Tag: Diy

Find your ‘Spotify Wrapped’ on more of your favorite apps

The end of every year is a time to dream about the future and reflect on the past, but you’re not the only one looking back. The apps that have kept you company over the last 12 months have been logging your listening and viewing habits, and stand ready to present your year in review. You might find that these apps know you better than you know yourself.

Spotify Wrapped

Spotify is rather proud of Wrapped, so you should find this end-of-year summary feature promoted heavily on the front page of the Spotify app when you open it during December. If it doesn’t show up immediately, tap the search button at the bottom, enter “wrapped”, and you should find what you’re after.

The main part of Spotify Wrapped works as a story-style slideshow. It will show you how much time you spent listening, your top songs, the music moods and genres you focused on, your favorite artists, and various other statistics. You’ll also get two playlists featuring your favorite songs and artists of the year.

YouTube Music Recap

YouTube Music's 2021 Recap
If you listen to an artist for exactly 2,021 minutes, you get… nothing special. David Nield

If you’re more of a YouTube Music fan, you can still get an end-of-year review, but it’s called Recap instead of Wrapped. At some point during December, it should appear as a large box on the Home tab, and you can tap Explore Now to view it. If you don’t see the box, tap your profile picture (top right), then 2021 Recap.

[Related: The best tips and tricks for YouTube Music]

YouTube Music will show you a few highlights from the year, including the artist and song you listened to most. Tap the play button under the main 2021 Recap heading to play some of your favorite tracks from the past 12 months.

Apple Music Replay

Apple Music listeners, meanwhile, have Replay. At some point during December, it will show up under Top Picks on the Listen Now tab in the Music app, and you can tap the 2021 Replay card to see a playlist of your most listened-to songs of the year.

You can find more detailed stats by heading to https://music.apple.com/replay on the web. Once there, click Get Your Replay Mix to see your most-played artists and songs, and to access the same playlist you get on mobile (plus your Replay playlists from previous years).

Instagram Playback

When it comes to social media, you can use your Stories to take a look back at what’s happened on Instagram for you over the last 12 months. In December, you should see a big Playback banner appear in the app when you open it, and you can tap View Playback to see it. Otherwise, you can find it by viewing someone else’s year in review and tapping on the 2021 sticker.

Playback will show you 10 highlights from your Stories over the past year, but Instagram doesn’t share how they’re picked. You can, however, edit the picks—either tap and hold on a Story and then select the trash can icon to remove an image or video, or tap the plus button to add one. You can also share the Playback reel with your Instagram contacts, if you’d like to.

Facebook Year Together

Facebook's Year Together year in review feature.

Keep interacting with Christopher and maybe he’ll let you ride in his sweet car. David Nield

Facebook has a year in review feature like Instagram, as you would expect considering they’re both run by the same company, Meta. You’ll find it under a Year Together heading in your main feed when you open the app, and it’ll be split up into sections such as friendships and places.

Tap on any of the sections to view your highlights, and use the Share button to post what you’ve watched to your profile for everyone else to see. If you can’t see the Year Together card, try searching Facebook for “year together Facebook 2021”, and you should see the option to create your own.

Snapchat Year in Review

Snapchat lets you look back on your year in review too: You may see a notification about it pop up inside the app, but you can also access it from the main camera screen by tapping the Memories button (the icon of two pictures to the left of the shutter button).

Other apps

Not every app has a year in review feature: After showing personal recaps in 2020, TikTok settled for a general overview this year, for example. It’s also worth bearing in mind that some of these highlights packages can only be viewed for a limited amount of time, so if you can’t find yours, it might be too late.

But plenty of apps let you look back at your viewing or listening history even if they don’t do year-end roundups. In the YouTube app, for example, tap Library and History to see what you’ve been watching; in the Netflix app, tap your profile picture (top right), then Account, your account name, and View (next to Viewing activity). There are also many ways to manually record the content you’re consuming.

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Level up your browsing with these five Safari tips

This story has been updated. It was first published on November 18, 2019.

Safari just keeps getting better: The default browser for Apple’s operating systems adds new features every year, so you could be missing out on some cool functionality if you’re not up to speed with everything it can do. See how many of these power user tips make a difference to your productivity in Apple’s web browser.

Check for weak passwords

Safari is concerned about your password security. It will warn you if it detects that you’re using the same password again and again, or if it thinks your credentials are too short or too simple.

To run a password audit, launch the browser, open the Safari menu, and choose Preferences. Switch to the Passwords tab to view a list of all the login details Safari has saved for you. You’ll see yellow exclamation marks next to all the passwords the program isn’t particularly happy with.

[Related: How to choose safe passwords—and remember them, too]

Click on any of the individual list entries to get more details. If the browser has identified a reused password, you’ll see the various sites where you’ve signed in with it. Where applicable, you’ll also get a link to the relevant site so you can change your login details straight away.

If you’re struggling to come up with unique, strong passwords, Safari can suggest them for you. Just click on the key icon that appears next to the password field whenever you’re signing up for a new service, and choose Suggest New Password.

Switch to mobile (and back)

You may want to carry your desktop browsing session over to an iPhone or an iPad as you leave the house, for example, or slump onto the sofa. Safari makes it easy for you as long as you’re signed in to the same Apple ID on all your devices.

On your Mac, open the Apple menu, then System Preferences. Under General, make sure the Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices box at the bottom of the dialog window is checked. On iOS and iPadOS, go to Settings, then General and AirPlay & Handoff to enable the feature.

With those options enabled, any webpage open on your Mac in Safari will also appear at the bottom of the app switcher screen on your iPad or iPhone (swipe up from the bottom of the screen or double-tap the Home button to see it). Any pages open on your mobile devices, on the other hand, will appear as an icon in your Mac’s Dock.

What’s more, if you’re using iCloud across all your devices, the tab overview screen will display all the tabs you have open on your various computers, tablets, and phones. To find it on an iPhone, for example, tap the tab overview button in Safari (the four squares in the top right), scroll down, and you’ll see a list of web pages open in Safari on your Mac.

Rearrange your tabs

You may have more tabs open than you really should, but Safari can help you get them into some kind of order. Open up the Window menu, choose Arrange Tabs By, and you’ll be able to pick from Title or Website.

The first option arranges your tabs in alphabetical order based on the title of the page, while the second arranges them in alphabetical order based on the name of the website.

Sorting by website is probably the most useful of the two, especially if you’ve got a pile of tabs open and want to keep pages of a particular type (like Twitter profiles or Google search results) together in the stack.

Another way to get a handle on all the tabs you’ve got open is to go to View, then Show Tab Overview (or click the button showing four squares on the right-hand end of the toolbar). There you’ll see all your tabs laid out as thumbnails, making them a little bit easier to navigate around. Click on any tab to jump to it.

You might have left Safari exactly as it was when you first bought your Mac—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but you can seriously boost your productivity on the web by bringing the tools you use most often closer to hand.

Specifically, you can tweak the Safari toolbar so the options you need most are within easy reach. Right-click on a blank area of the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar to get started.

It’s then just a question of dragging icons to and from the toolbar, and also along the toolbar to reposition them. You’ve got icons for sharing pages, accessing tabs synced to iCloud, showing or hiding the sidebar, zooming in and out of webpages, and more.

The default icon set is at the bottom—drag it up to the top to put Safari back the way it was when macOS was first installed. When you’ve got the browser toolbar looking the way you want, click Done to confirm.

Clean up your history

Online privacy is something you should always keep in mind, and it’s something Safari is quite good at. Case in point: The way it automatically deletes records of sites you’ve visited and files you’ve downloaded after a certain amount of time has passed.

To take advantage of the feature, open the Safari menu, then choose Preferences. If you switch to the General tab, you’ll see a Remove history items menu. Entries can be wiped from the record after a day, a week, a fortnight, a month, or a year—your choice. Alternatively, you can leave them all in place and delete them manually when necessary.

[Related: How to clear your web history in any browser]

Further down, there’s a Remove download list items option that works in the same way. It doesn’t delete the downloaded files, though, just Safari’s records of you having downloaded them. The options here are after one day, when you quit Safari, when the file is downloaded, or manually.

To clear your browsing history manually, open up the History menu in Safari, then choose the Clear History option. Safari’s records can be wiped for the last hour, the last day, the last couple of days, or completely.

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Massachusetts Passes Right-To-Repair Protections

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CAT SCAPE/Shutterstock

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Independent repair shops and aftermarket parts retailers have been pitted against major automakers and their dealer networks in Massachusetts for years. The state has served as the primary battleground for right-to-repair legislation that would permit/prohibit customers and independent entities from working on or modifying vehicles. However, a major victory came on Tuesday after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure updating existing right-to-repair laws to give vehicle owners and small shops better access to vehicle data typically reserved for industry giants.

The resulting decision gives consumers substantially more control over what’s done with the data being harvested by the industry (often without their knowledge) and frees up their options on who to go to when their vehicle needs fixing.

Full disclosure: this is one of those topics where I fall so hard on one side of this issue that I have to admit to my bias upfront to avoid looking like I’m acting in bad faith. I staunchly support right-to-repair laws in all forms and find the industry opposition to them reprehensible. Owners should absolutely have access to the data their vehicles generate and independent repair shops should have access to the tools used by branded service centers.

With that out of the way, it’s at least fairly obvious why industry players want to discourage the right-to-repair movement. They want the impunity to harvest driving data without someone looking over their shoulder and nullify the scant amount of competition that comes from do-it-yourself types and independent garages.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation (which represents practically every car manufacturer currently selling in the U.S.) has repeatedly stressed the importance of modernizing vehicles with “mobility” features, like data acquisition. But it hasn’t been too keen on sharing said data with customers. It has claimed that the accumulated info could be dangerous and open consumers up to privacy/security concerns. While this begs the question of why they’re harvesting on-road data if it’s so freaking dangerous, only the most naive person would come to any answer other than it making them money.

Of course, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (AAI) can blame businesses for being greedy too. It’s has been claiming aftermarket retailers and small shops just want the data for themselves. While technically true, some amount of data procurement is required just to work on modern vehicles and it’s not like anybody truly believes one business entity is going to act more responsibly with consumer info than another.

John Bozzella, CEO of AAI has also said government regulators have shared concerns about security — referencing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration specifically, according to Automotive News. He claimed the NHTSA shared concerns about some of the language used in the ballot measure.

“Automakers have made available all the diagnostic and repair information that is needed to service a vehicle safely and securely. That consumer choice will not change,” he said. “Moving forward, automakers will continue their work to protect our customers and prioritize their safety, privacy and vehicle security.”

From AN:

The updated law expands access to mechanical data related to vehicle maintenance and repair by requiring automakers to make available all mechanical information needed to diagnose and repair vehicles as well as perform routine maintenance starting with 2022 models. It also gives vehicle owners and independent repair shops access to real-time mechanical data from telematics — systems that collect and wirelessly transmit information such as crash notifications, remote diagnostics and navigation from the vehicle to a remote server.

Meanwhile, right-to-repair supporters (including the Auto Care Association and retailers like O’Reilly Auto Parts) have claimed the passed initiative closes a loophole in the current law that exempts data transmitted wirelessly through telematics system from being shared and will ultimately give vehicle owners more choice and control over how their data is used.

The ballot passed with 75 percent of voters in Massachusetts supporting. Right-to-repair advocates have called it an important victory and feel the state should continue setting a national example.

[Image: CAT SCAPE/Shutterstock]