Home Office Setup & Equipment

Many Americans are in the middle of making hard decisions about their health insurance, in part because open enrollment, the period in which consumers can change their plan, is happening now. That means scammers are also busy contacting people, impersonating insurance providers in an effort to collect personal, financial, and medical information. Common health insurance scamsFraudsters especially love to impersonate representatives from Medicare, targeting older adults and others who qualify for the federal program with unexpected calls. As the Federal Trade Commission warns, scammers may have some of your personal information already and will ask you to confirm your Medi…

Something strange is happening this week: The hottest trend among young people is acting mature. Maybe it's in response to our nation's financial and political leaders abdicating maturity, but Gen Z is adopting business casual attire as a cultural identifier and using a pick-up line in online dating that seems like something out of the 1950s. Even the brain-rot generation is considering moving away from meaninglessness and dropping six-seeeven in favor of memes people can understand. What is a “quarter zip” and what does it mean to wear one? A quarter zip is exactly what it sounds like: a pullover sweater with a zipper that goes a quarter way down the chest, and it's …

Smartphone display issues are nothing new. Most of us have dropped our phones the wrong way one time or another, and had to deal with the pain (and cost) of getting them fixed. But when your smartphone's screen starts acting up for no particular reason, it's pretty frustrating—especially if the manufacturer still holds you accountable for the repair fees. If that sounds like your experience with your Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, or Pixel 9 Pro Fold, there's good news: Google is now launching an Extended Repair Program for the Pixel 9 Pro line. According to Google's announcement on Monday, the company has identified a "limited number" of Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL uni…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Apple released the latest 14-inch MacBook Pro with the powerful M5 chip this October, and ever since then, it has been steadily dropping in price—right now, it's down to $1,349 (originally $1,599) for the base model. This new price is $50 cheaper than it was during Black Friday, when Lifehacker's Senior Tech Editor Jake Peterson called it "a ridiculously good value." At the time of this writing, Amazon is sold out of the base model, but it's still available at Best Buy. Apple 2025 MacBook Pro L…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. A popular productivity method encourages you to start your day by “eating the frog”—that is, tackling your biggest, most important task of the day first, then moving through the lesser ones in turn. For many, structuring their to-do list around their greatest responsibility is a good way to stay motivated and ensure top priorities are handled expediently. But not every person works best that way. I know I don't. Even for people who generally do enjoy tackling the hard stuff first, not every day is the same. If you find the prospect of jumping into a massive project first thing in the morning daunting—every day, or just t…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Backbone Pro mobile gaming controller is currently down to $134.99 from $169.99, its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. That drop helps justify its somewhat in-between status—it’s more expensive than basic clamp-on controllers but still cheaper than buying both a dedicated phone grip and a standalone Bluetooth gamepad. BACKBONE Pro Mobile Gaming Controller …

I’m sure you’ve heard it everywhere: Check with a doctor before beginning any exercise program. This is the standard disclaimer on fitness advice of any sort, which most of us probably ignore. But should you? Not necessarily, it turns out. Why are you supposed to check with a doctor before exercising?The concern underlying this oft-repeated statement is that there are rare cases where a person can die suddenly during exercise. When this happens, it’s usually in a person who (a) had some kind of underlying medical issue; (b) was not used to exercising; and (c) did very intense exercise that they were unprepared for. For a long time, there was a sense among many medical an…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Tools can be a serious investment—so if you're looking to up your DIY game in 2026, a tool bundle is often a good solution. Because they come with batteries and chargers, they’re a great way to get everything you need to use a new tool set right away, and they can be more economical than buying each tool individually. Milwaukee tool sets are often more than $1,000, but you can get a few of these bundles for under $700 right now at Home Depot. Why I recommend Milwaukee tools I’ve been using Milwaukee cordless tools for over a decade on a variety of…

If you've been running several email accounts through your Gmail, you might want to double-check your settings this month—that's because Google is ending support for the POP3 protocol that can sync emails from third-party accounts. And while there are some other solutions, they don't work quite the same. POP3 is an older standard of syncing emails between multiple accounts that allowed users to import emails from a third-party account and manage them in one spot. It's also a less secure method of transferring emails, so it's not a total surprise that Google is phasing it out, but the company hasn't broadcast the change too loudly, so it might come as a surprise to some us…

Say what you will about AI (and I've said plenty) but the progress in transcription and speech-to-text software is genuinely impressive. Whereas before such software was either clumsy or expensive, there are now all kinds of great open source tools that work well. Which brings me to Pipit, a free Mac dictation app that works offline, meaning it's totally private. Even more interesting, it can be used to do more than just transcribe speech—it can launch apps, toggle settings, and even launch a web search or query an AI service. The first time you open the application, it will ask for permission to use your microphone before downloading the Parakeet model for offline transc…

Stock Android added the concept of App Pairs back in Android 15. You choose two apps to use in split screen mode, add a shortcut to the paired apps to the home screen, and it's now trivially easy to trigger split screen multitasking (instead of having to perform multiple tap and drag gestures). It sounds neat, but I never really used it, because on my small Pixel 9a, using apps in 50:50 split-screen mode is hardly user-friendly. There's just not enough room on the screen for each app to take up half of it and still be usable. But that changed with Android 16, thanks to a small update to how split screen works. In Android 16, the split screen ratios for app pairs are muc…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. We're going back to Westeros, baby! Not that we ever really left, given that we're merely between seasons of that other Game of Thrones spin-off, and with several more allegedly in development. It seems the only place the Game of Thrones universe is completely stalled is on the page—but I digress. Where the original series saw a kingdom in decline and House of the Dragon takes us back to the Targaryen Dynasty at its height, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms occurs roughly in-between, shifting the focus from the realm's power players to more tangential (at least for now) smallfolk: Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a low…

Big changes have come to social media platform TikTok. On Jan. 22, TikTok's operations were passed from Chinese company ByteDance to TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a new entity backed by Larry Ellison's Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and United Arab Emirates-based investment firm MGX. Days later, on Jan. 23, TikTok introduced new Terms of Service for users. So far, the transition has not been smooth. Users immediately raised privacy concerns over the new TOS, taking to X with posts like this: This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Changes to TikTok's privacy policy While TikTok's new terms sound draconian…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I love getting things done around the house. I’m not the greatest carpenter, electrician, or plumber, but I like learning how things work and even enjoy learning from my mistakes (sometimes). And most of all, I like saving a bucket of money on home maintenance and repairs. None of this means that DIY isn't an incredible amount of work, however. Luckily, living in a consumption-based society means companies are always inventing new gadgets for me to buy, and some of them are incredibly useful for DIYers. The eight tool accessories below are ones I truly recommend. Each can help make your next project a little faster, easier…

Now that Apple has finally brought OLED to the iPad in the form of the most recent iPad Pro, its next goal seems to be foldables. The big news on the horizon is the foldable iPhone, which The Information first reported on way back in 2024, saying the company hopes to have a foldable iPhone on the market in 2026. But according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the iPhone maker is also working towards releasing a foldable iPad, originally rumored to be coming by 2028. Since those reports, others have come forward with supposed design leaks and potential release dates, and now we've got a pretty good idea of what Apple's first foldable devices might look like. The foldable iPho…

We should all take common-sense steps to make sure our data stays safe and secure: use strong passwords with our accounts, and never reuse passwords; employ two-factor authentication on any account that offers it; and avoid clicking strange links in emails or text messages. But even when you follow all those rules, your personal data can still be at risk, strictly because the services you rely on aren't following these rules themselves. Some websites are putting your passwords at risk Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that a concerning number of browser extensions can access sensitive information that you enter into websites. Think passwords,…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I'd never owned a really good pair of headphones; it's just not something I've really cared about. But the JBL Tour One M3s I recently acquired changed my mind forever. (Our resident audio expert Daniel Oropeza went in depth about these headphones in his review, which you should read.) JBL Tour One M3 Smart Tx Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones With Audio Transmitter $449.95 at Amazon …

Ring isn't having the week it probably thought it would have. The Amazon-owned company aired an ad on Super Bowl Sunday for "Search Party," its new feature that turns a neighborhood's collective Ring cameras into one network, with the goal of locating lost dogs. Viewers, however, saw this as a major privacy violation—it doesn't take much to imagine using this type of surveillance tech to locate people, not pets. The backlash wasn't just isolated to the ad, however. The controversy reignited criticisms of the company's partnership with Flock Safety, a security company that sells security cameras that track vehicles, notably for license plate recognition. But the partnersh…

Anthropic's Claude is an AI bot that keeps up a steady pace when it comes to pushing out new features, and the latest upgrade of note sees three useful features make their way down to free users, having previously been exclusive to the paid-for plans. If you're choosing between AIs and comparing the features available on the free plans, then there's now more of a case to be made for choosing Claude over a competitor like ChatGPT or Gemini for your next batch of AI tasks. The three new features now available to free users on Claude are file creation, external plug-ins called Connectors, and bundles of instructions called Skills. Here's how you can make use of them. File cr…

This week we're taking a look at some hyper-specific cultures within the larger youth culture. They run the gamut from the truly disturbing Looksmaxxing community, to the strange world of hardcore audiophiles, to the nostalgic domain of the bebot girls. What's a bebot girl? I'm glad you asked! What is a "Bebot Girl"? TikTok is being taken over by Bebot Girls. "Bebot" is Filipino slang from the 2010s that means "babe" or "baddie." The bebot girl trend is posting videos of the transformation from a regular person to a bebot, that is, a Filipino baddy from the 1990s. This is usually accomplished through period-appropriate makeup like heavy bronzer, frosty inner eyes, and s…

If you receive a text from a random number offering you a job, it's almost certainly a scam, and you likely know to ignore and delete the message and move on with your life. But a message from a recruiter with a link to an employment application may give you pause—and fraudsters are hoping that you'll believe it just enough to hand over your personal information. Malwarebytes recently identified a phishing scam that uses fake Google Forms posing as job applications to harvest user account credentials. How the Google Forms job scam worksThis specific campaign involves a fake Google Forms site that impersonates the real thing. Links sent to scam targets—likely via email or …

Whether you're a Samsung fan, an Android user, or just a tech enthusiast in general, you may want to clear your calendar: Samsung Unpacked 2026 is nearly here. Like Google I/O or Apple's fall event, Unpacked is Samsung's keynote, where the company shows off what it's been working on since, well, the last Unpacked. Like previous keynotes, this year's should be full of big Samsung news, all of which you can watch live as it happens. When is Galaxy Unpacked 2026? Samsung's big presentation will kick off in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 25. Like many tech events, Galaxy Unpacked starts at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET). How to watch Galaxy Unpacked 2026 While Samsung is hosting…

To coincide with the Samsung Galaxy S26 launch, Google announced three Gemini-related upgrades for Android, coming first to both the Galaxy S26 series and the Google Pixel 10 range. In fact, one of these new features seems like a significant step forward for AI on smartphones: the ability for Gemini to handle multi-step tasks on an Android phone. The examples Google gives are booking a ride through Uber or reordering a meal on DoorDash, where the AI takes care of everything in the background, leaving you free to worry about, well, whether it's going to work. Google wants Gemini to perform tasks on your behalf "When you're working on a repetitive daily task, it's easy t…

Instagram will soon alert parents if their teen repeatedly searches for content related to suicide and self-harm on the platform. According to an announcement from Meta, these notifications will be available to parents in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Canada who supervise their teen's accounts starting next week. As TechCrunch reports, this feature is being rolled out amid numerous lawsuits over how Meta and other tech companies have failed to protect kids and teens across their platforms. How the new safety alerts workInstagram will use teens' search activity to generate alerts. Searches that are flagged include "phrases promoting suicide or self-harm, phrases that sugg…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Open ear design headphones are picking up steam, possibly because ANC technology has become so good that people are forgetting what the sound of birds singing sounds like (or is that just me?). Nothing is a newer brand that has started off well, making good value products with great features that are very competitive with more well-known brands. The Nothing Ear (Open) is their first open ear design earbuds from 2024, and it's currently $99 ($149) for Prime Members, the lowest price it has been, according to price tracking tools. …