Earlier this year I finally fell down the rabbit hole that is Instagram Stories, and now I spend way too much time on Instagram. This week, the app started rolling out a new feature to combat Insta-addiction, a “Your Activity” tracker that shows you how much time you spend in the app, and lets you set limits to help reduce the number of hours you pour into scrolling you feed each day.

Windows: I wouldn’t be surprised if you have have folders upon folders of photographs that you swear you’ll get to sorting “someday”. For me, that day was this weekend. For whatever reason, I felt like spending a few hours trying to tackle my lifetime of photographic history that I’ve dumped into a big “To Sort” folder on my network-attached storage device.

Because why not, Apple has tweaked App Store product pages and made it impossible for you to see an app’s in-app purchases prior to buying it. Why does this matter? Because if you throw down $5 for an app, you’re probably expecting it to have all the features you read about in the app’s description.

You might be less interested in making that initial purchase—even a free download — if you find that you have to pay more to unlock the functionality you wanted in the first place.

I’m not going to ask why you need a keylogger. Just know that installing one on someone else’s system is a great way to get yourself dumped, fired, or prosecuted, depending on your situation. It’s also a great way to really put someone in a world of hurt, should the little utility you’ve downloaded capture keystrokes for you and send them to another source without you or your target’s knowledge.

I’m a big fan of making lists. I have a list of things I need to get done the month, another list is broken out into things I need to do this week, and yet another list of things that need to be completed in a day. For me and how I work, they’re great for keeping me organised, and I get a lot of satisfaction in crossing yet another item off my list.

There's a special corner in Tech Hell reserved for app developers who try to sucker people into paying obscene amounts of money for an underwhelming product.

iOS: If you’re the kind of person who uses a little creativity when organising the apps on your iPhone or iPad — by icon colour, for example — it might be time to take your device’s look to the next level. Sure, you can name your folders something descriptive and/or witty, like “yellow” instead of the category of the apps found within it, but here’s a trick you can use to ditch folder names entirely.

When Epic Games initially released Fortnite for Android earlier this year it made it exclusively available on Samsung devices. If you’re rocking a Galaxy S9 or Note 9, then that was great news. If you had any other Android phone on the planet, it was kind of a bummer.

I’m not big into the crazier Apple Watch faces — the ones that try to fill your watch’s face with the time, data points, and other icons you tap to access this or that.

But even though I’m a purist, I’ve installed the third-party complication Better Day ($2.99) and switched to a slightly more data-heavy face, because this third-party complication gives you a much better calendar experience for your Apple Watch than Apple’s.

Android/iOS: I have a reasonable but not overwhelming amount of media: Mostly books, followed by video games, followed by some collectable vinyls and CDs that I keep around. I also have friends who have rooms full of stuff: Stacks of books and floor-to-ceiling bookcases that are nearly bursting from overuse.

All of us could benefit from checking out Libib, a free service you can use to scan and catalogue your books, movies, music and video games.

Windows: While you might be wedded to your desktop wallpaper — be it a picture of your family, your favourite Internet pet, or something else amazing — there's no reason you can't have a little variety each day. All those Apple fans might get macOS Mojave's dynamic wallpaper, but you can do even better in Windows, thanks to a fun little utility called Chameleon.

Skype announced this week that it has added a cloud-based recording feature to its video chat service, which you can now access on almost any version of Skype save for the Windows 10 version. It’ll gain the call-recording feature “in the coming weeks,” according to the Skype blog.

This weekend Google announced plans to bring support for 22 new languages to Google Home by the end of the year. That number adds to the languages the smart assistant already supports.

iOS: Christian Selig has created Apollo, a Reddit app for iOS that’s so elegant Apple might have imagined it themselves. The design is beautiful, and the usability is top notch (and much better than Reddit’s official app). It even features a Dark Mode for all your nighttime meme-posting and GIF-watching.

iOS: For reasons ranging from risqué to super-spy, you might occasionally want to send a secret image to somebody. While there are plenty of apps you can use to send disappearing images, Cammeleon is a cool little iOS app that lets you hide images within images.

Android/iOS: In April, Google brought a new confidential mode to Gmail’s desktop version, allowing you to send emails that automatically expire. The idea being that if you use Gmail to send confidential information (which let’s face it, isn’t the safest idea), then using the confidential mode will make that decision a little bit safer.

Android: Earlier this week Google announced that thanks to a partnership with WhatsApp, backups from the app will no longer count against your Google Drive storage limits. That means it’s an even better idea than ever to use Google Drive as a backup for your messages.

When you're trying to learn a foreign language, there's no better way than being immersed in it. Language immersion, after all, is how most of us learned our first language as kids. When everything around you is written in a particular language, you're probably going to work to figure things out.

iOS: One of the best parts of any science-fiction game or movie are those ominous tones that suggest a conversation or discovery is about to head south — a quintessential part of the soundtrack that adds a lot of atmosphere (and tension) to an experience. And now, thanks to an open-source iOS app, you can make your own imposing synthesiser sounds and teach yourself the basics of music production.