Chrome for Android reads any article aloud, and the audio keeps playing with the screen off

Look first, then cap How-To Geek's Dibakar Ghosh starts at Settings, Network and internet, Advanced network settings, Data usage, which lists what every app pulled over the last 30 days; on his machine that was 204.8GB total, with System and Windows Update at 93GB and the Brave browser at 74.16GB. From there he closes the taps one at a time: Settings, Apps, Installed apps, then Advanced options and Background app permissions set to Never, which he is careful to say works only for Microsoft Store and built-in Windows apps rather than traditionally installed EXE software; marking the connection as metered; pausing updates for up to five weeks; and capping update bandwidth under Settings, Windows Update, Advanced options, Delivery optimization, as either an absolute Mbps figure or a percentage he sets to 30. For anything that ignores all of that, he reaches for Portmaster, a free and open-source application firewall that shows connections per app and can cut one off the internet entirely.

Drive on one side, Autosync on the other MakeUseOf's Tashreef Shareef keeps his notes on every device without the 4 to 5 dollars a month Obsidian Sync would cost, and the trick is that an Obsidian vault is just a folder of markdown files. On the computer he installs Google Drive for desktop, turns on Mirror files in its preferences so the folder lives locally as well as in the cloud, moves the vault inside it, and waits for the first sync to finish. On the phone he installs Autosync for Google Drive, connects the same account, creates a folder pair set to two way, switches on hidden file syncing so the .obsidian settings folder travels too, and then opens the synced DriveSyncFiles folder as the vault in the Obsidian app. He is straight about the tradeoffs: edit on one device at a time, let the sync land before switching, and accept that there is no end to end encryption here, so Google can technically read the files.

Four apps, one assistant Android Police's Parth Shah, writing on September 3, connects Gemini to four Google apps he already had open. In Slides the Gemini icon sits in the upper right corner and builds a deck from a written prompt, with a Help me Visualize panel for on-brand images; he advises doing this in the Slides web app rather than in Canvas, because the result is easier to customize afterward. YouTube Music is reached by typing @YouTubeMusic inside a Gemini chat and describing the playlist you want, down to a request such as low-fi beats with no lyrics, strictly under 80 BPM, though playlist creation is limited to the mobile apps for now. Sheets opens from the sidebar and writes complex formulas, builds pivot tables and charts, summarizes a sheet, and pulls data across files, with the caveat that full Workspace integration needs a premium Gemini plan. Keep builds categorized lists from a prompt and pulls facts back out of notes you already wrote.

One prompt, one file How-To Geek's Tony Phillips gave Gemini and Claude the same detailed prompt on September 4: build 14 small utilities, sticky notes, a text cleaner, a word counter, date and time calculators, a timezone converter, a stopwatch, a countdown timer, unit and file size converters, percentage and loan calculators, a random generator, and a URL cleaner, all inside a single self-contained HTML file with no external resources. You paste the result into Notepad, save it, and open it in a browser; there is no installation, no coding knowledge, and no internet connection required once the file exists. Gemini finished in about two minutes and Claude in about six. The reason to test before trusting is in his results: Gemini's timezone converter turned 3 p.m. in New York into 3 p.m. in London instead of 8 p.m., which Phillips calls a serious problem for a tool whose whole job is converting times, while Claude's version got it right.