Advertisements—sometimes prompts to do something that would financially benefit Microsoft and sometimes actual paid advertisements—are showing up all over Windows 11. Start menu ads are rolling out to all users this month, taking the shape of "Recommended" applications you haven't installed. Ads also briefly showed up in File Explorer, though this was apparently unintentional. And there have long been calls to action on the lock screen and in the settings app. It's a mess.
We've told you how to manually turn off all of Microsoft's ads in Windows 11, but it's a lot of digging around in the settings. If you'd rather not do that, an app called OFGB can do it for you. This free and open source application can quickly change various registry settings to disable those ads—all you have to do is click a few checkboxes.
To get started, simply download the latest release from Github. There are two versions—one tiny one that will only work if you've already installed .NET 8.0 and another massive one that has .NET bundled. Use whichever sounds easier to you.
Open the application and you'll see a bunch of checkboxes allowing you to disable different features. This includes the infamous ads in the File Explorer, the ads on the lock screen, the "Suggested content" in the Settings app, the general tips and tricks that pop up while you're using Windows, the Windows "Welcome Experience," the optional tracking tool that enables "more personal" ads, the "Tailored Experience" feature that tracks your website browsing to show product recommendations, and the "recommended" ads that show up in the start menu.
It's honestly a lot of stuff to have to disable just to get a clean operating system, but with this application, at least it's all in one place. And hey: It's easier than wiping your computer just to install an actually clean version of Windows 11, so that's a plus.
One of the most under-appreciated Mac features is the services menu, which you can find by right-clicking just about anything—highlighted text, say, or any image. Hover over the "Services" section and you'll see a bunch of quick actions. You can find this same collection in the menu bar: just click the name of the application that's currently open and hover over Services.
Credit: Justin Pot
There are all kinds of useful options here. You can, for example, look up a word in the dictionary, or add a bit of text to your to-do list. You can open a URL using IINA, a great video player for Mac. You get the idea: you can automate whatever it is that is selected. You can take control of which things do, and do not, show up by open System Settings and heading to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services. From here you can check or uncheck items. You can also set custom keyboard shortcuts for these services.
Credit: Justin Pot
Where things get really fun, though, is when you look into the custom services you can download. Here are a few of the best apps I could find that add cool features to the services menu on your Mac.
Dictater reads text to you out loud
Credit: Justin Pot
The Mac comes with a built-in service for reading text, but I don't really like it very much. Dictater, in my experience, works a lot better. With this application you can highlight any text, in any app, and have it read out loud. There's a pop-up window with buttons to play and jump forward and backward, and an optional window you can open to see the text on screen as it is read. You can change the voice used in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content, if you like—I prefer to use one of the high-quality Siri voices.
CalcService does math
CalcService is a free download that lets you do math in any text field. With the app installed you can highlight any mathematical formula in any app—for example, (62*7)/4, and get an answer right in place, like this: (62*7)/4 = 108.5. It's magic, and even better once you create a keyboard shortcut for the feature.
WordService
Credit: Justin Pot
WordService comes as a free download from Devon Technologies, the same company that made CalcService. This one offers all kinds of tools for working with text, the most obviously useful of which allows you to get a word count and character count for any text you highlight. This is useful for all kinds of things, from composing social media posts to long-form writing. But there's so much more here to dig into. There are actions for converting text that's in all caps to lowercase, and vice versa. There are actions for inserting the current time, or the current date. And there are actions for adding or removing smart quotes from a block of text. If you publish things online regularly, this is a good collection of tools to have around.
SearchLink quickly looks for a link and adds it
SearchLink is a little harder to explain but I love it. Basically, you can highlight any text, trigger the service, and the tool will automatically search the web for the term and add a markdown-formatted link. So, for example, here's a text document with my name in it:
Credit: Justin Pot
If I run SearchLink on the highlighted text, which is my name, the document looks like this:
Credit: Justin Pot
The link has been added, without me having to open a browser. This can save you a lot of time while writing, assuming that you do that writing in markdown. And there are more advanced features you can dig into, including one that will fill in all the links in a document. It's a great tool to have around.
Shortcuts can work this way too
Credit: Justin Pot
Didn't quite find the app you want? You could try building one yourself. Any shortcut you build in Apple Shortcuts can function as a service. Just make sure Use as Quick Action and Services Menu are highlighted in the Shortcut details pane. Check out our list of the most helpful Shortcuts on macOS if you need a few ideas of how to put this to work.
One of the better recent features in macOS is Live Text, which allows you to copy text from images on your Mac in Preview, Quick Look, or Safari. It's honestly kinda magical—any text inside an image can be highlighted and copied, just like text on a website or in a document. The problem: this feature only works for images files, not videos, and you can't use it to copy text from a shared presentation in a meeting unless you take a screenshot and then extract the text from that.
Enter TRex, a free application for Mac that speeds that workaround up. It works similarly to Text Extractor for Windows: Select the area of the screen with the text you want, regardless of whether that text is in an image, video, or presentation. Any text in the area of the screen you select is instantly converted to text and copied to your clipboard. This functionality comes as a cost: TRex is $8 in the Mac app store, or is free if you download it from Github.
After installing, you'll get a brief tutorial on how the app works, and the icon will appear in your menu bar. You can trigger the application from there, or set optional keyboard shortcuts in the settings. The app itself uses the same crosshairs you see when you take a screenshot on your Mac, but instead of creating a screenshot, it looks for text that it can recognize with optical character recognition (OCR). That text is then instantly copied to the clipboard.
Only a handful of languages are supported right now—English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. The application can automatically detect the language of the text you're copying if you want, but it performs a little better if you pick a default in the settings.
I tested it out a few times, and while not perfect, it consistently proved easier than re-typing text myself, and saved me a step over the usual "screenshot + OCR" process. If you find certain words are consistently misspelled—an uncommon name, for example—you can add that word to the "Custom Words" tab in the settings.
Credit: Justin Pot
Perhaps the most unique feature is found in the automations tab. You can set the application to automatically recognize and open both URLs and QR codes, if you want. You can also automatically trigger a URL scheme or even an Apple Shortcut. It's an amazingly flexible program—you can set it up to send the converted text anywhere you like.
Even without setting up automations, though, TRex is the quickest way to copy text from places on your screen that otherwise can't be easily copied from. Heck, at this point some websites even block you from copying altogether—but TRex works around that too. It's worth the download.
Do you sometimes miss the doorbell, or a knock at the door, because you're wearing headphones? Not everyone knows this but there's a built-in feature for recognizing sounds in the iPhone settings. By default this feature, which is in the accessibility section of System Settings, gives you a notification every time a given sound is heard, but you can take things even further by triggering a Shortcut.
Note that Apple's documentation clearly states this feature shouldn't be relied on "to recognize sounds in circumstances where you may be harmed or injured, in high-risk or emergency situations, or for navigation." If the stakes are lower than that, though, it might keep you from missing something.
To get started open System Settings and head to Accessibility > Sound Recognition. Turn the feature on.
Credit: Justin Pot
From here you can toggle which sounds you want the phone to passively listen for. The default list includes alarms, pets, and various household sounds like a kettle boiling or a knock at the door. You can enable sounds and get a notification every time your iPhone "notices" the sound. You can also train your phone to recognize your specific appliances and alarms. The process, which is guided, means triggering the alarm multiple times so your phone can learn to recognize it.
As I mentioned before, you can also use this feature to trigger Apple Shortcuts. The only limit here is the shortcut you manage to build. You could, for example, keep track of how many times you boil a kettle of water every day, or how often the neighbor's dog barks. Or you could, like I did, just set your phone to talk to you every time a fairly common thing happens because you think that's funny.
To get started open the Shortcuts application on your phone and open the Automations tab. Scroll down to near the bottom and you'll see Sound Recognition. You can choose which sound triggers the automation and which shortcut you want to run.
Credit: Justin Pot
Note that you can add as many automations as you like, meaning you could trigger different shortcuts for different sounds. Use this new power wisely.
I've had an e-ink tablet—specifically, the reMarkable 2—for a couple of years now. There are a few products like it on the market: devices with black and white, Kindle-like e-ink screens and some sort of stylus that gives you the ability to take notes and mark up existing PDFs and e-books. They exist somewhere between an iPad and a pad of paper.
Most of the time when I use the reMarkable in public, people don't realize, or don't care, that it isn't just a pad of paper. I love that—part of the appeal is that this sort of device comes between me and the people around me less than an iPad or laptop would. Those who are familiar with the e-ink tablet category, however, often do notice, and want to know: How do you like it? What do you use it for? Can it completely replace something like an iPad? And that's what I want to talk about today.
My answer to such questions, typically, is that e-ink tablets are very good at replacing paper-based workflows, and very bad at replacing computer-based ones. On some level you have to think about it less as a computing device and more as a pad of paper with infinite pages. It's not quite that simple, of course; most e-ink tablets sync your notes with other devices and convert your handwriting into plain text. Some can even run apps. But in my experience, an e-ink tablet works best when you treat it as virtual paper.
That limited functionality doesn't mean they cost less than a tablet. The reMarkable 2 starts at $400, which isn't cheap. The Chinese company Only BOOX is well known in the space, and sells e-ink tablets starting at around $400 (for the Note Air 3). The Kindle Scribe is a little cheaper, at $240. Meanwhile, the iPad starts at $350 and is arguably more capable. All of this to say, if you're buying an e-ink tablet, it needs to be for a specific reason.
People who love paper know that lined, blank, and gridded paper all have different uses. So do dedicated notebooks and day planners. My favorite part of the Remarkable is that this single device offers all of these types of paper, in one place, and that I can add even more flexibility by finding purpose-built PDFs. With that in mind, here are the things I tend to use my e-ink tablet for the most.
Brainstorming
Almost all of my writing workflow happens on my computer, with one main exception: brainstorming. Whether it's trying to come up with new article ideas or thinking through the way an article should flow, I find that sitting down at a table with a pen and paper works better than sitting at my laptop.
There are a couple reasons for this. First, it's too easy to be distracted at my computer. Another, though, is that brainstorming is less linear than writing, and non-linear thinking is easier for me to do with a pen. I can write things wherever I want on the page, draw little arrows connecting them, and generally just make a mess. It's this combination of focus and open-ended writing that works for me, and e-ink is perfect for it.
Reading and marking up documents
Every once in a while something I'm working on requires that I parse an academic text or a dense article. There's nothing stopping me from doing such reading on a computer, but I find I grasp the content better if I read away from my laptop. At one point in my life I would print out documents out for exactly this reason, but now I just use my e-ink tablet. I send the PDF to the device and switch between the highlighter and pen to mark it up. When I get to my computer all my annotations are synced over.
Taking notes during a meeting
Once upon a time I was the person in the corner of the meeting constantly typing away. I'm a loud typer, so that was distracting for everyone, and it also meant there was a screen between me and the other people in the room. A e-ink tablet doesn't feel tas obtrusive. I can occasionally jot things down while also feeling fully present in the room. My notes are waiting for me when I get back to my computer, and I can even convert them quickly to text.
Planning my day
Credit: Justin Pot
Don't get me wrong: I love digital to-do list and calendar apps, and couldn't live without them. When it comes to blocking out the current day's and week's projects, however, they never really click. That's why I love the day planner templates in the Remarkable—they allow me to quickly block out what I'm going to work on and when. There is something about physically writing this on a calendar that works for me. This process got even better when I found this PDF day planner, which uses the link functionality in PDFs to make it easy to jump between days, weeks, and months, and even notes that are tied to a particular day.
Playing Dungeons & Dragons
Credit: Justin Pot
I love playing DND and hate every smartphone-, tablet-, and laptop-based system for managing a character. Try as they may, none are quite as flexible as a paper character sheet. But paper has some clear downsides, mostly because I tend to scuff them up so much I need to replace them every few sessions. My Remarkable doesn't have this problem, and also makes it easy to quickly add more pages when I want to write something else down. I even created a separate document with all of my character's race, class, and spell information, saving me the trouble of digging through the Player's Handbook constantly during the play session.
If you want to do anything else—all the stuff you'd usually use your tablet for—e-ink tablets range from adequate to incapable. There are a few obvious downsides: There's no color (unless you pay through the nose color a color e-ink tablet, but the tech definitely isn't quite there yet, producing colors that look muddy and dull). You generally can't watch videos or play games on them (though newer tablets with higher refresh rates make this technically possible, it's never pleasant). But they also aren't a full replacement for a note-taking application.
Anything you want search or indexing for
I journal every day, but I don't use the reMarkable to create my entries. Part of this is habit: I've been using Obsidian as my journal for years, and I don't want to switch. But I also really enjoy being able to search, and index, my journal, and I haven't found a great way to do that with an e-ink journal—none that I know of can index handwriting by default. You can work around this by converting your handwriting to text every day, granted, but at that point you might as well just type things out in the first place.
Integrating with other apps
Many e-ink tablets can't open apps or even browse the web. There are some exceptions that can run apps—the Boox Note Air 3, which runs Android, is among them—but even in these cases, the experience is going to be lessened by the inherent limitations of e-ink. Put simply, scrolling and browsing isn't exactly sleek on these devices, and you'll experience problems like grainy images, lag, and ghosting. They work best when they're being used like a sheet of paper.
Now, limited app support isn't all bad—a big part of the appeal of e-ink, for me, is that the distractions of the internet aren't as readily accessible. But if you're trying to decide between an e-ink tablet and an iPad, and access to your usual applications is a priority, you should get the iPad.
Quickly sharing your files
If you type something in a document, you can quickly email or text it to someone, or even post it in a Google Doc. You can kind of do this with an e-ink tablet, but you've got got to use one of two workarounds. There's the built-in optical character recognition (which, you are going to need to clean up whatever it outputs first—typos are common) or you can just send an image of your handwritten text. Neither is ideal, and in both cases, you're probably going to need to do so from a computer. It's probably easier just to start on a computer.
None of these cons are to suggest e-ink tablets aren't useful or that the downsides I've noted are universal. It's more that they're only useful in particular context, and that these are the contexts I keep in mind. Your experience may vary. But hopefully reading my thoughts give you the context you need before dropping big bucks on a device that may not do what you dream of it doing.
Every once and a while you find an app that does one very specific thing very well. Timestory is just such an app: It allows you to quickly visualize any timeline. This can be useful for viewing history in context, which makes it a great learning tool if you're, say, studying history. But Timestory is also useful for general planning. You can use it to visualize all the steps necessary for a longer term project, and even include multiple proposals on the same timeline.
Timestory is made by a single developer, Aaron Trickey, and lovingly crafted for the Mac and iPad. The software is not exactly cheap: The Mac version costs $40 right now (up front—there's no ongoing subscription), while the iPad version is the same, with the option to buy a yearlong subscription for $15. There's a free one-week trial for the Mac version and a two-week trial for the iPad version, meaning whichever version you're using, you can get a feel for the application before you decide whether you need to pay for it. But if you do, I think you'll find it is well worth it.
Credit: Justin Pot
Creating a timeline can be a little tricky to get started, but for the most part it's all about adding events. These can be ongoing "spans" with a start and an end date, or they can be "Points" that happen on a specific date.
You can create an event either by clicking on the timeline or by using the "Quick Entry" button, which I personally find a little more precise. You can set custom colors and icons for every entry. You can also attach an image to any item on the timeline, allowing you to add some visual context.
I could have kept adding shows and movies all day but at some point I needed to actually submit this article.Credit: Justin Pot
If this all sounds confusing, I recommend checking out the built-in tutorial documents, which include a couple of project management examples and a sample history of the timeline of Mars. They'll give you an idea of what this application is capable of.
Once created, you can export your timelines to PNG or PDF, allowing you to share them directly with anyone or embed them into presentations or documents. It's not an application most people will use every day, granted, but when it comes in handy, it will come in really handy.
Ever wish a certain window could be pinned above all other ones? Or that you could see through a window to whatever's behind it? A free and open source Windows utility called MenuTools lets you do that and more.
After installing the program you only need to right-click the bar at the top of any window and you'll find more options. My personal favorite is the ability to make any window transparent. This is occasionally useful, probably, but mostly I think it's neat.
You can also pin any window to the top—a feature that has much more obvious utility. You could pin a notepad to the top while a video plays in fullscreen, for example. This stacks well with the transparency—you can still sort of see what's going on behind your note-taking window.
Credit: Justin Pot
And there's one more feature: the ability to minimize any window to the system tray instead of to the taskbar. Many applications offer a feature like this, but with MenuTools you can apply it to any application. This is perfect if you want to keep an application running in the background without it taking up any visual space in your workflow.
Credit: Justin Pot
There's one last feature in the menu: the ability to change the process priority of the application. This is a feature you could otherwise only find deep in the Task Manager, and that's for a good reason: Messing with priority levels can cause instability, and isn't really necessary most of the time. I would strongly recommend you not use this feature unless you're clear on what it means. If you want a certain application to have priority access to the CPU, however, the option is there.
MenuTools isn't new: it's been around since 2014 and was last updated in 2020. The developer is still answering questions on Github, though, and it works well with Windows 11.
We've talked more than once about the pomodoro technique, which is built around intensely focusing on a task for 25 minutes and taking a five minute break. There's a lot of software out there for the job, but most of them live on only one of your devices.
Not Focus Timer, an indie app that's been around in various forms for eleven years. The current version works on every Apple platform: Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and even Vision Pro. Your settings—including the current timer—sync via iCloud, all without you having to do much of anything other than install the app on various platforms. It's very convenient, but it's not free: The app costs $40 per year for access on all platforms.
Credit: Justin Pot
That's a lot to pay for a timer, granted, but it is really nice having a Pomodoro timer that follows you everywhere. I, for example, like to get up and walk around the house during my breaks—with this application installed I can start my break on my laptop, get up, and get my "back to work" reminder on my phone.
Credit: Justin Pot
Meaningful Things, the Germany-based four-person team behind the application, offers updates constantly—basically any major Apple feature you can think of is offered. There are versions for Apple Watch and Vision Pro. There's a live activity for the iPhone app, meaning you'll see the realtime countdown on your phone's lock screen as soon as you start a session (even if you start that session on your Mac). There are a variety of widgets available for all platforms. There's extensive support for Apple Shortcuts. There's a menu bar icon for the Mac version.
Credit: Justin Pot
I could go on, but basically if you're the kind of person who likes to take advantage of the latest Apple features, this application has you covered. Focus Timer isn't going to be the perfect Pomodoro app for everyone—the price alone means some people aren't going to touch it—but I recommend at least giving the seven-day free trial a shot. It's rare to find something that works across devices this smoothly.
Most things are faster to do with the keyboard than with the mouse, but not every app is built with the keyboard in mind. That's where where Shortcat comes in. This free Mac application allows you to quickly search for and click things like buttons, links, and fields in applications, all in a few keystrokes. There's a bit of a learning curve, granted, but once you get past that it can speed up almost anything you do on your computer.
Shortcat is triggered with a keyboard shortcut—by default, CMD-Shift-Space. Trigger this shortcut and you'll see a search bar and yellow boxes with two-letter codes for everything in the menu bar and every clickable item in the current window.
Credit: Justin Pot
Search for the thing on the screen—either by typing the two-letter code or by just typing for the thing you're looking for. When you see the thing that you want to "click," simply hit enter—the result will be just as though you'd moved the mouse and clicked that item. You're not limited to clicking: you can double-click by hitting enter twice quickly or right-click by holding Control when you press enter.
Credit: Justin Pot
This works with native Mac applications, which is to be expected, but I was delighted to learn that it also works in web browsers. You can, for example, search for a link you want to open and then hit enter to open it.
Credit: Justin Pot
This works not only in the browser but in Electron apps. It's okay if you don't know what that means—this is relatively obscure stuff—but to oversimplify, Electron apps are basically just websites running in a dedicated browser. Slack works this way, as do a lot of applications at this point.
This is, admittedly, a niche application, but for me it scratches an itch. Keeping your hand on the keyboard is generally better ergonomically, and typically a lot faster, than reaching for the mouse. With Shortcat running I reach for the mouse a lot less, which I really enjoy.
Slack users across the web—on Mastodon, on Threads, and on Hackernews—have responded with alarm to an obscure privacy page that outlines the ways in which their Slack conversations, including DMs, are used to train what the Salesforce-owned company calls "Machine Learning" (ML) and "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) systems. The only way to opt out of these features is for the admin of your company's Slack setup to send an email to Slack requesting it be turned off.
The policy, which applies to all Slack instances—not just those that have opted into the Slack AI add-on—states that Slack systems "analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement."
So, basically, everything you type into Slack is used to train these systems. Slack states that data "will not leak across workspaces" and that there are "technical controls in place to prevent access." Even so, we all know that conversations with AI chatbots are not private, and it's not hard to imagine this going wrong somehow. Given the risk, the company must be offering something extremely compelling in return...right?
What are the benefits of letting Slack use your data to train AI?
The section outlining the potential benefits of Slack feeding all of your conversations into a large language model says this will allow the company to provide improved search results, better autocomplete suggestions, better channel recommendations, and (I wish I was kidding) improved emoji suggestions. If this all sounds useful to you, great! I personally don't think any of these things—except possibly better search—will do much to make Slack more useful for getting work done.
The emoji thing, particularly, is absurd. Slack is literally saying that they need to feed your conversations into an AI system so that they can provide better emoji recommendations. Consider this actual quote, which I promise you is from Slack's website and not The Onion:
Slack might suggest emoji reactions to messages using the content and sentiment of the message, the historic usage of the emoji and the frequency of use of the emoji in the team in various contexts. For instance, if 🎉 is a common reaction to celebratory messages in a particular channel, we will suggest that users react to new, similarly positive messages with 🎉.
I am overcome with awe just thinking about the implications of this incredible technology, and am no longer concerned about any privacy implications whatsoever. AI is truly the future of communication.
How to opt your company out of Slack's AI training
The bad news is that you, as an individual user, cannot opt out of Slack using your conversation history to train its large language model. That can only be done by a Slack admin, which in most cases is going to be someone in the IT department of your company. And there's no button in the settings for opting out—admins need to send an email asking for it to happen.
Here's Slack exact language on the matter:
If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slack global models, you can opt out. To opt out, please have your org, workspace owners or primary owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com with your workspace/org URL and the subject line ‘Slack global model opt-out request’. We will process your request and respond once the opt-out has been completed.
This smells like a dark pattern—making something annoying to do in order to discourage people from doing it. Hopefully the company makes the opt-out process easier in the wake of the current earful they're getting from customers.
A reminder that Slack DMs aren't private
I'll be honest, I'm a little amused at the prospect of my Slack data being used to improve search and emoji suggestions for my former employers. At previous jobs, I frequently sent DMs to work friends filled with negativity about my manager and the company leadership. I can just picture Slack recommending certain emojis every time a particular CEO is mentioned.
Funny as that idea is, though, the whole situation serves as a good reminder to employees everywhere: Your Slack DMs aren't actually private. Nothing you say on Slack—even in a direct message—is private. Slack uses that information to train tools like this, yes, but the company you work for can also access those private messages pretty easily. I highly recommend using something not controlled by your company if you need to shit talk said company. Might I suggest Signal?
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