Feed Blur
Instagram is really two apps sharing one icon. One is where your friends are. The other is built to keep you scrolling.
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Hours a year, if Reels take about three hours of your day. That is more waking time than most people spend at work in six months.
Feed Blur is a free app for Android phones. It covers the second one and leaves the first alone. Your feed, Reels, and the Explore page go behind a blur, while messages, Stories, profiles, and search carry on working exactly as before.
- Covers your feed, Reels, and Explore
- Leaves messages, Stories, profiles, and search working as normal
- Turns the sound off while something is covered, then puts your volume back
- To switch a block off you have to finish an annoying puzzle first, which takes longer than just closing the app
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Multi-Copy
Pulling twenty questions out of a quiz means copy, switch tab, paste, switch back. Twenty times over. The work is the switching, not the copying.
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Less time spent moving text around, so you reach the actual work sooner.
Multi-Copy is a free add-on for the Chrome browser. Draw a box around anything you want to keep and carry on. When you are done, press one button and the whole lot arrives on your clipboard together.
- Copy text you normally cannot select, such as words inside a picture
- Pull text straight out of screenshots and scanned PDFs instead of typing it out by hand
- Collect from as many pages and tabs as you like, then paste it all in one go
- Undo the last one without losing the rest
- Nothing leaves your computer. No account, nothing tracked
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Before
Copying the normal way
9 steps, for every single question
- Highlight the question
- Press copy
- Switch to the other tab
- Click into the box
- Press paste
- Switch back
- Find your place again
- Scroll to the next question
- Retype anything stuck inside a picture or PDF by hand
After
Copying with Multi-Copy
3 steps, once, for all of them
- Press Capture area and drag a box over each question, pictures included
- Press Copy everything
- Paste once, wherever you are working
Twenty questions take the same three steps as one.
Install Feed Blur
A free app for Android phones. Works on Android 12 to 16, and it never asks you to sign up.
Android shows a warning for any app that did not come from the Play Store. You will see two of them here. Both are normal, and the steps below say exactly when each one appears.
Install it
Open this page on your phone
Tap the download button above using Chrome, on the phone you want to use it on.
Accept the first warning
Chrome will say this kind of file can harm your device. Tap Download anyway.
Open the file
Tap it in your notifications, or find it in your Downloads.
Let Chrome install it
Android will say Chrome is not allowed to install apps. Tap Settings, turn on Allow from this source, then press back.
Accept the second warning
Tap Install. If a scan warning appears, tap Install anyway. This shows up for every app that skips the Play Store.
Turn it on
Open Feed Blur
It opens on a setup screen and walks you through the two permissions it needs.
Let it see which screen you are on
Tap the prompt, find Feed Blur in the list, and switch it on. This is how the app knows whether you are looking at your messages or the feed.
Let it draw on top
This is what puts the blur over the feed. Without it, nothing gets covered.
Choose what to block
The feed, Reels, and Explore each have their own switch. Turning one on is instant. Turning one off means finishing the puzzle first, which is the whole point.
Feed Blur is not connected to Instagram or Meta. It runs entirely on your phone and never sends anything anywhere.
Install Multi-Copy
A free add-on for the Chrome browser. It also works in Edge, Brave, and anything else built on Chrome. Everything it needs is inside the download, so there is nothing to set up afterwards.
Multi-Copy is not in the Chrome store, so you add the folder to Chrome yourself. It takes four extra clicks the first time and nothing after that.
Install it
Download and unzip it
You get a folder called multi-copy. Put it somewhere you will not move it, like Documents. Chrome runs the extension straight from that folder, so deleting or moving it later stops it working.
Open Chrome's extensions page
Type chrome://extensions in the address bar and press enter.
Turn on Developer mode
The switch is in the top right corner.
Add the folder
Click Load unpacked in the top left, choose the multi-copy folder, and confirm.
Pin it to your toolbar
Click the puzzle piece icon in Chrome's toolbar, then the pin next to Multi-Copy. The whole tool runs from that one button.
Use it
Click the toolbar button
A small panel appears in the bottom right. Drag it anywhere by its top edge.
Pick Text or Image
Text grabs the real words under your box and is exact. Image reads the picture instead, for screenshots, diagrams, and scanned PDFs.
Grab as much as you want
Press Capture area, drag a box, let go. Then scroll, switch tabs, and do it again. The counter keeps track, and your stack survives page loads.
Copy it all at once
Press Copy everything. The whole stack lands on your clipboard as one block with a blank line between each piece, and the counter resets.
Chrome may ask on startup whether to turn off developer mode extensions. Click Keep and Multi-Copy carries on working.
Two problems worth solving.
Who I am
I'm Dawud, a student. I built both of these because I needed them and could not find anything that did the job without a subscription or an account.
Feed Blur
Instagram's messages are useful. Being able to reach classmates, teammates, and people whose work you want to be near is worth keeping.
The feed and Reels are a different thing. They are built to hold your attention for as long as possible, which is the opposite of what you need when you are trying to work.
Deleting the app costs you the messages. Feed Blur hides the feed, Reels, and Explore instead, and leaves everything else exactly as it was.
Multi-Copy
I care about working efficiently, and the workload only goes up. Moving research between tabs was the slowest part of my day, and none of it was actual thinking.
So I built something that grabs everything in one pass and pastes it in one go. It reads text out of images too, on your own computer, because sending my coursework to someone else's server to be typed up was never the answer.
Why they are free
I built both for myself. There is no pricing page and there will not be one.
The code is open, so you can read it, change it, or take it apart. If either tool gives you back an hour, that is the point.
Dawud