✈️ Google Flights' 5 free money tricks

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here. Tomorrow: There’s a tab on real estate sites that shows your neighbor’s exact mortgage rate. In this market, that number tells you if they need to sell right now.

Happy Wednesday, {{first_name | friend}}. Today’s tech tip sounds like something your dad would do outside a Costco while pretending it’s science. Except it is. 

🅿️ Imagine you’re in a massive parking lot, blazing July sun, and you can’t for the life of you remember where you parked. You hold the fob up, mash the unlock button, and nothing. You wave it around like you’re conducting an invisible orchestra. Still nothing. 

Here’s a fix that looks completely ridiculous but totally works: Press the key fob against your head or under your chin, then hit the button again. Voila, car found. 

🔑 Why does holding your key fob to your head make the signal reach farther? A) Your head helps extend the signal, B) Body heat boosts the battery, C) Your eyes help aim it, D) The car feels bad for you. Keep reading, the answer’s waiting at the end.

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💌 It’s my birthday today. The best gift you could give me is a new reader. Forward this newsletter to that one coworker, family member or friend who still uses “password” as a password. You know the one. Tell ’em to sign up for free at GetKim.com. Thank you very much. — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

Happy almost-Fourth. The grill’s hot, the calendar’s filling up and if you still haven’t booked that July or August trip, you’re not alone. More than a third of summer travelers still haven’t bought their tickets. 

Booking this late feels like a guaranteed wallet beating. It doesn’t have to be. Here are five free moves.

Flexible on dates? On any Google Flights results page, find the Date grid and Price graph buttons. The grid shows what you’d pay flying out a day earlier or later. 

The graph shows how the fare swings across whole months. Nudging your trip a single day can knock a couple hundred bucks off. Love that for you.

Flexible on airports? 

Tap the plus sign in the From or To box and pile in up to seven airports at once. If two airports sit within driving distance of home, or two cities work for landing, let Google find the cheapest mix. Most people never touch this button.

No set destination? This is the fun one. 

Type your home airport, leave the destination blank and hit Explore. Google paints a map of the world with the cheapest fare to every spot on your dates. Perfect for when you just want to go somewhere warm without going broke. Click any city to jump straight to booking.

Before you buy, read the little color note. Google tells you whether today’s fare is low, typical or high for that route, and shows the normal price range. It will even nudge you to wait when a drop looks likely. 

As a rule of thumb, U.S. fares are usually cheapest about three weeks out. Flying overseas? Book at least seven weeks ahead, because international fares bottom out early.

Last one, and it’s clever. Locked into your dates but worried prices might still dip? 

Book a fully refundable fare, then switch on Track Prices for that exact flight. If the fare falls later, Google emails you, and you cancel and rebook the cheaper one. Confirm that the first fare is truly refundable before you try it. Airlines bank on you booking once and never looking again. This flips that on them.

🤣 One airplane asked another where they should go on vacation. The other said, “I don’t know. Let’s just wing it.” (With these tricks, you don’t have to.)

📩 Send this to someone who still hasn’t booked their summer trip and keeps groaning about the prices. Use the handy links below.

Share this now:

Your garden is getting trust issues. Thieves are branching out. Planting spy cameras in bushes. Studying your routine before they rob you.

Hit the link below, so you’re in the know. 👇

▶️ Burglars are bugging your bushes →

🌺 Fake flower racket: Bet you didn’t think botanical catfishing was a thing. Yep, fraudsters are using AI-generated pictures of exotic flowers that do not exist, then selling the seeds online for a few bucks a pop. I’m talking about 8-foot flowers that look like the Teletubbies. Gardening already requires patience. Now apparently, it requires fraud detection. You have to see the wild AI pics people are falling for.

Privacy gets pinged: Imagine the cops drawing an invisible circle around a credit union and asking Google who walked through? That’s the geofence warrant at the center of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling. After a 2019 Virginia credit union robbery, police used phone location data to find the suspect with nearly $100,000 in teller-banded cash. The Supreme Court ruled that Google Location History (aka Timeline) gets Fourth Amendment protection, so police can’t treat geofence data like it’s freely available simply because people opted in.

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Wordle gets cracked: Stuck on today’s Wordle? Math nerds ruined the mystery, using Shannon entropy, basically the guess that removes the most uncertainty, to solve the daily puzzle with a 99% success rate, usually nailing the answer in three or four attempts. The secret? Don’t try to guess the word early. Buy information. Open with words like SLATE, CRANE or RAISE, then use the color clues to shrink the suspect list fast. In other words, stop playing poet. Start playing detective. Wordle to the wise.

🇺🇸 Glazed patriot games: Huge news for people who love dress codes and doughnuts. For America’s 250th, Krispy Kreme is giving one free Original Glazed to anyone wearing red, white and blue on July 4th at participating shops, no purchase needed. Yes, adults will debate if navy counts. And from July 2 to 5, buy any dozen and the second Original Glazed dozen is $2.50. Free dessert for getting dressed. That deal is downright hole-some. 🍩

🏡 Your home can be stolen while you sleep: No gun. No locksmith. A scammer forges your deed at the county recorder’s office, and legally, your house belongs to them. You won’t find out until it’s too late. Home title fraud is exploding, and reversing it takes an average of 12 months of lawyers and court dates. I use Home Title Lock to monitor my title 24/7. Get your free Title History Report and 25% off for up to two years.* 

Filter sketchy texts: Scammers don’t always call pretending to be someone you know. They also text fake package alerts or “locked bank account” warnings to make you tap bad links. On iPhone, open Settings > Apps > Messages and turn on Screen Unknown Senders. Random numbers move to a separate folder. Fewer traps in your main inbox.

📱 Two apps on Android: Those big screens are good for more than making your thumb stretch. Open Recent apps, tap the app icon at the top of the first app, then hit Open in split screen view. Pick your second app and drag the middle slider to resize. Text while watching YouTube, or pretend it’s for productivity. Your call.

🕹️ Unlock Windows "God Mode": Every Windows pro has this one up their sleeve, and almost nobody else knows it exists. Right-click your desktop, pick New > Folder, and name it exactly this: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. Hit Enter and the icon transforms. Open it for one master list of every setting Windows buries across a dozen menus. Mouse, power, backups, all in one spot. Turns out I'm a bit of a control freak.

💧 I write this for you: Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to turn garage clutter into cash, give AI better prompts before it serves beige paste, lock down your chatbot privacy, understand how AI decoded animal “names” and use Google’s new AI tool on your stock portfolio. Yours free. Sign up now at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning.

Don’t you love a good life hack that starts with “First, grab the superglue.”

A viral trick has people permanently gluing a few LEGO pieces to their desks, then snapping minifigures onto them to hold charging cables in place. That’s it. No magnets. No fancy engineering. Just decades-old plastic toys suddenly getting promoted to IT support. 

Batman holds your USB-C cable. A Stormtrooper keeps your mouse wire from swan-diving behind the desk. Even the tiny construction worker finally landed a stable job.

Check it out in action here.

🔜 Tomorrow: Your neighbor’s mortgage rate may be public, and it can say a lot about whether they’ll ever move. I’ll show you the hidden home-search details smart buyers use to spot motivated sellers. Creepy? Yes. Useful? Also yes. Check your inbox.

In tomorrow’s trivia, the home printer’s glory days may be fading faster than its will to print in black ink.

The answer: A) Your head helps extend the signal. Well, technically your head is packed with fluid, and water turns out to be a surprisingly good conductor of radio waves. 

🙂‍↔️ Press the fob to your chin or temple, and your head effectively becomes part of the antenna, coupling with the fob and stretching its weak little signal farther than the fob manages on its own. Don’t expect magic. This is like a few extra car lengths, roughly double in some tests, enough to find your car across a packed lot, not unlock it from the next county.

Oh, what do you get if you cross a dog and an antenna? A golden receiver. (I crack myself up sometimes writing this newsletter!)

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What you learned today: Google lost the right to hand your whereabouts to the cops without a warrant. Google Flights has been hiding five free money-savers where nobody looks. Your house deed can walk off while you sleep. And LEGO Batman now moonlights in cable management. Not bad for five minutes. Do this every day and you'll be the sharpest one at the cookout.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, FEPPO, @milania_mi_mi via Instagram

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