Google’s hidden clean mode

By adding “udm=14” to your Google search URL, you can strip away all the AI summaries, knowledge panels, and ads that clutter the results. This doesn’t improve the actual search results, but it provides a cleaner, distraction-free interface reminiscent of Google’s early days. You can set this up as a custom search engine in most browsers, making it your default search experience. Or you can just go here. — MF

Exploring career possibilities

The challenging thing about finding a job these days is that most people, especially young ones, are not aware of their own marketable skills and are not aware of all the possible careers those skills can aid. Google has a new, free, AI-based, web-based service, Career Dreamer, that will assist you to clarify your marketable skills, match them with possible kinds of jobs you probably didn’t know about, provide you with current job openings of that type near you, and then help draft a resume aimed at those opportunities. Google calls it “a playful way to explore career possibilities with AI,” and it’s a great use of AI. — KK

Underrated Rituals

In the Simple Living subreddit, someone asked, “What’s a simple, underrated ritual that genuinely changed your life—and you wish you’d started earlier?” The top-voted comments included advice like reading books instead of screens before bed, washing dishes at night to feel “on top of things” in the morning, and taking regular 20-minute afternoon naps to reset internally. But the most surprising advice that seems useful to try was: if you work from home, turn on a desk lamp when you start work and turn it off when you finish—a simple light cue to mark the start and end of your day and help you switch modes. Another interesting tip is to incorporate a minute of silence in the car before heading out on the road to help shed the flurry of prep and loading, and to let your subconscious catch up before you drive off. — CD

Hand-crank grater

This hand-crank grater keeps your knuckles away from the blades while shredding cheese blocks and vegetables like carrots and zucchini. It sticks to the counter with suction cups and comes with three swappable grating drums. You’ll need to pre-cut larger items to fit the chute. Cleanup is simple since everything pops apart and goes in the dishwasher. Worth the counter space. — MF

Population around a point

This simple map tool will tell you the human population from any point in the world, for whatever radius you select. I’ll be visiting the Scottish Highlands soon, and it’s interesting to know that the village near where I’ll be staying has a population of less than 800 within a 20 km radius. — CD

New space frontier

I thoroughly enjoyed When The Heavens Went on Sale, a new book by Ashlee Vance that recounts in entertaining detail the creation of the new space frontier: scrappy startups inventing small, fast, cheap rockets and satellites, and against all odds, succeeding where NASA could not. The cast of misfits, bigger-than-life visionaries, genius jerks, and admirable old-school engineers is vast, and way beyond Elon Musk (who only appears in Ashlee Vance’s other book, a Musk biography). Vance spent many years hanging out on this frontier, attending endless test failures, hearing the intimate dreams of the makers, and via this deep immersion, he explains in thrilling detail the innovations and technology that has created this new industry. An excellent documentary was filmed in parallel with the book, Wild, Wild Space (HBO Max) and it gives you a great sense of the key characters in this new wild, wild west. — KK

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05/18/25