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Its 2025. Weve got cars that can drive themselves, robots that can program themselves, and all sorts of other mind-bogglingly futuristic tech achievements (for better or, erm, maybe sometimes for worse). And yet, somehow, I still find myself painstakingly entering stuff into my calendarwhen I get a long email about upcoming events from my kids school, for instance, or I see a flyer about something out in the world that I want to be sure to remember. Todays Cool Tools discovery is a new and improved sliver of sorcery that swipes away all the effort from those sorts of situations and makes managing your calendar laughably easyno matter what sorts of events you encounter. It might even, dare I say, be more useful than those futuristic robots. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Event addingwithout the effort So, first things first: This tool is actually one weve talked about before. Its called Agenda Hero, and I wrote about it in these very same Cool Tools quarters about a year and a half ago, when it was first getting off the ground. In the time since then, though, its gotten even bettermost notably with a nifty new feature that just came into mix and cranks its real-world usefulness up an extra measure. Well get to that in a minute. But first, what Agenda Hero is all about is taking the hassle out of creatingand, if you want, also sharingcalendar events from unstructured information. Specifically: You can send Agenda Hero an image or a PDF with info about events or even paste over entire paragraphs of text, and in the blink of an eye, itll identify and extract all the relevant details and put em into proper calendar event format. From there, you can add any and all events its identified into your calendar (Google Calendar as well as Outlook, Apple, or practically any other platform) with a single click. And, if youre feeling especially saucy, you can create a shareable page with all the event info for anyone else to see and add into their calendar in a similarly simple way. All of this takes roughly a minute, maybe two, to do. And now, in addition to all of that, you can also give Agenda Hero plain-text commands to tweak your extracted events to your specificationsadding in a specific location, setting a certain length, putting a particular name or even emoji at the start of each title, or making the events recurring in any way imaginable, just for a few fast examples. So, for instance, I took a roughly 500-word email newsletter update from my kids school and plopped it over into the Agenda Hero website. It had all sorts of information, with important dates and events sprinkled in here and there. And it wouldve been a massive headache to try to find all the date-specific tidbits and add em into my calendar on my own. With one click, though, Agenda Hero did all that heavy lifting for meand, in literally a few seconds, gave me a series of ready-to-roll events with all the relevant info extracted from the email. Agenda Hero easily extracts and formats events from text, images, and PDFs. But the text didnt mention any specific places, which meant none of the events had assigned locations. So I just asked the site to add that in . . . The service now lets you ask for specific adjustments, like adding a location to every event it identifies. And, booma couple seconds later: Locations added, thanks to a quick text command on Agenda Hero’s results list. Then, I thought maybe itd be helpful to put the word SCHOOL at the start of all of these events, so Id know at a glance theyre about the kids and not my own personal schedule. One more request . . . You can even add text or emojis into a series of event titles, all with a simple plain-text command. And there we have it. Agenda Hero will process any number of events at once, in a matter of seconds. You get the idea. From there, all thats left is to click the Add all to Google button to have all of these events instantly beamed into my Google Calendar. And/or, if I want to share it with someone else, I can use the Shareable page buttonwhich creates a nifty little page like this that anyone can open and then interact with in a similar way. And remember: The same exact thing works if you upload a PDF or an image that has any manner of event info within it as well. Its a massive time-saver. In my experience, its also much easier and more effective than trying to do the same thing with Gemini or any other such chatbot. Those services can perform some of the same tasks around basic event extraction, but you run into a wall pretty quickly once you start trying to update events or modify em en masse like we did here. And theres no real option for easily sharing with otherswhich is a super-practical power that could definitely come in handy in the right sort of scenario. So there ya have it. Agenda Hero may not be the flashiest high-tech tool out there todaybut my goodness, it sure is one of the most useful. And, as usual, all youve gotta do is remember to use it. You can access Agenda Hero right in your web browser on any deviceor, if youd rather, grab the Android app, iOS app, and/or Chrome extension for easy event adding on any of those fronts. The service is free to use without restrictions for all of its core features, and you dont even have to create an account or sign in, either. The new chat-based event editing ability is free to try a handful of times if you do sign in and then requires a $30-a-year subscription if you want to keep using it. Agenda Hero doesnt do anything disconcerting with the limited amount of data it sees, as per its privacy policyand it doesnt share any user data for any manner of AI model training. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
Apples iOS 26 for iPhone is now available to download. The star of the operating system is the all-new design language known as Liquid Glass, which introduces a translucent layer to various interface elements that mimics the physical properties of real glassincluding the way light shines and refracts through the material. But iOS 26 is about more than just a pretty new digital face. The new operating system also adds some compelling new productivity features that make Apples smartphone a more helpful tool for work than ever before. These are the top five new productivity features Apple has just added to the iPhone. 5. Only take the phone calls you want [Photo: Apple] One of the most common interruptions to our workflow is phone calls. And given that U.S. consumers received over 4.1 billion robocalls in August alone, the chances are good it might be spam. Yet this isn’t always the case. One way to distinguish between a call you need to take and one you don’t is by glancing at the iPhones caller ID. But this only works if you recognize the number calling. If the number is unknown, you need to pick up to see who is on the other lineand what theyre calling for. Now, with the new operating system, your iPhone gains a feature called Call Screening, which enables your iPhone to answer the unknown call for you by playing a message for the caller, which asks them to identify themselves and state a reason for their call. Once they do this, your iPhone will alert you to their response so that you can decide whether to take the call. If you decline, the unknown caller will be sent to voicemail. To enable Call Screening in iOS 26: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Phone. Under the Screen Unknown Callers heading, choose the level of Call Screening you desire. The three levels are Never (disable Call Screening), Ask Reason for Calling (your iPhone will collect the caller’s name and their reason for the call before alerting you), or Silence (all calls from unknown numbers will go right to voicemail). 4. Create calendar events with a screenshot [Photo: Apple] For many conferences or retreats, event organizers will email poster invites for the event, which include a photo of the venue, date, time, and location. Or sometimes theyll post the invite to their social media feed or webpage. Prior to iOS 26, you had to enter this event information into your calendar manually. However, with the new OS, you can now take a screenshot of the invite, and your iPhone will extract the relevant information from it and add it to your calendar with just a few taps. This greatly simplifies the tedious process of manually adding invites to your calendar. Heres how: With the event invitation on your screen (whether it’s an image attached to an email, a webpage, or a social media post), take a screenshot on your iPhone by pressing the volume up and power buttons simultaneously. iOS 26 will detect the event information in the screenshot and display a Add to Calendar button below it. Tap this button. A pop-up will appear showing the event information that has been extracted from the screenshot. Tap the Create Event button to add the event to your calendar. You’ll now see a listing for the event in your Calendar app. 3. Make your iPhone wait on hold for you [Photo: Apple] With iOS 26, waiting on hold is a thing of the past, thanks to a new feature called Hold Assist. With Hold Assist, your iPhone can wait on hold for you while you continue with your work. When you finally get connected to someone, your iPhone will ring you again to let you know they are on the line. To use Hold Assist in iOS 26:/p> Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Phone. Ensure the Hold Assist Detection toggle is turned on (green). Now, dial a phone number as you normally would. When you are placed on hold, tap the Hold button on your iPhones dialer screen. Your iPhone will notify you when its time to pick up the phone again to talk to a real person. 2. Put AI to work as your foreign language interpreter [Photo: Apple] Business is global, and that means that we may often find ourselves needing to communicate with people who dont speak the same language as we do. Now, in iOS 26, your iPhone can act as your personal digital interpreter thanks to a new feature called Live Translation. The feature uses Apple’s AI platform, Apple Intelligence, and works across all major iPhone communication apps, including Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. In Messages, text conversations will be cross-translated in real-time. In FaceTime, real-time caption translations will appear on your screen. And in the Phone app, the iPhone will actually speak the translated conversation for you. Live Translation is enabled by default and will kick in whenever your iPhone detects you’re communicating with someone who is using a different language from yours. However, this feature only works on iPhones that support Apple Intelligence, which includes the iPhone 15 Pro and later models. 1. Customize folders for better file management [Photo: Apple] Apples Files app is a robust file management system on your iPhone, enabling you to store and access documents and other essential files for your work. Before iOS 26, the folders in which these documents were stored and sorted all looked the sameplain and pale blue. However, in iOS 26, Apple has added the ability to customize the look of each folder, allowing you to create custom designs that make it easy to pinpoint the folder containing the files you need at that moment. In iOS 26, you can customize the folders in the Files app in numerous ways, including by color and by adding a symbol or even an emoji to the front of the folder. Heres how: Open the Files app on your iPhone. Long-press on a folder you want to customize and tap Customize Folder & Tags . . . from the pop-up menu. Select the Tags button, then choose a color to give the folder a new hue, and tap the checkmark button. Now, choose a symbol you want to add to the front of the folder (Apple provides hundreds of options). Alternatively, tap the Emoji button and select an emoji you want to add to the front of the folder. Tap the blue checkmark button when done. Best of all, after customizing your folder to your liking, the new style will sync across all your devices using iCloud Drive, so itll look the same on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. iOS 26 is now available as a free download. It requires an iPhone 11 or later to run.
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E-Commerce
In a new report, OpenAI said it found that AI models lie, a behavior it calls scheming. The study performed with AI safety company Apollo Research tested frontier AI models. It found “problematic behaviors” in the AI models, which most commonly looked like the technology “pretending to have completed a task without actually doing so.” Unlike hallucinations, which are akin to AI taking a guess when it doesn’t know the correct answer, scheming is a deliberate attempt to deceive. Luckily, researchers found some hopeful results during testing. When the AI models were trained with “deliberate alignment,” defined as “teaching them to read and reason about a general anti-scheming spec before acting,” researchers noticed huge reductions in the scheming behavior. The method results in a “~30× reduction in covert actions across diverse tests,” the report said. The technique isn’t completely new. OpenAI has long been working on combating scheming; last year it introduced its strategy to do so in a report on deliberate alignment: “It is the first approach to directly teach a model the text of its safety specifications and train the model to deliberate over these specifications at inference time. This results in safer responses that are appropriately calibrated to a given context.” Despite those efforts, the latest report also found one alarming truth: When the technology knows it’s being tested, it gets better at pretending it’s not lying. Essentially, attempts to rid the technology of scheming can result in more covert (dangerous?), well, scheming. Researchers “expect that the potential for harming scheming will grow. Concluding that more research on the issue is crucial, the report said, “Our findings show that scheming is not merely a theoretical concernwe are seeing signs that this issue is beginning to emerge across all frontier models today.
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E-Commerce
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