Like many people, I do a lot of my computing in coffee shops (and restaurants and bars), where wifi coverage is slow and spotty at best. As a result, I frequently tether my iPhone for use as a mobile hotspot.

The problem: I pay for bandwidth on the phone by gigabyte, and I have a slew of cloud services constantly sending and receiving files (say, backing up photos and videos) in the background, which drives up my usage.

Enter the simple app TripMode, which notes when you’re using your phone (or any other similarly designated slow / pay-per-byte / whatever networks) for access, and allows you to allow and disallow access individually, app by app.

TripMode runs $7.99 (or $6.99 while on pre-launch sale) and, if you’re like me, will very quickly pay for itself.

Jess and I buy a lot of our stuff from Amazon, as it’s far cheaper than neighborhood stores here in NYC. And, more broadly, we tend to do most of our shopping online, which is usually faster, more convenient and less expensive than our brick-and-mortar options.

Online prices change frequently, and sales and coupons have a Murphy’s Law-esque way of popping up the day after you need them. Fortunately, most sites will retroactively match lowered prices or sales and discounts if you email to ask. But, in reality, it’s almost impossible to keep up with deals on future purchases, much less past ones.

Enter Paribus, a great new site that chases those potential discounts for you. Connect Paribus with your email account, and it will catalogue your purchases, then keep an eye on whether they qualify for partial refunds down the line. If they do, Paribus’ team will follow up on your behalf. Paribus gets paid only if they find you refunds (they takes 25%, and send the other 75% your way), so there’s only upside to trying it out.

Sign up for Paribus, and get what you’re owed.

[I discovered Paribus through today’s Product Hunt email. If you like cool new stuff, head on over and sign up for their daily newsletter. Each morning, they send along a crowdsourced list of the coolest new software, hardware, books and courses in the tech world. It’s a fast way to stay on the bleeding edge.]

This is a small one, though triggered by yesterday’s post. A handful of folks emailed to ask about the background behind the Alfred command bar, which is actually just a slice of my larger desktop background:

It’s courtesy of Satellite Eyes, a small, fun piece of software that automatically sets your desktop to a map of wherever you are at the time. Thus, my background looks different all throughout the day, depending on whether I’m at home, work, or somewhere else in or out of NYC.

With a bunch of different map styles and levels of zoom, you can widely customize the exact look; I’m partial to ‘MapBox Terrain’ at ‘Neighborhood’ zoom, though your mileage may vary.

No a big one, but definitely a worthwhile bit of fun.

If you live in Gmail, like most people I know, two small tips that will change your life:

1. Go into settings, and on the General tab, about halfway down the page, choose ‘Keyboard shortcuts on’.

There’s an awesome PDF of the keyboard shortcuts here, though you can access a cheat sheet at any time by clicking the ‘?’ key (i.e., shift-/).

Open a message by clicking the letter ‘o’, then head back up to the list of messages by clicking ‘u’.

While you’re reading a message, you can head to the prior one (‘j’) or the next (‘k’), or go forward and back while archiving the message you’re leaving (‘[’ and ‘]’ respectively).

Hit ‘c’ to compose, or ‘g’ and then ‘s’ to go to the starred folder, or ‘g’ then ‘i’ to go back to the inbox.

It’s wildly faster than mousing around, and worth the small amount of study time required.

2. Go into settings, and on the Labs tab, find and enable ‘Undo Send’.

This one does pretty much what it says on the label. Once it’s enabled, after you send a message, you have five or ten seconds to click an ‘undo’ button that recalls the message before it goes out.

If you, like me, tend to notice typos, wrong names, wrong recipients, etc., only moments after you click the send button, this one is worth its weight in gold.

You’re welcome.

When people wax nostalgic for a simpler past, I often think about the huge improvements in the years since that we too easily ignore. Sure, life would have been an adventure in the Old West, or a quiet pleasure at Thoreau’s Walden. But if you’ve been hospitalized or had major surgery at any prior point in your life, odds are pretty excellent that, in those good old days, you’d be dead.

Of course, there are smaller advances than antiseptic, anesthetized surgery that still make life better. Consider Rebrickable, a site I recently discovered, that would have changed my life as an eight-year-old.

If you’re a Lego-loving kid, you probably have a bin full of pieces that you can create from as you see fit. But you’re also dying for you parents to buy you the pirate ship kit, or a castle kit, so you can follow directions, step by step, to something way more awesome than you’d figure out on your own.

Enter Rebrickable, where you can log the Lego kits you already have, and then download a nearly infinite array of the instruction booklets from other Lego kits you can build from your existing collection of parts.

If you’re missing a couple pieces for a project you want to take on, no worries; directly from the site, vendors will bid for the chance to send you those missing parts, one-off, on the cheap. Building that AT-AT is within a week’s allowance’s reach, rather than a full birthday off.

Right now, the back of my MacBook Air looks like this:

For less than $7, yours can, too. It’s a small thing, but it definitely brightens my day, and draws comments and compliments whenever I pull my laptop out.

In my experience, these seem to last three to four months before beginning to fray around the edges, though I suspect it’s largely dependent on how and where you cart around your laptop.

If you’re looking for other good ideas, this was the prior back, until a few weeks ago (also on Etsy):

And, next up, we’re headed to this (on Etsy, too):

In the words of Sammy Davis, Jr., I gotta be me.

When we think about the future, we tend to imagine new technologies showing up in our lives fully formed. For example, you might expect that the next car you buy, and maybe even the car after that, will just be regular cars. But then, one car further into the future, you get a car that drives itself. A self-driving car! Out of nowhere! Skynet!

In reality, though, groundbreaking technologies usually arrive in the real world piecemeal, through slow, iterative feature introduction. Consider that self-driving car: your current car is likely already AI-enabled. You call that AI “cruise control,” and it keeps the car going at a steady speed without you having to put your foot on the gas or breaks. More recently, a number of car companies have introduced adaptive cruise control – cruise control that monitors whether the car in front of you is slowing down or speeding up, and adjusts accordingly. And for years, a number of car manufacturers have provided the option of parallel parking assistance – line up in front of a curbside space, and the car automatically backs you in.

Going forward, your car is likely to get slightly smarter still. It might, say, combine those two ideas, for cruise control that follows minor curves in the road, so you can drive a mostly-straightaway hands off. And then, perhaps, cruise control that connects to your GPS, so it can make the correct exit off the highway.

And so it goes. Baby-stepping forward, and arriving at the same self-driving car in about the same time frame as we might have originally predicted. But in an iterative way that doesn’t seem like magic, just the next obvious thing.

So when people complain that technology doesn’t solve big problems anymore, is more 140 characters than jetpacks, I think they’re only part right. Sure, we have more people doing laundry apps and dog walking SAS platforms than perhaps we should. But we also have way more authentic and impactful innovation happening in the things we use day to day in our lives – it’s just coming in slowly and steadily enough that we don’t notice it at all.

Which, depending on your perspective on technology, is either a bit like not noticing how much your children grow because you see them every day, or not realizing that you’re the frog in a pot of cool water on a hot burner, slowly and imperceptibly boiling to death.