Long gone are the days when our work happens in only one place in one room. Sure, there are still many that have the traditional “9 to 5” jobs that take place in the office, but recent years have seen an increase in more flexible work arrangements. Even at home, you might not even just work in one room only, nor is your use of the computer confined to one desk. Work and office equipment have started to adapt to this more flexible lifestyle, starting with more portable computer accessories that you can take with you on the go. There’s even a new breed of ultra-thin monitors you can slip in your bag and connect to your laptop for an instant dual monitor setup anywhere. While this 31.5-inch LG monitor won’t be leaving your home, it can be easily rolled to any location inside the house, at least as long as there’s a power outlet nearby. Designer: LG Despite their name, computer monitors today are no longer just displays permanently attached to computers, be they desktops or even laptops. They have become general-purpose screens that are used for both work and play, connecting to anything that can display video. In fact, some computer monitors have become “smart” and can display content on their own without any external device. The LG Smart Monitor Swing takes that flexibility to the extreme by sporting a design that really lets it do whatever you need it to do, whether it’s displaying a spreadsheet or playing kids’ shows. The 31.5-inch 4K UHD monitor is attached to a flexible stand with a torsion spring hinge that lets you bend, tilt, and swivel the screen to any height or angle you want. You can even twist it around to display a tall screen, like when you’re mirroring your smartphone. Its secret sauce, however, is the five wheels hidden beneath the base, letting you reposition the monitor anywhere in your home. You can, in effect, use the same large screen for work and, when you’re done, for your entertainment. The catch is that, despite the large base and thick stand, there is no built-in battery so you’re a bit limited in where you can actually place it, namely, near a wall socket or power outlet. The LG Smart Monitor Swing is powered by WebOS, which means you can stream not only content but even a remote or cloud PC without connecting it to a desktop or laptop. It is also touch-enabled, turning it into an interactive device for education, presentations, and collaboration. Unfortunately, no word yet on global availability, but it’s reported to be priced at around $740 in South Korea. The post LG Smart Monitor Swing Bends, Twists, and Rolls Wherever There’s a Power Socket first appeared on Yanko Design.

Lucia Parvolo helps you dream up a captivating protagonist

More than eye candy.

China is limiting US access to critical minerals in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, but the move isn’t as devastating as Beijing wants it to be.

In March, Finland successfully completed the first test of its encapsulation plant, which, if finished, will become the world’s first permanent underground storage facility for radioactive waste.

The European Commission said the Silicon Valley companies violated the Digital Markets Act, a law meant to crimp the power of the largest tech firms.

In the landmark antitrust case, tech executives have harked back to a Silicon Valley age when social apps like Facebook, Path, Orkut and Google Plus boomed.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google’s got a wild new idea about “reinventing” how we silence our phones. It’s happening now, in the current Android 15 era of our favorite operating system. Google eliminated the simple, one-tap system for silencing a device and putting it into Do Not Disturb mode and instead bundled that setting into a perplexing new Modes menu. Now, when you want your phone to zip its metaphorical lip, you’ve gotta tap the Modes tile within your Android Quick Settings panel, then find and activate Do Not Disturb from there. That may seem like a small distinction, but for something as foundational as silencing your frickin’ phone, it’s an extra step that adds up and quickly feels cumbersome — especially if you’re hunting for it multiple times a day. More than that, it’s an extra slice of confusion that creates needless murkiness around what oughta be a simple-as-can-be core phone function. And, oh yes: We’ve been here before. Way back in the Android 5.0 “Lollipop” era of Android, Google similarly sought to revamp the simple silencing function — with a similar sort of setup, even, around overly complicated “modes.” Long story short, it was bewildering and annoying, everyone hated it, and Google eventually backtracked and brought back a simple one-step silencing system. Now, it seems, history is poised to repeat itself again in yet another amusing Android flip-flop. Freshly uncovered code suggests El Googenphlorp has heard the outcry and is actively working to restore a one-tap Android Do Not Disturb toggle that’ll exist alongside the new Modes option. There’s no telling how long it’ll take to show up for most of us, though. And in the meantime — whether you’re using a device with the latest Android version and its ever-fun Modes maze or not — you’ve got some spectacular ways to not only restore a simple Do Not Disturb toggle on your own but also to improve upon it and make it even more effective. Pick whichever path you prefer, and prepare for an instant and immensely practical upgrade to your day-to-day Android-using experience. [Psst: Love shortcuts? My week-long Android Shortcut Supercourse will teach you tons of time-saving tricks for your phone. Sign up now for free!] Android Do Not Disturb shortcut #1: The simple toggle return We’ll start with the simplest possibility of all, and that’s bringing back the one-tap Do Not Disturb toggle in your Android device’s Quick Settings section — without having to wait on Google to make it happen. This one couldn’t be much easier to manage. Just install the free and aptly named Simple DND app from the Play Store. Open it up and follow the prompt to grant the app the permission to manage your phone’s Do Not Disturb state — then tap the Add Tile button on its main screen and confirm that you want to do that. One tap, and boom: Simple DND puts a simple Do Not Disturb tile right back into Android’s Quick Settings for you.JR Raphael, Foundry And that’s it: You should now see a new single-step Do Not Disturb tile right in your Quick Settings, if you swipe down twice (or swipe from the right side of the screen, on certain devices) to open it. Do Not Disturb, right back where it belongs — thanks to Simple DND.JR Raphael, Foundry That, of course, is simply restoring the once-standard Android behavior in a roundabout way. But you can also make it even easier to access your device’s Do Not Disturb mode and silence or unsilence your phone on the fly, if you want. Android Do Not Disturb shortcut #2: The Pixel tap dance If you’re using a reasonably recent Pixel device, you’ve got an incredibly cool and impossibly convenient way to make Do Not Disturb easy to toggle. For this path, you’ll need to go download a handy (and completely free) little app called Mute. Install it, then open ‘er up and follow the prompts to allow the app to modify your system settings. Next, head into your system settings and scroll down until you see the line labeled “System.” Tap that, then tap “Gestures” followed by “Quick Tap to start actions.” Flip the toggle next to “Use Quick Tap” into the on position, then tap the option for “Open app” to select it — and once it’s active, tap the gear-shaped icon alongside it and select “Mute” from the list that pops up. Quick Tap strangely doesn’t support toggling Do Not Disturb out of the box, but the Mute app fixes that.JR Raphael, Foundry Make your way back out of that menu, and now, anytime you double-tap the back of your Pixel, you’ll feel a brief vibration and see a small visual confirmation that Mute has been activated. Your phone’s media and ringer volume will shoot all the way down to zero, and Android’s Do Not Disturb mode will be activated. Double-tap again, and Do Not Disturb will go back off while your volume settings pop back up to their previous levels. You might have to experiment a bit to figure out the exact right spot on the back of your phone where the tapping gesture works most reliably. On most Pixels, it’s higher than you might expect — right beneath the camera module. Once you know where to tap, though, you’ll have a swift ‘n’ satisfyingly simple new way to switch your phone in and out of Do Not Disturb without having to mess with any on-screen menus. As long as the screen is on — even if the device is locked! — all it’ll take is two quick taps to silence or unsilence as needed. Android Do Not Disturb shortcut #3: The notch nudge No Pixel? Or maybe you just aren’t into the whole tap-a-tap tactic? No problem. With the help of a clever and convenient app called Touch the Notch, you can transform that blacked-out space at the top of your screen — y’know, where the front-facing camera lives — into a simple switch for impressively efficient toggling of your device’s Do Not Disturb status. Just snag the app, then open it once to configure it. The first time you do, you’ll be prompted to pay four bucks to bump up to the app’s full version. You may want to do that, for reasons we’ll explore in a moment, but you don’t have to commit right off the bat. If you’d rather try the app out first and see whatcha think, tap the “x” in the upper-left corner of the upgrade offer to skip it. Now, tap “Required permissions” on the app’s main screen, then tap the checkbox next to “Touch the Notch.” With that one-time initialization out of the way, you can scroll down the app’s main screen and review the available options. If you didn’t upgrade to the app’s full version, you’ll be limited to “Single touch” — which isn’t exactly optimal but will get the job done and at the very least let you see what the app can do. Personally, I’d suggest going with “Long touch,” which does require the one-time $4 upgrade but works brilliantly well and is far less likely to be activated accidentally. Tap that line, then find and select “Do Not Disturb” in the list of choices that comes up and make your way back out of that menu. Touch the Notch adds all sorts of interesting possibilities into an otherwise unfunctional area of your phone’s screen.JR Raphael, Foundry Now, for the real magic: At this point, all you’ve gotta do is press and hold that blacked-out spot at the top of your screen (a.k.a. the notch) for a split-second, no matter what else you’ve got goin’ on with your device, and boom: Android’s Do Not Disturb mode will flip on and back off, with every press you make. srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?quality=50&strip=all 800w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?resize=300%2C23&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?resize=768%2C59&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?resize=150%2C11&quality=50&strip=all 150w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?resize=640%2C49&quality=50&strip=all 640w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/android-do-not-disturb-toggle-notch.webp?resize=444%2C34&quality=50&strip=all 444w" width="800" height="61" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px">Toggle on, toggle off: Touch the Notch’s Do Not Disturb sorcery in action.JR Raphael, Foundry Doesn’t get much easier than that. And you don’t need any special fixes from Google to make any of these paths instantly available. Get even more advanced shortcut knowledge with my free Android Shortcut Supercourse. You’ll learn tons of time-saving tricks!

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.  I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things to read. Soon enough I wasn’t content to just read stuff on the internet—I wanted to make it. So I learned HTML and made a basic web page, and then a better web page, and then a whole website full of web things. And then I just kept going from there. That amateurish collection of web pages led to a journalism internship with the online arm of a magazine that paid little attention to what we geeks were doing on the web. And that led to my first real journalism job, and then another, and, well, eventually this journalism job.  But none of that would have been possible if I hadn’t been bored and curious. And more to the point: curious about tech.  The university computer lab may seem at first like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology.  There are the big easy examples, like photography or the printing press, but it’s also true of all sorts of creative inventions that we often take for granted. Oil paints. Theaters. Musical scores. Electric synthesizers! Almost anywhere you look in the arts, perhaps outside of pure vocalization, technology has played a role.   But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity. Think of the way we talk about the arts. We often compliment it with words that refer to our humanity, like soul, heart, and life; we often criticize it with descriptors such as sterile, clinical, or lifeless. (And sure, you can love a sterile piece of art, but typically that’s because the artist has leaned into sterility to make a point about humanity!) All of which is to say I think that AI can be, will be, and already is a tool for creative expression, but that true art will always be something steered by human creativity, not machines.  I could be wrong. I hope not.  This issue, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. You can see it on our cover illustrated by Tom Humberstone, and read about it in stories from James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven, Rebecca Ackermann, Michelle Kim, Bryan Gardiner, and Allison Arieff.  Yet of course, creativity is about more than just the arts. All of human advancement stems from creativity, because creativity is how we solve problems. So it was important to us to bring you accounts of that as well. You’ll find those in stories from Carrie Klein, Carly Kay, Matthew Ponsford, and Robin George Andrews. (If you’ve ever wanted to know how we might nuke an asteroid, this is the issue for you!)   We’re also trying to get a little more creative ourselves. Over the next few issues, you’ll notice some changes coming to this magazine with the addition of some new regular items (see Caiwei Chen’s “3 Things” for one such example). Among those changes, we are planning to solicit and publish more regular reader feedback and answer questions you may have about technology. We invite you to get creative and email us: newsroom@technologyreview.com. As always, thanks for reading.

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.