Day: February 28, 2022

Considering how often we all send email, and how stuffed our collective inboxes are, you probably already know it’s critical to make sure you don’t miss important messages or let them linger too long without responding. Luckily, there are plenty of tools to make wrangling your inbox a bit easier. 

These extensions and tools can help, whether you need to make sure that message to the boss doesn’t contain any spelling errors, your email to the family doesn’t sound too defensive, or your next client pitch has as many emoji in it as it needs.

Bring the Emoji

Imagine your favorite translation engine but with emoji instead of a foreign language. That’s the promise of EmojiTranslate and it does a fine job (even if there are occasional inconsistencies with the results).

With email, like any text, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this tool will help your messages strike a good balance. Just make sure you’re using it with the right audience. There’s a time and a place for emoji.

Type out your text, click the conversion button, and you get the emoji translation below, ready for you to cut and paste. While you might not want to translate emails in their entirety, emoji can certainly make those messages more fun to read.

Stick to the Point

If you have a tendency to ramble, Hemingway tries to directly counter that instinct—and yes, it is named after the famous writer known for the simplicity of his prose.

Compose your digital missives inside the Hemingway editor and you’ll be alerted to issues with adverbs, passive voice, hard-to-read sentences, and complex words that can be replaced by a simpler alternative.

As Hemingway himself once said of a fellow writer: “He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” If that’s the approach you want to take with your email, this will help.

Check Spelling and Grammar

Grammarly is one of the most popular writing aid plug-ins. The tool flags spelling and grammar mistakes in a discreet but authoritative way. There are extensions for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Slack, and more, so the tool works just about everywhere and on virtually every website with a text box.

As well as the basics, Grammarly can make suggestions about the clarity and tone of your writing, helping you get the point across in the best possible way, as well as making sure messages are free from typos and other errors.

In the Gothenburg of the 1980s, decades before Tomas Härenstam would become CEO of the tabletop role-playing game company Free League Publishing, he discovered American games in a hobby shop. “I was completely blown away as a big comic book nerd,” he admits. Although Sweden has a rich and storied history of tabletop role-playing, often the most recognizable worlds and characters come from further West. Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Marvel superheroes all could be played in licensed ’80s TTRPGs.

These licensed games not only shaped the role-playing mechanics we see today, they created many fond memories for players like Härenstam—you could bring Hollywood to your home in a rule book long after the film left your theaters and you memorized all the famous quotes with your friends.

The tabletop gaming industry has transformed since the ’80s, and if tabletop players vote with their dollar, there’s never been a better time than the present day to play in licensed games. After Free League Publishing worked with analog game designer Francesco Nepitello and intellectual property holders to Kickstart The One Ring, a Lord of the Rings TTRPG, it broke records to become the highest-funded game of its kind in history, raising nearly $2 million. That high-water mark lasted only six months before Magpie Games raised $10 million for an Avatar: The Last Airbender  TTRPG (they were expecting around $3 million, Dicebreaker reports). Trade publication ICv2 estimates 2020 TTRPG sales at $105 million and growing rapidly.

While Francesco Nepitello developed the newest, expanded edition of The One Ring, Härenstam and his team were releasing modules for their newest licensed game—an Alien adaptation—and secretly began to write and test what Härenstam believes is their biggest acquisition yet, the intellectual property rights to a Blade Runner game. “Blade Runner is more of a state of mind, a place to go, more than a story,” Härenstam tells WIRED. It’s a great fit for an improvisational, setting-driven medium like a TTRPG. But designing these Hollywood games often requires Hollywood rules, and a new set of relationships to property brokers, cross-platform world-builders, setting designers, and custodians of cult classic films.

Licenses have an initial cost of purchase, followed by a royalty to the license owners, alongside the tick-tick-ticking countdown until a license has to be renewed. Renewals, Härenstam explains, create situations where designers are never entirely confident in the future of their game in the ever changing world of big media spending. Will an IP holder let all the licenses expire so they can negotiate rights at a higher price after a reboot is released? Will a movie studio restrict designers to only exploring a fantasy world after their movie ended, so that the early lore can be saved for prequels?

One time passwords, otherwise known as OTPs, are great for keeping your accounts safe. They force anyone looking to sign into an app or site to not only know the username and password, but also provide a one-time code from a trusted device. Bu if you’ve ever received your OTPs via text, you know they can start to add up and get cluttered. Fortunately, Google is finally offering a solution to the problem.

What’s the problem with OTPs?

OTPs are fantastic, but they serve no purpose once they’re used (hence the name). If you’re constantly signing into accounts with 2FA, for example, you’ll receive these one-time passcodes frequently, use them, then…leave the text alone forever. After all, the only thing more annoying than a sea of useless codes is deleting these codes by hand, one after another, every time you sign in to your accounts.

How to delete temporary passwords on Google Messages

Google is beginning to roll out a new update for its main messaging app, Google Messages. The big change with this update is conversation categories, which uses AI to automatically sort your various text threads into groups. Right now, those groups consist of “All,” showing you all of your threads; “Personal,” which shows your texts from friends and family; and “Business,” which collects texts from work and other more formal contacts.

However, there’s a new setting buried in the update that isn’t getting much attention. If you head to “Message organization,” you’ll see a new option for “Auto-delete OTPs after 24 hours.” All you need to do is enable the feature, and your 2FA codes will remove themselves from your phone 24 hours after they arrive.

24 hours is still pretty generous; with 2FA especially, codes are only useful for a very short period of time—typically minutes instead of hours. If you don’t enter the code in time, it expires, and you need to generate a new one in order to proceed. Still, at least by this time tomorrow, that code you generated will be removed from your phone, ready to make room for the next code, and the one after that.

How to download the latest Google Messages update

This feature, as well as the entire conversation categories feature, isn’t fully rolled out yet. As such, you’ll need to wait for it to hit your device. To check, download the latest version of Google Messages from the Play Store, or sideload the app from APK Mirror.

[Android Police]

The Transwing is an awesomely unique aircraft that’s part VTOL and part traditional airplane. The craft begins its flights with its wings tucked, in VTOL mode, eliminating the need for a long runway. Once it reaches the desired altitude, the wings thrust forward and transforming it into a more traditional fixed-wing aircraft. When it reaches its destination, the Transwing then contracts its wings and begins the vertical landing process in a similar fashion to its takeoff. The Transwing could end up being a better alternative to more traditional aircraft thanks to its superior agility, smaller airport footprint, and its ability to handle a greater payload than many similar craft. 

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