You Can Get $165 Free to Spend During Amazon October Prime Day

Amazon really wants to you to buy things during its Prime Big Deal Days. This year’s sale will take place October 8 and 9, and the mega-retailer is not only cutting prices (kind of) on thousands of products (whether you need them or not), it’s offering free money (in the form of credits that can only be spent on Amazon). You can grab $165 of Amazon’s money if you jump through the following digital hoops.

Get $15 for backing up pictures with Amazon Photos

If you're an Amazon Prime member, you get free, unlimited photo storage with your membership, and if you take advantage of this promotion, Amazon will pay you $15 in credits for backing up your pictures. Here's how:

• Download the Amazon Photo App. It’s available for iOS, Android, and desktop, but this offer only applies to the mobile version.

• Upload your photos. (Or photo; you only need to upload one.)

• Await your reward. A $15 credit should arrive in your email shortly.

This won’t work if you’ve used the app before, and the credit you receive has to be used by Prime Day. You need to hop on it quick, too: the offer is only open until midnight on October 3. The credits expires at midnight on the 9th, and it can only be used on an order of $30 or more.

Sign up for an Amazon Prime Visa card for $150

If you sign up for an Amazon Prime Visa credit card, and you're approved, you'll get an instant free $150 Amazon gift card.

If you shop at Amazon a lot, the card might prove a good deal, even without the free $150. It offers 5% discounts on Amazon purchases, Whole Foods purchases, and Chase travel, plus a 7% discount for anything you buy on Prime Days, as long as you choose no-rush shipping. There's no annual fee if you're a Prime member.

The APR is 19.99% to 28.74%, which is around the national average of just above 20%. The bad news: the rebate rate on non-Amazon purchases is 1%, so it's really best if you do a lot of Amazon shopping.

Discounted Prime membership for students and others

Amazon Prime membership gives you free shipping on many Amazon items and access to Prime Video’s vast selection of movies and TV shows for $14.99 and month or $139 per year (worth it for the selection of mid 1960s Beach Party movies alone.) But if you’re an eligible student or receive EBT or other government benefits, Prime will only cost you $7.49 or $6.99 per month respectively. Definitely take advantage if you qualify.

You can already shop for early Prime Day deals

Some items are already marked down on Amazon in advance of Prime Big Deal Days, like this 55-Inch Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED. Lifehacker will be covering everything related to Prime Big Deal Days, so keep watch and stay alert.

Every James Bond Movie Is Finally Available to Stream in One Place

I've spent a few years here at Lifehacker writing up or editing lists of all the movies coming to the biggest streaming services every month, and one thing I've taken note of, as a fan of the James Bond films, is how annoying it is to figure out where (and if) you can stream all 25 of the iconic spy films.

It's rare for any one streamer to have more than a handful of them at a time, a situation that has persisted even after Amazon bought MGM, the film studio that owns the rights to the franchise, in 2021. As a customer in the modern streaming marketplace, it's frustrating, but certainly not unprecedented state of affairs—though Paramount+ bills itself as the streaming home of the Star Trek franchise, for example, you can currently only stream three of the big-screen Trek films there.

There's a simple reason for this, and it unsurprisingly has zero to do with making things easier for the consumer: By signing short-term licensing deals with a bevy of different streamers, the rights holders can make a lot more money. That's why it's such a rare delight to have all 25 Bond films* streamable in the same place—something that has only briefly happened once before, as far as I can determine.

Where to stream all the James Bond films right now

Unsurprisingly, given Amazon owns MGM, the current streaming home for every film in the franchise is Amazon Prime Video. This is generally good new for Bond fans, since there's a good chance they're already a Prime member (like 184 million other folks in the U.S.). Unfortunately there are a few caveats worth noting.

*One of the best Bonds is only technically available

First, while all 25 Bond films are technically available on Prime Video, if you want to watch 2006's Casino Royale (hey, that's my favorite one!), as of this writing you can only do so via Prime Video if you sign up for the Paramount+ add-on channel. That costs $7.99 extra per month on top of your Prime membership, but you can watch directly via Prime Video without logging into a separate Paramount+ app, so I guess that was close enough for the people running the official James Bond account on X.

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Two Bond films aren't included at all

Second, "all 25 007 movies" doesn't include two other Bond films that aren't typically counted as part of the franchise proper: 1967's Peter Sellers-starring comedic take on Casino Royale, and 1983's Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery returned to the title role even as Roger Moore was still the "official" 007 for complex legal reasons you're probably familiar with if you're a big enough Bond fan to know the movie exists at all. If you want to watch either of these minor entries in the canon, you'll need to go the digital rental route.

How long will the Bond films be streaming on Prime Video?

Third—and here's the real sticky wicket when you're trying to stream anything these days—is the fact that there's no way of knowing how long all 25 movies will remain available via Prime Video. Amazon isn't exactly forthright about what titles are leaving the service and when, so my advice is to spend the rest of October binging Bond, if you're so inclined (and can find the time amid all the spooky season fare). That's your mission, if you choose to accept it. Wait, wrong spy franchise (but luckily all seven Mission: Impossible movies are also in one spot right now: Paramount+).

You Can Get This Ninja Phantom MAX 8 Drone on Sale for $80 Right Now

You can get the Ninja Phantom MAX 8 drone on sale for $79.99 right now (reg. $169.99). It’s an excellent beginner-friendly drone featuring a headless mode that makes taking off simple, and obstacle avoidance that helps you dodge trees and walls. You can pair your smartphone with the remote control to see through the drone’s HD front and bottom cameras and take photos or videos, and you can fly for up to twelve minutes before running out of batter. It also has a return function where the drone automatically finds its way back to the control and lands.

You can get the Ninja Phantom MAX 8 drone on sale for $79.99 right now (reg. $169.99), though prices can change at any time.

Microsoft Just Dropped a Bunch of New Copilot Features

After an underwhelming launch in June, Microsoft is retooling Copilot and Copilot+ to make it match up to its competitors a bit more. It's a mixed bag of an update though: It’s losing some of its initial, unique promises—there don’t seem to be any tools for adjusting your Windows settings included in the new version—even as it gains multimodal features (like ChatGPT) and AI generative fill (like Photoshop).

The Copilot chatbot gets a voice

In a series of videos and a blog post, Microsoft revealed that Copilot now comes with a new, more neutral look as well as the ability to chat over voice—and soon, it will also take input from video. It’s similar to what companies like Google are doing with Gemini Live, with a few Microsoft touches.

Most obvious are the cards that pop up when you open the new Copilot app or website, which resemble Microsoft’s live tiles UI from older versions of Windows and give you suggestions for what to do with Copilot based on your past conversations with the chatbot.

More interesting is the Copilot Daily feature, which presents a brief AI-generated summary of recent news headlines. These are taken from approved partners like Reuters or Financial Times, to prevent copyright issues, and are presented in a sort of TV news anchor voice. It could be helpful to quickly get caught up when waking up, although I’d caution against using a freshly developed robot as your only news source.

The new look and voice support are available for iOS, Android, and the web today, while Vision, which will let you point your camera at your surroundings in order to use them when asking the AI questions (say, "What breed of dog is this?"), is currently part of the experimental Copilot Labs program.

Also in Copilot Labs is “Think Deeper,” which will let you give the AI more time to answer your questions, hopefully improving your results. Copilot Labs features will be available to a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers first—it’s not something you can just sign up for like a Windows Insider account.

At this point in the lifecycle of AI, none of these reveals are especially revolutionary, with even Copilot Daily having similar competition in apps like Perplexity. The unique but controversial Recall feature that will take continuous screenshots of your Copilot+ PC is still in testing, although Microsoft says it will come to testers with Qualcomm’s Copilot+ chips soon.

In the meantime, Copilot+ laptops are getting some additions to Paint and Search to hold them over. 

Copilot+ Laptops may soon finally be worth it

Credit: Microsoft

Building on the existing Cocreator in Paint feature, which uses generative AI to make images based on your sketches, Generative Fill and Generative Erase allow Copilot+ laptop owners to adjust their images without having to draw anything first. Fill will simply let you create and place AI imagery from text, while Erase works a bit like Google’s Magic Eraser, letting you paint over elements you want to remove from a photo with a brush, then watching as they get erased and replaced with imagery the AI thinks is appropriate.

Credit: Microsoft

There’s also AI upscaling in the Copilot+ version of the Photos app, with which on-device AI will fill in the blanks on low-res photos to increase their resolution as much as eightfold. Microsoft says you can get 4K results “within seconds,” although I’ll need to see more examples of its output before I can really recommend the tool.

Credit: Microsoft

Meanwhile, Windows Search on Copilot+ PCs will soon use AI to discern the content of your files, not just their names. That means you could search for “cat” and it could bring up photos of cats, even if “cat” is not in the file name. While Microsoft doesn't say that the feature is in testing, the company seems to think it’s not ready yet, saying it will be coming first to File Explorer next month, and to Windows Search and Settings “in the coming months.”

Perhaps this extra time is to address any privacy concerns that could come from Microsoft snooping through your files, as happened with Recall, although Microsoft does say the feature will work offline.

Credit: Microsoft

One feature that Microsoft does say is in testing is “Click to do.” Click to Do seems sort of like an AI-powered right click, with Copilot analyzing what you’re currently doing on your PC and suggesting appropriate actions in a context menu. It’s a bit more involved, since you’ll need to access the Snipping Tool or Print Screen to do it, but it’s the one new feature that hearkens back to Copilot’s initial promises of, well, helping you pilot through Windows. Click to Do will be available to Windows Insiders on Copilot+ laptops next month.

Overall, today’s changes and announcements are hefty, in the sense that there’s a lot to dig into, but it might be a while until they actually impact your workflows, as some are in testing and you’ll need a Copilot+ laptop to access most of them. Whether that'll make Copilot+ worth the investment remains to be seen, but in a best-case scenario, features like Generative Fill could potentially save you the cost of a Photoshop subscription.

Try ‘Density Sets’ to Actually Do Those Exercises You Keep Skipping

You have an exercise you’re always “forgetting” to do. I know you do. For some of us it’s curls, for some of us it’s everything but curls. If you’re short on time or motivation, let me introduce you to my favorite trick for actually getting everything in: density sets.

What are density sets? 

Density sets, also called density training, refers to timed sets of an exercise, or more often two exercises in a superset. I generally do normal sets-and-reps training for most of my lifts, but add in a few density sets for accessories or anything I otherwise would be tempted to skip. 

In density training, you set a timer, and then do as much of your target exercise as possible in that time. I like to use a five-minute timer for a quick burst of accessories, or 10 minutes for something I need to spend more time on. You can choose the number that works for you, and even increase or decrease the time from one training block to the next.

It’s called “density” because the idea is to do as many reps as possible during that time. You can track how many reps you do, and try to beat it the next time. 

How do you do density training? 

First, choose your exercises. I find this works best with a superset of either antagonistic (opposite) exercises, like bicep curls and tricep extensions, or with exercises that work entirely different body parts, like core work for the abs and grip work for the forearms. Warm up for those exercises, if needed. 

Then you start the timer. Begin doing the exercises, but on each set, you don’t want to go all the way to failure. Get close, but quit while you still have a few reps in the tank. This maximizes how many total reps you’ll be able to do before the timer goes off. 

After you’ve done a set of each exercise, rest for the minimum time possible and then get right back into it. It’s normal for those later sets to be fewer reps than the first set, and that’s fine. And if you do hit true failure, that’s also fine! Just keep going, one way or another. If you end up doing 2-3 reps in each of these mini sets toward the end, so be it. If you want to track progress, make sure you write down the weight you used and how many total reps you did. 

Pros of density training

The absolute best thing about density training is that if you set a five-minute timer, you’ll know it will be over in five minutes. Just think: That exercise you keep putting off? Five minutes from now you will be done. 

It’s also great for bro-style pump work. You know, the kind of thing where you get the blood flowing to the target muscles, make them feel like jelly, and walk away looking and feeling temporarily super jacked (this is the ideal time for a gym mirror selfie). 

You also don’t have time to overthink the minutia. How many reps? Enough. How much rest? Until you’re ready to go again. How many sets? As many as it takes to fill the five minutes. 

Cons of density training

During a density set, you don’t have much time to switch weights or to log the exact weight you used, if you did. 

You also aren’t giving yourself enough rest for quality strength work. Density training can make you stronger, but if strength is your focus, you should really make time for some heavier work with three- to five-minute rest times. 

You can do all your training as density sets, and honestly, if I were really crunched for time—had to get a whole workout in in a 20- or 30-minute session—I’d probably organize it into density sets. But for most of us, density sets work best for a few accessories at the end of the day, not all of our training.

Examples of density training

Supersets are great for density training, since you can rest one set of muscles while doing an exercise with another. Say it takes 30 seconds to do a set of bicep curls, and then another 30 for a set of tricep kickbacks. Rest for 30 seconds in between, and now your biceps get a full minute of rest. (You may even be able to skip that last rest, if the 30 seconds of tricep work was enough.) 

You can also do tri-sets (like a superset but with three exercises). And of course you can do single exercises if you want, but I’d recommend at least doubling up. Here are some good supersets that you can do as density work, with examples of exercises you might choose for each: 

• Biceps (curls) and triceps (kickbacks or overhead extensions)

• Core (ab roller) and grip (wrist roller)

• Push-ups (or dips) and inverted rows (or pull-ups)

• Goblet squats and kettlebell swings

• Band walks (for abductors) and Copenhagen planks (for adductors)

• Front raises, lateral raises, and reverse flies (for the three heads of the deltoid)

Don’t forget that I also have a list of my favorite supersets here. Because of the time crunch, it’s best to choose exercises you can do with the same weight (like squats and swings with the same kettlebell) or on the same machine (that list has some examples of cable supersets you can do with just one station on a cable machine). 

And if you ever have exercises that you’ve been prescribed by a physical therapist but you always hate doing…guess what, those are great candidates for density sets as well. 

The Best Alternatives to Verizon Wireless, If You've Had Enough

Yesterday, a massive outage hit Verizon customers across the U.S., leaving millions unable to make calls or stuck with their phones in SOS mode. The outage is the last straw for some Verizon customers. If you're one of them, and you're looking for a new provider of cell phone service, you have options. Below are the best deals on non-Verizon cell phone service.

Mint Mobile: best overall bargain

If you're going for the overall least expensive plan with your existing phone, Mint Mobile is for you. Mint is currently offering new customers a promotional rate of $15 a month, for the first three months, for any of its data plans. After that, the pricing is based on the tier of service you've chosen and how far you much of a commitment you want to make. Mint's "unlimited" plan is $35 a month if you sign up for six months, and $30 a month if you commit to a year. Check out the site for a full breakdown of plans and prices.

The downside: if you need a new phone, Mint might not be the choice for you. It offers discounts on phones, but they aren't the best you can get.

T-Mobile: best data plan

If your priority is data, and you download and upload a ton of it, consider switching to T-Mobile, specifically its Magenta plan. Magenta comes with perks like discounts to Hilton hotels, Hertz rental cars, and concert venues, but the real draw is an "unlimited" plan that offers the best overall mobile network (according to our sister site PCMag) and 100GB of data usage per month before they throttle you. AT&T's comparable plan offers 50GB—and AT&T is $5 a month more.

The downside: Magenta isn't cheap. The plan costs $70 a month.

AT&T: best new phone discounts

If you're planning on getting a new phone when you switch away from Verizon, consider AT&T. The company is offering a rebate of up to $1,000 toward the purchase of an iPhone 16 when you trade in your old handset. If you're about that Android life, AT&T is offering a Pixel 9 Pro XL for free if you have a decent trade-in. AT&T's network also offers the widest coverage and a lower percentage of dropped calls than either T-Mobile or Verizon.

The downside: According to PC Mag's 2023 survey of user satisfaction, AT&T is sitting at number 10, behind even TracFone and Verizon.

Google Fi: best family plans

Google Fi offers the best deal for multiple phone. Its "Simply Unlimited" plan costs $100 for four people. Of course the "unlimited" part doesn't mean that, but 35GB of data before they put the brakes on it is adequate for most people. Plus, Google Fi uses T-Mobile's excellent network. Google Fi is at the top of PC Mag's user satisfaction survey too.

The downside: Fi is better for Android users. You can use an iPhone on Google Fi, but it won't get 5G service, yet.

Tello: best minimalist phone service

If you want barebones, minimal phone service, pre-paid wireless company Tello offers a no-data plan for only $8 a month. That's cheaper than a hamburger! If you're anything like me, the first time you're stuck in line buying that hamburger, you'll want a data plan. Luckily you can upgrade to plans that include data whenever you want. Tello also offers sweet anti-cool phones like the NUU F4L flip phone for only $89.

The downside: Tello doesn't offer discounts for multiple lines, and you'll pay extra for international roaming.

How to Get Your iPhone Out of SOS Mode

If you are one of the millions of Verizon customers whose phones are currently stuck in “SOS Mode,” there’s some good news and some bad news. The good news: Getting your phone out of SOS Mode is a few steps away. The bad: Solving the underlying Verizon outage, and thus, getting your phone service working again, is another story.

First, some business. This should only be affecting iPhone 14 and above users or Android users with Satellite SOS. It’s a bug of the SOS feature, where once you’ve activated SOS (and yes, I know you probably didn't do so, which is what makes this more painful), the SOS won’t go away until the phone finds service again. Since service is out, that’s a tricky situation. 

Consider first: Do you really want to fix the problem? As long as the outage persists, you can use SOS mode to call emergency services if you need it. It doesn’t help if you need to call your boss, though.

Even once Verizon restores service, it might take a few ticks for your phone to get back on board, so trying these steps might solve the problem. 

• Turn your cellular data on and off. This is usually in your settings, and works like a soft reset, forcing the phone to look for a signal again. 

• Restarting your phone has the above effect, plus resets any cache or apps that were running before. 

• While it’s unlikely to be the fix Verizon rolls out, you might as well see if there’s a software update.  Obviously, this will only work if you’re connected to wifi. Go to Settings > General > About.

• You can actually turn your cellular line off and on if you’re using an eSIM. Go to Settings > Cellular > your phone number and turn the line on and off. If you’re using a physical SIM card, take it out and put it back in. 

• You can try resetting your network settings, but this is a drastic action and since we know the SOS issue is likely related to the Verizon outage, you might not want to do so. If you do, all your networks and passwords for wifi, cellular and VPN will be toast.