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Journey with me back to the good old days, if you will. There was a time that, when youd buy a gadget, itd come with a sometimes verbose but often helpful instruction manual. Not a quick start guide: an honest-to-goodness manual that you could pore through. Your patience and attention to detail would be rewarded, as youd learn tons of helpful tips and tricks that youd almost certainly never stumble upon on your own. Those days are gone. Im not entirely sure when this became a thing but I do recall opening an Apple gadget many years ago and wondering if theyd forgotten to include the manual. Anyway. The point is that Ive had my Pixel 9 for months and months, and I finally got around to digging into its many features and functionality. And, indeed, I found some stuff that was unexpected, and pretty great. Quick Tap Shortcuts Well start with my favorite. Dive into Settings > System > Gestures > Quick tap to start actions and prepare to be mildly surprised. You can set it to take a screenshot, summon the Google Assistant, pause or resume media, or even open a specific app. Once youve made your choice, thwap-thwap the back of your phone with your index finger while youre holding it and see what happens. I know, right?! Notification History Ever dismiss a notification in a fit of overwhelmed rage and then realize it was actually important? Your Pixel has a built-in safety net. The “Notification History” feature keeps a log of all your recent notifications, even the ones you swiped away in a moment of haste. To find it, go to Settings > Notifications > Notification History and make sure it’s turned on. You’ll never miss a crucial alert again. Hold For Me OK, this one isn’t entirely unknown, but if you havent experienced its glorious potential, youre missing out. If youre on a call and you find yourself trapped in the endless purgatory of hold music, keep an eye out for the “Hold for me” button. Tap it, and your Pixel will listen for a real human voice on the other end. When someone actually picks up, you’ll get a notification to jump back onto the call. It’s not foolproof, but when it works, it feels like a tiny miracle. Long Screenshots Taking a screenshot of a long web page or conversation used to be a multistep dance of multiple captures. But your Pixel has a hidden superpower: scrolling screenshots. Take a regular screenshot (power + volume down). Instead of just disappearing, a little “Capture more” buttonan icon with up and down arrowswill often appear at the bottom. Tap it, and you can drag the borders to capture the entire scrollable content. It’s great for saving entire articles or those lengthy text message threads where youre trying to win an argument with someone by using their past words against them. So much drama. Adaptive Vibration Tucked away in Settings > Sound & vibration > Adaptive vibration, you’ll find a feature that subtly adjusts your phone’s vibration intensity based on your surroundings. In a quiet room, your notifications might be softer. In a noisy environment or if your phones in your pocket, they’ll intelligently boost themselves so you don’t miss crucial calls or messages. It’s not a night-and-day difference, but it’s one of those subtle Pixel touches that makes living with the phone just a little bit nicer.
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After pouring brown, gritty liquid from a huge silver tank into a flute-like container known as a refractometer, South African beer brewing master Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela gives an expert nod of approval and passes it around to her students, who yell their observations with glee. When you are brewing you must constantly check your mixture, Nxusani-Mawela instructs them. We are looking for a balance between the sugar and the grains. The 41-year-old Nxusani-Mawela is an international beer judge and taster, and is believed to be the first Black woman in South Africa to own a craft brewery, a breakthrough in a world largely dominated by men and big corporations. Her desire is to open South Africa’s multibillion-dollar beer-brewing industry to more Black people and more women. At her microbrewery in Johannesburg, she’s teaching 13 young Black graduatesmost of them womenthe art of beer making. The science behind brewing The students at the Brewsters Academy have chemical engineering, biotechnology or analytical chemistry degrees and diplomas, but are eager to get themselves an extra qualification for a possible career in brewing. Wearing hairnets and armed with barley grains and water, the scientists spend the next six hours on the day’s lesson, learning how to malt, mill, mash, lauter, boil, ferment and filter to make the perfect pale ale. My favorite part is the mashing,” said Lerato Banda, a 30-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of South Africa who has dreams of owning her own beer or beverage line. She’s referring to the process of mixing crushed grains with hot water to release sugars, which will later ferment. “Its where the beer and everything starts. Nxusani-Mawela’s classes began in early June. Students will spend six months exploring beer varieties, both international and African, before another six months on work placement. Beer is for everyone Nxusani-Mawela’s Tolokazi brewery is in the Johannesburg suburb of Wynberg, wedged between the poor Black township of Alexandra on one side and the glitzy financial district of Sandtonknown as Africa’s richest square mileon the other. She hails from the rural town of Butterworth, some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away, and first came across the idea of a career in beer at a university open day in Johannesburg. She started brewing as an amateur in 2007. She has a microbiology degree and sees beer making as a good option for those with a science background. I sort of fell in love with the combination of the business side with the science, with the craftsmanship and the artistic element of brewing, she said. For the mother of two boys, beer brewing is also ripe for a shakeup. I wanted to make sure that being the first Black female to own a brewery in South Africa, that Im not the first and the last, she said. Brewsters Academy for me is about transforming the industry . . . What I want to see is that in five, 10 years from now that it should be a norm to have Black people in the industry, it should be a norm to have females in the industry.” South Africa’s beer industry supports more than 200,000 jobs and contributes $5.2 billion to South Africas gross domestic product, according to the most current Oxford Economics research in Beers Global Economic Footprint. While South Africa’s brewing sector remains male-dominated, like most places, efforts are underway to include more women. One young woman at the classes, 24-year-old Lehlohonolo Makhethe, noted women were historically responsible for brewing beer in some African cultures, and she sees learning the skill as reclaiming a traditional role. “How it got male dominated, I dont know, Makhethe said. Id rather say we are going back to our roots as women to doing what we started. With an African flavor While Nxusani-Mawela teaches all kinds of styles, she also is on a mission to keep alive traditional African beer for the next generation. Her Wild African Soul beer, a collaboration with craft beer company Soul Barrel Brewing, was the 2025 African Beer Cup champion. It’s a blend of African Umqombothi beera creamy brew incorporating maize and sorghum maltwith a fruity, fizzy Belgian Saison beer. Umqombothi is our African way, and everybody should know how to make it, but we dont, she said. I believe that the beer styles that we make need to reflect having an element of our past being brought into the future. She’s used all sorts of uniquely African flavors in her Tolokazi line, including the marula fruit and the rooibos bush that’s native to South Africa and better-known for being used in a popular caffeine-free tea. Who could have thought of rooibos beer? said Lethabo Seipei Kekae after trying the beer for the first time at a beer festival. Its so smooth. Even if you are not a beer drinker, you can drink it. Michelle Gumede, Associated Press
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Abdulrazak al-Jenan swept the dust off his solar panel on his apartment roof overlooking Damascus. Syria’s largest city was mostly pitch-black, the few speckles of light coming from the other households able to afford solar panels, batteries, or private generators.Al-Jenan went thousands of dollars in debt to buy his solar panel in 2019. It was an expensive coping mechanism at the time, but without it, he couldn’t charge his phone and run the refrigerator.Syria has not had more than four hours of state electricity per day for years, as a result of the nearly 14-year civil war that ended with the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in December.Syria’s new leaders are hoping renewable energy will now become more than a patchwork solution. Investment is beginning to return to the country with the lifting of U.S. sanctions, and major energy projects are planned, including an industrial-scale solar farm that would secure about a tenth of the country’s energy needs.“The solution to the problem isn’t putting solar panels on roofs,” Syria’s interim Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir told The Associated Press. “It’s securing enough power for the families through our networks in Syria. This is what we’re trying to do.” Restoring the existing energy infrastructure Some of the efforts focus on simply repairing infrastructure destroyed in the war. The World Bank recently announced a $146 million grant to help Syria repair damaged transmission lines and transformer substations. Al-Bashir said Syria’s infrastructure that has been repaired can provide 5,000 megawatts, about half the country’s needs, but fuel and gas shortages have hampered generation. With the sanctions lifted, that supply could come in soon.More significantly, Syria recently signed a $7 billion energy deal with a consortium of Qatari, Turkish, and American companies. The program over the next three and a half years would develop four combined-cycle gas turbines with a total generating capacity estimated at approximately 4,000 megawatts and a 1,000-megawatt solar farm. This would “broadly secure the needs” of Syrians, said Al-Bashir.While Syria is initially focusing on fixing its existing fossil fuel infrastructure to improve quality of life, help make businesses functional again, and entice investors, the U.N. Development Program said in May that a renewable energy plan will be developed in the next year for the country.The plan will look at Syria’s projected energy demand and determine how much of it can come from renewable sources.“Given the critical role of energy in Syria’s recovery, we have to rapidly address energy poverty and progressively accelerate the access to renewable energy,” Sudipto Mukerjee, UNDP’s resident representative in Syria, said in a statement announcing the plan. Sanctions crippled the power grid While the war caused significant damage to Syria’s infrastructure, crippling Washington-led sanctions imposed during the Assad dynasty’s decades of draconian rule made it impossible for Syria to secure fuel and spare parts to generate power.“Many companies over the past period would tell us the sanctions impact matters like imports, implementing projects, transferring funds and so on,” al-Bashir said.During a visit to Turkey in May, the minister said Syria could only secure about 1700 megawatts, a little less than 20%, of its energy needs.A series of executive orders by U.S. President Donald Trump lifted many sanctions on Syria, aiming to end the country’s isolation from the global banking system so that it can become viable again and rebuild itself.The United Nations estimates the civil war caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages and economic losses across the country. Some 90% of Syrians live in poverty. Buying solar panels, private generators or other means of producing their own energy has been out of reach for most of the population.“Any kind of economic recovery needs a functional energy sector,” said Joseph Daher, Syrian-Swiss economist and researcher, who said that stop-gap measures like solar panels and private generators were luxuries only available to a few who could afford it. “There is also a need to diminish the cost of electricity in Syria, which is one of the most expensive in the region.”Prices for electricity in recent years surged as the country under its former rulers struggled with currency inflation and rolling back on subsidies. The new officials who inherited the situation say that lifting sanctions will help them rectify the country’s financial and economic woes, and provide sufficient and affordable electricity as soon as they can.“The executive order lifts most of the obstacles for political and economic investment with Syria,” said Qutaiba Idlibi, who leads the Americas section of the Foreign Ministry.Syria has been under Washington-led sanctions for decades, but designations intensified during the war that started in 2011. Even with some waivers for humanitarian programs, it was difficult to bring in resources and materials to fix Syria’s critical infrastructureespecially electricityfurther compounding the woes of the vast majority of Syrians, who live in poverty. The focus is economic recovery The removal of sanctions signals to U.S. businesses that Trump is serious in his support for Syria’s recovery, Idlibi said.“Right now, we have a partnership with the United States as any normal country would do,” he said.Meanwhile, Al-Jenan is able to turn on both his fans on a hot summer day while he watches the afternoon news on TV, as the temperature rises to 35 degrees Celsius (95 F). He doesn’t want to let go of his solar panel but hopes the lifting of sanctions will eventually bring sustainable state electricity across the country.“We can at least know what’s going on in the country and watch on TV,” he said. “We really were cut off from the entire world.” Chehayeb reported from Beirut. Ghaith Alsayed and Kareem Chehayeb, Associated Press
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