MakeUseOf swapped four security subscriptions for free tools, and the three quoted prices came to about $315 a year

Four renewals audited Microsoft Defender takes the antivirus slot on Windows, KeePassXC takes the password slot at $35.88 a year saved, WireGuard takes the VPN slot for reaching your own network, and Restic takes backup, with the cost of each swap stated plainly: you now own the syncing, the storage, and the restore test.

Included in the free plan XDA's Hamlin Rozario saves repeated blocks of text as snippets that expand with dynamic placeholders for the date, the time, and the clipboard, builds quicklinks that jump to a site, file, folder, or a search inside an app, and installs community extensions for Notion, Slack, Spotify, and 1Password from inside the launcher, while the AI pieces (Screen Awareness, Quick AI, and Quick Fix) need Raycast Pro, listed on the official pricing page at $10 a month or $96 a year.

One Android setting How-To Geek's Arol Wright switches Private DNS to a named provider hostname, dns.google, one.one.one.one, dns.quad9.net, or dns.adguard-dns.com, which wraps every lookup in the same kind of encryption that protects HTTPS websites, though the piece is equally plain that it does not hide your IP address, it is no substitute for a VPN, and some hotel and corporate networks block the port it relies on and drop you back to unencrypted DNS.

Everything else, tapped Android Police's Anu Joy opens Google Wallet, taps the plus for Add to Wallet, chooses Everything else, photographs or picks an image of a library card, gym membership, insurance slip, or hotel confirmation, corrects whatever the scan misread, and gives it a name, marking the sensitive ones private so they need biometric unlock, with the limit stated outright: a photographed pass is not an official replacement for the document you still have to carry.

Switch on notification history MakeUseOf's Oluwademilade Afolabi turns on Settings, Notifications, Notification history, shares a saved Wi-Fi network by QR code from its own page, keeps Google Maps Timeline as the record of where the phone has been, pulls older copies from the keyboard's clipboard, checks Now Playing history on a Pixel, and saves the parking marker with a note for the garage level, with the catch that notification history holds nothing from before you switch it on.