All posts tagged: bestkept

Teddy Thompson is music’s best-kept secret

Teddy Thompson is music’s best-kept secret

Some singers are born with it: a teardrop in their voice that grabs you by the heart and refuses to let go. Tammy Wynette had it; just listen to her mourn how “the sun will never shine in Apartment #9” and your ear will catch the throb in her throat that echoes the song’s steel guitar. Roy Orbison singing “In Dreams,” Sam Cooke praising divine healing on “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” Emmylou Harris grieving Gram Parsons on “Sweet Chariot” — all of them have it too, the quiver that can’t be taught, only expressed. Teddy Thompson possesses one of those voices, a golden, vivid instrument capable of conjuring joy — though not in excess; he’s English — and caverns of heartache. The quality, he says over a bottle of San Pellegrino at a coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant on a sunny April afternoon, is “subconscious.”  He credits it to his love of classic country, which he discovered while growing up in London as a child in the early 1980s, and “something a little bit intangible. It’s …

Android’s best-kept gestures are hiding in plain sight — here’s what you’re missing

Android’s best-kept gestures are hiding in plain sight — here’s what you’re missing

Android has multiple gestures built into the system and certain apps that are easy to miss. These gestures make navigating Android faster and easier, and allow you to access key functions with minimal effort, and over the years you might have triggered some of these gestures by accident. I know I have. For example, Gboard (which has a cool extra feature on iOS) has a hidden trackpad function to allow for precise cursor placement — a lifesaver when editing text. Also, there’s a gesture that lets you rapidly swipe between two recent apps in a similar way to using the Alt + Tab on your PC. I put together a list of the most powerful Android gestures you might have missed, including several system-level gestures, one for Gboard, and towards the end, a YouTube gesture that makes navigating videos much faster. Gboard precise cursor placement Makes text editing much easier Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf When editing text on Android, you can position the cursor by tapping and holding in the text field to move the …