I found that there's too much of a lag to do anything besides watching videos on the TV when streaming to my Chromecast

Really? Cause most of the TED talks that I've seen have ended with a Thank You.

I just don't have a microphone :P

Nova Launcher has always had a feature in the "Look and Feel" (I think?) section of the settings folder, and if you check the experimental, there is an option for transparent status bars, and I've had this enabled since I changed from TouchWiz Launcher

I swear to god this is the exact same list as the technobuffalo video