Life Style

Like many parents, I know well the pain of my Roblox-addicted child asking me to trade my real money for fake money he can use to buy pretend items in a digital video game. So when Roblox announced the April 30 launch of Roblox Plus, a monthly subscription service with perks that could net us a 20% discount on all the digital items, my interest was piqued. But is Roblox Plus actually worth it? Let's do some math.What do you get with Roblox Plus?As noted in today's announcement on the Roblox website, once it launches at the end of this month, the primary benefit of Roblox Plus will be a discount on items purchased with Robux, the platform's in-game currency. Your monthly subscription won't actually come with any Robux (yet, anyway—more on that in a bit), but it does come with the promise th...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. If you’re grossed out by the idea that you might be bitten by a tick this year (chances are good, to be honest), now is the time to get yourself a bottle of permethrin spray. Permethrin-treating your shoes and pants is one of the simplest ways to set up a barrier between hungry ticks and your delicious, blood-filled flesh. Ticks need to spend time in dirt or leaf litter to avoid drying out, so they hang out close to the ground. They find us by climbing a stalk of grass and reaching out with their little legs when we walk by. (They'll settle for a deer, rabbit, or mouse instead of a person—they're not picky.) Once they find a warm body, they crawl upwards.So if you want to avoid tick bites, the most important places to...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Apple Maps may not be everyone's top choice for navigation—even those committed to the Apple ecosystem—but the app has come a long way since it's initial rocky rollout, and has plenty of features that make it worth using. Beyond the basics, you'll also want to consider some of its lesser-known settings to get the most out of Apple Maps on both mobile and desktop. Enable "Visited Places" to save locations (even if you didn't use Maps to get there) "Visited Places" is a new feature with iOS 26 that passively tracks your location and stores places you go—even if you don't use Maps to get there. If you want to keep tabs on your previous pit stops, you can view them later in the "Places" menu (tap Places > Visited Places...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Google has packed its flagship Pixel phones with a long list of useful features for everything from privacy to productivity, and rolls out more with its frequent Pixel Drop updates. It can be hard to keep up with all that's available—plus, many of the best features are disabled by default. If you have one of Google's smartphones, here are 10 ways to maximize everything your Pixel has to offer. Use App Pinning to keep people fro...

Daniel Oropeza Daniel Oropeza Shopping Editor Experience Daniel is Lifehacker's Shopping Editor covering tech deals and reviewing TVs, headphones, speakers, and projectors. He earned his master’s in journalism from Columbia University and has reported for the Miami Herald. He lives in Atlanta. Read Full Bio ...

I've written before about various software tricks to nudge a smartphone toward dumb-phone territory: stripping the home screen down to essentials, enabling greyscale mode, scheduling downtime windows. I tried all of it, and for a time it worked for me, but only in the way that hiding a bag of chips in a high cabinet works—technically an obstacle, but not really a barrier. One tap to "Ignore Limit," and I'm back to scrolling. The problem is that the key to unlock everything is right there in your pocket. Turns out I needed a small device called Brick to physically restrain me create a physical barrier, and I can feel my screen time habits finally change for the better. How Brick works with your smartphoneBrick is a small NFC fob—roughly the size of an AirPods case—paired with an app. You ...

While iOS has caught up in recent years, Android is still the most versatile OS when it comes to smartphone gaming—especially if you're looking beyond downloading games from app stores. Android supports a huge number of emulators, as well as game controllers and game pads. If you want to play a game, there's a decent chance you can get it up and running on Android. And yet, the OS doesn't have something that many other modern gaming platforms do: native controller remapping. The idea is, you get to choose which of your controller's buttons do what. If you'd prefer your down button to have the same effect as the L1 button, or the D-pad to have the same inputs as the right stick, you can. While individual Android games may offer these options, it doesn't apply to the entire OS, which leads t...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The 65-inch TCL QM7K is currently selling for $777.99, down from $999.99, and price-trackers show this is the lowest it has dropped so far. The QM7K isn’t a stripped-down budget model—it’s a mini-LED TV with full-array local dimming, wide HDR format support, and brightness levels that push past 2,000 nits. In practice, that means HDR highlights pop, contrast stays controlled, and the screen remains usable even in rooms with a lot of daylight. It doesn’t reach the extreme peak brightness of TCL’s higher-end QM8, but for most living rooms, the difference is negligible. And if you’re also shopping for a solid gaming and streaming setup ...

Google is back with yet another AI service—this time, an offline dictation program using its "Gemma" architecture. But rather than include it within the Gemini app, or as a Gemini function, the company has decided to roll it out into a dedicated iPhone app, with the very catchy name of "Google AI Edge Eloquent." I decided to give the app a shot on release day, though the privacy policy gave me pause. Google says that your location, contacts, identifiers, device diagnostics, contact info, user content, usage data, and "other" data can be linked to you, while purchases and other diagnostics can be collected but not linked to you. That's a lot of data, especially for an app that advertises that "audio, confidential conversations, and personal data never leave your device," and I'm not sure I'...

When you download an app from the App Store or Play Store, how much research do you do ahead of time? Do you look into who makes the app, and where that company is based? Do you scan the app's privacy policy to make sure your data is handled responsibly? You might not, but, as it turns out, the FBI wants you to. The FBI issued a warning last Tuesday concerning "foreign-developer mobile applications (apps)." (Thank you, FBI, for that clarification.) The FBI's thesis is this: Many of the most popular apps in the U.S. aren't developed here—instead, they're often developed and maintained by foreign companies. Now, these discussions can verge dangerously close to xenophobic, especially considering the U.S.'s current administration, but some of the FBI's concerns are legitimate. The FBI's chief ...