Five Android automations you can build tonight without code, from a phone that silences itself to a saved parking spot

Rules first, app second How-To Geek's Joe Fedewa starts with what the phone already does, an alert mode that changes itself on a Wi-Fi network or at a location, under Settings, System, Rules on a Pixel or in Modes and Routines on a Samsung Galaxy, then NFC tags for study, sleep, and driving modes, and a Galaxy rule under Settings, Connections, Wi-Fi, Intelligent Wi-Fi that drops Wi-Fi when you leave home; the last two run on MacroDroid, a text to one person when you leave work and the one he calls the most involved of the set, a parking note triggered by the car Bluetooth disconnecting that saves the GPS spot and opens it in Google Maps, and the limitation he states plainly is that Samsung leads here, leaving Pixel owners on third-party apps and unable to use NFC tags with the built-in Rules at all.

Four plugins, one vault XDA's Parth Shah spent a month folding separate apps back into Obsidian's own parts, using Daily Notes with the Calendar plugin in place of a planner, the Kanban plugin for Trello-style boards of columns and cards, Canvas for mapping ideas out visually, and Beautitab for a start page with a search bar that he says almost makes the vault feel like his own private search engine, all dressed in the Encore theme; two limits belong on the label, that he still sends team projects to proper collaboration tools and keeps this setup for personal work, and that he is openly uneasy about Beautitab, a plugin that has not been updated in two years.

Label, then archive XDA's Mahnoor Faisal treats the main Notes screen as an inbox, adding the relevant label to each note and archiving it so it leaves the view without leaving the search, and leans on a search that filters by type, label, and color and by categories Keep recognizes on its own, including books, music, travel, places, TV, and food, and that reads text inside images too; the rest is plumbing already sitting there, since Copy to Google Docs turns a note into a document and Keep opens in the Docs sidebar to drag notes from, Keep reminders feed into Google Tasks and surface on Calendar, and a voice note is saved with its transcription; the one piece to wait for is Keep Live, the feature meant to structure messy thoughts, which she says she does not have access to yet.

Two toggles, two minutes How-To Geek's Goran Damnjanovic points at Energy Saver, which Windows 11 can leave switched on permanently, and at the Best power efficiency power mode, a pair that together hold CPU clock speeds down, slow app launches, weaken gaming performance, and can drop the display to 60Hz even with the machine plugged in; the fix is to turn the Energy Saver tile off in Quick Settings, or clear Always use energy saver under System, Power and battery, Energy saver, then set Power mode to Best performance on mains and Balanced on battery; the tradeoff is real and worth keeping in view, because those same settings are what buy you quieter fans, less heat, and a longer afternoon away from the charger.