Phones have become such a part of our daily lives that it's important to find ways to make them easier to use. There's always one place that can make navigating cleaner, smoother, and easier: the Home Screen. But you might not realize there are some neat features available in your system launcher, like Samsung's One UI Launcher.

Collecting stuff is a fantastic hobby. In my younger days, I would scour flea markets, yard sales, thrift stores, Craigslist, and eBay for the stuff I liked. I enjoy collecting entire artist discographies on CD whenever possible. Ditto comic books (mostly omnibus collections) and retro games (NES and SNES, if you're curious). Since I like to dabble with Docker applications, I used Koillection, an open-source utility that helps me keep track of my physical media easily.

I'm frustrated with various companies because we live in a time when everything is licensed to us; we don't own it after making the purchase. Amazon has never been one of my favorite corporations. But, like many of you, I've bought things from them numerous times over the years. That includes quite a bit of my current music collection.

Modern life sure is hectic. It seems like there's always something going on. We can all build bad habits along the way. Watches, trackers, and all the different productivity apps are fine; but I found something that worked even better for me: a few formulas on an Excel spreadsheet.

Ever since the death of Flash, I've not been much of an Adobe fan. There are open-source alternatives to almost all of their Creative Cloud apps that don't lock you into a subscription or require a secondary program to uninstall them. Because of its simple interface, Pinta is one of my favorite image editing apps. It's cleaner and simpler than GIMP, and it does everything I'd use Photoshop for without the associated cost.

Bluetooth is a fantastic feature on mobile phones, but if you use it to listen to your favorite tunes regularly, you might notice it sometimes sounds dead, tinny, or just plain bad. The culprit might actually be the default codec your phone is using for Bluetooth.

Playing music via the command line is a joy for many Linux users. Besides, who wants to pay for a Spotify membership or any other streaming service, when you can stream files to your computer directly from your phone's local storage? Or just listen from the phone itself? I decided to test it out.