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By: CJ Most smartphones start with a battery that can comfortably last through the day. After a couple of years, however, you may notice that the same phone needs to be charged much more often. This isn’t necessarily because the phone suddenly became inefficient. In many cases, the battery itself has gradually lost some of…
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By: CJ Noise-cancelling headphones can make a busy airplane, crowded café, or noisy street feel surprisingly quiet. At first, it might seem like the headphones are simply blocking outside sounds, but active noise cancellation works in a more interesting way. The technology uses microphones, speakers, and some fairly clever audio processing to reduce certain sounds…
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By: CJ Most people have more online accounts than they can realistically keep track of. Email, banking, shopping, social media, school, work, and streaming services can all require different passwords. Trying to remember every password can quickly become frustrating, which is why many people turn to password managers. A password manager is a tool that…
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By: CJ Most people don’t want to read a 30-page report just to find three important points. That’s one reason AI summarization tools have become so popular. They can take a long article, meeting transcript, research paper, or document and turn it into something much shorter. But creating a useful summary isn’t as simple as…
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By: CJ When you ask an AI assistant a question about a document, a collection of notes, or some other personal information, it can sometimes feel like the AI is looking through your files the same way you would search through a folder. That’s not usually what’s happening. A large language model, or LLM, doesn’t…
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By: CJ Imagine having thousands of notes saved on your computer. You remember writing something about an idea a few months ago, but you can’t remember exactly what words you used. You search for “climate change,” but the note actually says “global warming” and “changes in the environment.” A normal keyword search might miss it.…
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By: CJ Human notes aren’t usually written for someone else to read. You might write half a sentence because you already know what you meant. You might use an abbreviation that only makes sense to you. Maybe there’s a random arrow pointing from one idea to another, or a reminder written in the corner of…
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By: CJ You can write down everything a professor says and still forget most of it later. That’s because good note-taking isn’t really about creating the longest possible record of a lecture. What matters more is what you’re doing with the information while you’re taking the notes. You have to listen, decide what’s important, put…
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By: CJ There is a strange problem that comes with having access to too much information: you can end up knowing that something is somewhere without having any idea where it actually is. A useful article gets saved. A meeting produces a few good ideas. Someone sends you a document that you know you’ll need…
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By: CJ Most people don’t have a problem with writing things down. The harder part is remembering where they wrote something six months ago. A useful idea might be buried in an old lecture, a meeting transcript, a document, or a note on your phone. You may remember that you wrote it down, but not…