort of incentive to keep going for the allotted amount of time. Sometimes you get a few extra features as well, like the ability to block access to other apps. In the interest of trying to write this specific article without switching between browser tabs and apps every two minutes, I gave three of the best focus tools a try.

DIY Tech Hacks There's a helpful translation tool hidden in your iPhone Messages More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Get translations right inside the Messages app. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There are all kinds of ways to use your phone to help you learn a language of course, but here's one you might not have come across before: You can enable real-time translations for a host of different languages right inside the Messages app on iOS. It works through the Apple Translate built into your iPhone, and it's a great way to keep reminding yourself of conversational words and phrases.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Current takes a minimal approach to RSS. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) protocol has been giving users a way to keep up with their favorite websites for decades. It essentially presents all the new articles on a specific site in chronological order as they're published, so you can read through or skip over them as you like. It's also, by the way, the main way that podcast feeds are published, but it was originally designed to manage web feeds.

Make sure your e-reader is set up exactly the way you want it. There are plenty of ways to tweak how your Kindle works. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. All of the Amazon Kindle models are intentionally designed to be straightforward to use. Grab your Kindle, tap the power button, and you're back reading from the place you left off (it's almost as simple as opening a real book).

You don't want a soda bath. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Picture this: You're at a picnic on a hot day and grab a cold Coke out of the cooler. It's wet, you drop it, but think "eh, it's fine." You pop the can open and SPLASH--there's soda all over white shirt.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

Nico (right) and Matteo Mucchetti pose with their homemade dark ride vehicle. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. When 12-year-old Matteo Mucchetti mapped out an amusement-style attraction that he wanted to create in his family's basement and then showed it to his older brother Nico, the high-school sophomore was immediately sold. "This is amazing," said Nico. "Let's make it!" Matteo had sketched on paper a top-down view of the multi-room space in Bear, Delaware, where they live.