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Posted by Daniel Oropeza

https://lifehacker.com/tech/bose-quiet-comfort-ultra-headphones-sale-january-2026?utm_medium=RSS

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If you're seeking the best headphones at the best price, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra are at the top of the list for active noise-cancelling (ANC), while also excelling in other important categories. Right now, the Bose QuietComfort Ultras (in black, deep plum, or lunar blue color) are $279 (originally $429), a record-low price according to price-tracking tools. Other colors are also discounted but not quite as steeply—for example, you can get "white smoke" for $299.

Bose QuietComfort Ultra

$395.00 at Amazon

$429.00 Save $34.00

Get Deal

Get Deal

$395.00 at Amazon

$429.00 Save $34.00

Few other brands can compete with Bose's QuietComfort Ultra lineup when it comes to ANC. Apart from the headphone model, they also make some of the best ANC earbuds, both using the same tech. PCMag's "outstanding" review goes into detail on how the headphones do the best job at dialing back low-frequency rumbles, as well as lows and mids.

Despite those plaudits, they're not perfect: Some high-frequency sounds still make it through the ANC technology (that's the case for all ANC headphones, though). But these headphones performed better at ANC than their other two main competitors at the time of their respective release, Apple AirPods Max and the Sony WH-1000XM5. Of course, the new Sony WH-1000XM6 has new ANC technology that outshines the QuietComfort Ultra, but you'd be paying a premium for those.

The Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones launched in the fall of 2023 with many reviewers praising their overall quality, but earning complaints for their pricing, at almost half a grand. At their current discounted price, there is no better value for your money if you value top-tier ANC. Another great feature of the headphones is their transparency mode, meant to be used to allow you to better hear your surroundings (cars, bikes, or people around you) while wearing them.

You can expect about 24 hours of juice with a full charge, or about 18 hours if you're using ANC. The accompanying app has a well-designed, customizable EQ.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/bose-quiet-comfort-ultra-headphones-sale-january-2026?utm_medium=RSS

Posted by Beth Skwarecki

https://lifehacker.com/do-you-really-need-rest-days-in-your-exercise-routine?utm_medium=RSS

Rest days are a standard part of exercise programs, especially beginner ones: You work out one day, then rest the next. That can be a good schedule, but complete rest days are not the only way to avoid overworking yourself. Contrary to what a lot of online advice says, you don't always need a rest day after each day of exercise, and you can even work out seven days a week if you like. But once you start bending the rules, you'll need to take some extra care to make sure you allow yourself enough recovery, even if it doesn't come in the form of "rest."

Why rest days are a common way to structure workouts

As we'll see below, taking a single rest day after a hard workout isn’t the only way to keep yourself from overtraining. There are a few reasons it’s a good rule of thumb, though:

• Resting every other day means only half of your days will be hard workouts. The other half will be rest days or easier days, so the schedule keeps your total workout intensity manageable.

• An alternating schedule is easy to follow. You don't have to ask yourself whether your recovery work is easy enough, or memorize which exercises work which muscles. You just stay home if it's not a workout day, and you know you're on track.

• Mentally, it’s easier to stick to a workout when you enjoy it. Hard workouts aren’t always fun, and you may need to psych yourself up to try something really challenging. It’s okay if you don’t feel up to that every day. Having some easier, more relaxing days can help you stick to your schedule.

• Routines with rest days are easier to schedule around your life. People who work out six days a week have to fit those workouts around everything that's going on in their lives. Having multiple rest days every week means you have more time for work, school, family, hobbies, and anything else that competes for those time slots.

If you can accomplish those goals with another schedule, though, feel free to do so. If you enjoy all your workouts, even the hard ones, slowly include more hard days in your schedule. If you feel okay with that, keep doing it! But if you end up sore or fatigued, listen to your body and put those rest days back in.

Why recovery is more important than rest

Your body doesn't actually require total rest between workouts. Your body just needs to be able to recover from its hard work, and there are many ways to do that—with or without rest days.

For example, strength training programs often work your whole body and then have you rest the next day. But they can also have you split up your workouts so that each muscle group gets a day of rest—for example, your arms get a rest on leg day. The idea is to let each muscle get a break from hard work before you ask it to do the same thing again. Rest days accomplish this, but so do body part "splits," as they're called (because you split up the work over several days).

But not every activity works this way. Runners, for example, often run every day, and may only take one or two true rest days a week (or, for some, zero). But within that weekly pattern, they will alternate days of hard running (like speedwork, hill running, or long runs) with easy runs that feel less challenging to the body. The easy run days may not be "rest," but they do count as recovery time for an experienced runner.

Other sports may fall somewhere in between, but nobody expects to work every body part to exhaustion every day. Even when elite athletes do workouts every day that look killer to us, it’s because our “hard” is their “easy.” You can bet their coaches schedule in enough of the easier workouts to keep the athlete’s progress on track with minimal risk of injury.

Whatever your schedule looks like, those rest days or easy days are there to help us pace ourselves. Too much hard running, if you’re not used to it, sets you up for tendonitis and other overuse injuries. And too much exercise of any kind can lead to a syndrome called overtraining where your body may develop flu-like symptoms and disturbed sleep because it just can’t keep up with the demands you’re putting on it.

How to recover without resting

Some people prefer the term “recovery” to “rest” days, because total rest isn’t necessarily your goal. After all, lifting a fork to your mouth is a similar action to a bicep curl, so if you just did a heavy arm day, would you be unable to eat? Clearly, some amount of activity is fine on a rest or recovery day.

This is where you have to calibrate your own sense of effort. If you’re new to exercising and you just did a day of heavy squats, a five mile bike ride is probably not a great choice for the following day. But if you bike five miles to work every day, you should be able to keep doing that even on your “rest” days.

Back when I did push-ups every day for 30 days, a few people suggested that I was setting myself up for injury by not taking rest days. But as I wrote in that article, I ramped up my fitness very carefully. A few sets of pushups every day became my new normal, and it was no more taxing to me than a bike ride is to a bike commuter. Some days I would try a more challenging type of pushup or I might do more reps than usual; but I balanced out those harder days with, you guessed it, easier days that are closer to my baseline effort level.

As you learn your own strengths and limitations, you too can alter your workout schedule according to what works for you. That might mean you only take one or two rest days per week, or it might mean you do mega-hard workouts and then lay low for a few days. If you’re getting a reasonable amount of exercise in total, and if you aren’t getting sore or injured, you’re probably doing okay. Now, let me ask some of the specific questions that I know tend to come up in these discussions?

Can I walk or do cardio on rest days?

Yes, if that's your baseline level of activity. If you always go for a walk after dinner, there's no need to skip that just because it's a rest day. If you want to start adding cardio on your rest days, make sure you're recovering well from whatever you're already doing. Feel free to add in that extra cardio, or other easy movement, a little bit at a time. I also have this guide to figuring out what to do on your rest days.

How do I know when I need a rest day?

If you can't tell the difference between feeling lazy and needing a rest day, ask yourself: Do I want to skip my workout or do I need to skip my workout? If you feel like you need a rest day, you probably do. It's OK to take a rest day if you feel sick, or if you're unusually tired or busy. A workout is just a workout. It can wait.

If you ask yourself this question and decide you just don't want to work out, consider moving the workout to another day or time. Or, if there's really no reason to skip, go do the workout anyway. Any time I feel this way, I always feel better afterward, and I'm glad I got the workout done.

But if you're asking yourself this question pretty often, you should probably revisit your workout routine and make sure it's actually working for you. Rest (or recovery) days should be preventative. They keep you from getting too run-down.

Do I need rest days if I'm not sore?

Soreness doesn't have much to do with recovery, believe it or not. You can be well-recovered but feeling a little sore, or vice versa. On a new exercise program, I'd advise sticking to your scheduled recovery days. After two weeks, that's when you can add in some extra work on those recovery days as long as you're still feeling good.

What happens if I don't take my rest day?

You might feel a little more fatigued for your next workout. Over time, if you don't take any rest days, you may find you're lifting less weight or performing poorly in workouts. You may notice other effects on your health, like poor sleep.

But then again, maybe you'll be fine. As we discussed above, rest days aren't magic, they're just a tool in the toolbox. If you work out every day, but your total amount of work is within your body's limits, you might recover just fine and this becomes your new normal. Pay attention to how you're feeling, though, and add those rest days back in if you feel you need them.

https://lifehacker.com/do-you-really-need-rest-days-in-your-exercise-routine?utm_medium=RSS

Posted by Michelle Ehrhardt

https://lifehacker.com/tech/gemini-is-about-to-get-to-know-you-way-better?utm_medium=RSS

Since the days when Google Gemini was still called Bard, it's been able to connect with the company's other productivity apps to help pull context from them to answer your questions—but you still had to connect those apps to the AI manually using extensions. And even after bringing your apps together, you usually had to tell Gemini where to look for your data to get much use out of its abilities. For Instance, if you wanted it to pull information from your emails, you might have started a prompt with "Search my email."

Now, Google is making it easier to connect Gemini to its various services, and adding "reasoning" when pulling context from across your Google Workspace. It's calling the feature "Personal Intelligence."

Rolling out in beta for paid subscribers in the U.S. today (and coming to other countries and free users "soon"), Personal Intelligence is an opt-in feature that currently works with Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search, all of which you can connect in one tap while setting up the feature.

That alone makes it more convenient than a collection of extensions, but there are supposedly a few upgrades to general usability as well. The biggest is that Gemini will apparently be able to "learn" about you from a grab bag of sources all at once, without you having to specify where to look, and use that information to answer your questions.

Credit: Google

In an example, Google has a user say "I need to replace the tires for my car. Which ones would you suggest for me?" The bot then runs through multiple reasoning steps, pulling from all the data available to it, to find out what car the prompter drives and which tires would be best for it in the conditions the prompter tends to drive in. Specifically, in the example, it references actual vacations the prompter had taken in the past, using Google Photos data, while also using Gmail data to help the prompter find their car's specific trim. This can take a while, which is why there's an "Answer now" button next to the reasoning progress bar to stop the bot from getting stuck. In the example, it took about 10 seconds for the AI to generate a response.

Google is promising its typical Workspace privacy guarantees with Personal Intelligence, saying "because this data already lives at Google securely, you don't have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience." In other words, it's not going to move the needle on how much data about you Google can access, but at least it'll prevent you from having to connect your Workspace to third parties. The company also promises that data Personal Intelligence pulls from sources like Gmail won't be used to train Gemini, but that "specific prompts and responses" might be, at least after personal data has been filtered out.

Google also says, "Gemini will try to reference or explain the information it used from your connected sources so you can verify it," although we don't have any examples of that in action yet. It's worth keeping an eye out, though, if you're worried about hallucinations. To that end, the company does suggest asking Gemini for more information about what it used to come to its answers if you're unsatisfied, and to correct it "if a response feels off," perhaps by saying something like "Remember, I prefer window seats." Theoretically, Gemini will then remember this for next time, using its existing chat history feature. If you're continually unsatisfied, you can hit the thumbs down button on responses to provide feedback.

How to turn on Personal Intelligence in Google Gemini

Google says that eligible users should see an invitation to try Personal Intelligence on the Gemini home screen as soon as it's rolled out to them, but if you don't, you can turn it on manually by following these steps:

1. Open Gemini and click or tap Settings.

2. Click or Tap Personal Intelligence.

3. Under Connected Apps, select which apps you would like Personal Intelligence to take information from.

And that's it! Remember, Personal Intelligence is off by default and is only available for paid subscribers for now, so it may be some time until you can actually use it. Google also stresses the Gemini might not personalize every response, as that will save time on more simple requests. The company also said Personal Intelligence for AI Mode in Google Search is currently planned, but does not have a set release date.

https://lifehacker.com/tech/gemini-is-about-to-get-to-know-you-way-better?utm_medium=RSS