Home Office Setup & Equipment

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’re considering a smartwatch with top-tier health tracking and rugged durability, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 (Bespoke Edition) is now $249.99 (down from $329.99), its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. SAMSUNG Galaxy Watch 7 Bespoke Edition $249.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-pri…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Having your car stolen is a traumatic experience—and a depressingly common one. Although car thefts nationwide are trending downward, there were still more than 850,000 vehicles stolen in 2024. If you’ve ever woken up to find your car missing from its spot (and I have!) you know it’s not fun. But thieves don’t always target the entire car. It’s often easier and less risky to steal a specific part from your car or truck. Many of these parts are relatively easy to access, remove, and sell, and the profit margin can be very lucrative for a busy and organized criminal. If your car is ever parked out in the open (especially ove…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. We might not live in a Jetsons-like future with robot maids and flying cars, but we do have the technology to transform our standard houses into futuristic smart homes. There are some very compelling reasons to do that, including having more control over your environment, increased automation for repeated tasks, and even improved security. But smart homes—and the devices that comprise them—have one enormous downside: privacy. Smart home devices work by allowing access over a network, and as a result, every single smart device in your home, from the lock on your door to the light bulbs in your fixtures, is a potential weak …

Most video editing software works through re-encoding—essentially, uploading the file so it can be broken apart and stitched back together. This is necessary for advanced editing techniques but has some downsides. It's slow, for one thing, and the encoding process isn't lossless, meaning videos can look worse over time. This is a particularly vexing problem when all you want to do is cut a bit from the beginning or end of a file. Lossless Cut is an open source application for Linux, Windows, and Mac that can trim videos without the need for encoding. The changes to the original file are basically instantaneous and totally lossless. It's a great tool if all you ever do whe…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. From viral hacks to your grandmother, someone or something has, at some point, told you to clean with baking soda and vinegar. Even I have told you to clean with baking soda and vinegar. Yesterday, sadly, I learned that this approach isn't all it's cracked up to be. Let's discuss. Why you shouldn't mix baking soda and vinegar to cleanThe good news is that this mixture isn't toxic or dangerous in any way. You're not poisoning yourself over time if you mix vinegar and baking soda to get a bubbly paste to scrub onto your walls, countertops, or tile. The bad news is that it just doesn't do much. See, yesterday, I wrote about…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Noah Wiley can't seem to escape the emergency room. After spending more than a decade on NBC's '90s mega-hit E.R., he's back in scrubs for HBO's buzzy new doctor show The Pitt. If that show hasn't quite scratched your itch for medical drama, there are plenty of other shows to stream. The genre's roots can be traced back to the early '60s, and the sexy Dr. Kildare, but it really exploded in the '70s with shows like Medical Center, Emergency!, and Quincy, M.E., all of them fairly soapy dramas with plenty of action and occasional doses of silliness. Later in the decade, M.A.S.H. became a hit by lacing the sit-com formula with…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Over the years, I've accumulated dozens of makeup brushes, which means I’ve also spent far too much time cleaning them. Dirty brushes can screw up your glam, but can also cause breakouts and distribute bacteria and whatever else lurks in your makeup bag across your skin. In worst-case scenarios, you could even get an infection. Cleaning them regularly—every seven to 10 days—is important, but so, too, is doing it right. Some cleaning methods are ineffective and others are downright bad for the brush. Here's what to know about cleaning not only your brushes, but your sponges. How I clean my makeup brushesThere are loads of…

Gone are the days of blaming an entire generation's money problems on avocado toast. In fact, the stereotype of "millennial money problems" may not be quite what it seems in the first palce. Millennial wealth in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled since 2019, according to Federal Reserve data. And yet, time and time again, millennials report feeling financially insecure. This disconnect between numerical wealth and actual financial wellbeing has been termed "phantom wealth—money that exists in theory, but it doesn't translate to a sense of security or freedom in daily life. Here's why millennials might still be feeling financially vulnerable, and how you can regain a sense of…

If you're out and about with your laptop, or just in a different room than your charging cable, you want to eke out as much time as possible before the next recharge—and an important part of that is knowing which apps are draining the battery the quickest. Once you know who the worst offenders are as far as battery drain is concerned, you can do something about it. Maybe you can use the programs in question less often, enable any battery-saving features (if they're available), or uninstall them altogether and switch to less power-hungry alternatives. Take Google Chrome, for instance—not a program known for its light touch on system resources. If you find it's putting a lo…

While it's generally useful to get notifications on your phone, there are times when it's too much, too fast, such as after you disable Airplane Mode or when your family text thread is blowing up while you're in the middle of a meeting. On Android, you can turn on silent mode or snooze or disable notifications entirely—or you can rely on the new Notification Cooldown feature, which temporarily lowers the literal and figurative volume on your alerts so you don't have to manage those modes yourself. We've known this feature was coming for a while, and it finally arrived on Android 15 with the March 2025 update. How Notification Cooldown worksNotification Cooldown manages…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” This is a series where I highlight cookbooks that are unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own. Casseroles, soups, cakes, pastas, and roasts—many cookbooks give us plenty of ideas to feed a family of four or a crowd of 12. I don’t run across as many recipes made for only two people. As much as I appreciate leftovers, I feel tethered to those containers in my fridge, which is one of the reasons I chose to spotlight Table for Two this week. Yes, Valentine…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Like any surface, a wood floor can get stained and dirty, but you have to be really careful with how you clean it. You shouldn't use harsh chemicals, whether your floor is sealed or unsealed, because you don't want to damage the wood itself, but that leaves you with fewer options. I tried two—well, three, but we'll get to that—simple techniques that didn't require any intense chemicals today and they both worked well. Remove stains from wood floors with vinegarFirst, I assessed the stains I was dealing with, which I noticed while cleaning under my couch earlier in the week. They appeared to be leftover from a project I di…

Breaking news: Apple has another update for you to install. While it seems like there's always a new update for us Apple users to install on our devices, this one is quite important to prioritize. That's because it's not a simple feature update, changing the software you're used to. Instead, it's a security patch, fixing issues with iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and other Apple OSes that, left unpatched, leaves you vulnerable to hacking. Security patches vs. software updatesSome platforms separate security patches and software updates as two distinct processes. Not Apple. Usually, the company couples security patches and software updates together, which creates some interesting si…

If you live in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Colorado Springs, or Rockville (Maryland), Comcast might have just given you a sneak peak at the internet of the future. In collaboration with Apple, Meta, Nvidia, and Valve, the service provider is currently rolling out a new open standard called “L4S,” which seeks to drastically reduce how lag works online, and make gaming and video calls much smoother. What is L4S?Short for “Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput,” L4S wants to make this internet feel faster— not by upping bandwidth, but by making data transfer more efficient. Right now, your internet service provider, or ISP, sends data to you in the fo…

The pre-Super Bowl hype weeks have begun, and with them comes the annual American tradition of calling the NFL rigged. Local drunks, AM radio sports show hosts, and message board experts are all in agreement: The fix is in. Last year, the most interesting conspiracy theory held that the Pentagon rigged the entire 2024 NFL season so the Chiefs could appear in the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift could help Democrats get re-elected in 2024. (Oops.) This year's football truthers have a less esoteric theory for why the Chiefs are definitely going to win the Super Bowl: Follow the money. They make a compelling case, but they're wrong. Why "they" would fix the Super BowlThe rough …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate (RHR) are the metrics that most wearables' "recovery" numbers are based on. I wore five devices to bed for two weeks to see how their readings compared. Those devices were an Apple Watch Series 10, a Fitbit Charge 6, a Garmin Forerunner 265S, an Oura Ring 4, and a Whoop 4.0. Why these five? Well, they're the major brands that people tend to gravitate toward when they want to track sleep, and for each I chose the best (in my opinion) of each company's current offerings. I had most of them on hand due to testing them for recent or upcoming reviews. The Apple Watch Series 1…

The Steam Deck changed the game for PC players, opening up a world of portability that was usually reserved for Nintendo fans. Naturally, manufacturers tried to follow suit with Windows-based handhelds and the results are, shall we say, mixed. Now, Valve has released official instructions for installing its SteamOS on devices other than the Steam Deck. Let's dive into how to do it—and whether you should. I should note up front: This is going to be a nebulous area when it comes to official support from the company that made your handheld. At time of writing, the Lenovo Legion Go S is the only handheld with the "Powered by SteamOS" branding (besides the Steam Deck itself), …

It happens every year: The weather warms up, the plants start sprouting, and suddenly it’s spring—and time to clean up after a few months of hibernation. The concept of spring cleaning is pretty popular, and for good reason: Scrubbing and decluttering offer a range of benefits, from lowering stress and boosting your mood to simple physical exercise. Plus, the chances are good that your home needs it. For most people, the phrase “spring cleaning” brings to mind dusting and vacuuming the interior of the house. That’s a big part of it, of course, but you shouldn’t neglect the exterior of your house (or your car!), which has taken a beating during these cold, snowy months. N…

As egg prices skyrocket, you too may be considering if it would be cheaper going straight to the source and raising your own flock. As the steward of four sweet but dimwitted backyard chickens, I'll caution that it's more expensive than you think—but with prices spiking as high as $1 per egg in some areas, it may be worth considering. Each day, I reliably pull three or four gorgeously colored eggs out of my backyard chicken coop. “They're free!” I think to myself. But these eggs are only “free” if one ignores the costs of feeding, sheltering, protecting, and entertaining a flock of tiny, feathered dinosaurs. Now, most people with backyard birds aren’t going the cheap rou…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. It can get a bit confusing to decide between the standard iPad, the iPad Air, and the iPad Pro. For the most budget-friendlyoption, the iPad 10th gen is your best bet. For those looking for top-of-the-line specs, the iPad Pro is the way to go. If you're somewhere in between, that's where the iPad Air's sweet spot is. Right now, the latest 11-inch M2 Wifi iPad Air is $499 (originally $599), and the Wifi + Cellular version (if you don't want to rely on wifi) is $649 (originally $749)—for both models, those match their lowest-ever prices, according to …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Whether you’re still trying to hold down those New Year’s resolutions or you’re just generally trying to stay on top of your productivity, we can always benefit from having some accountability checks. You can do these yourself, sure, but having a little outside help from a well-made app can make a big difference. For one-on-one accountability: FocusmateA major component of productivity is planning your day, so if you’re planning on doing a certain task, like clearing your inbox or consolidating notes, try using Focusmate to get paired with an accountability partner who’s working at the same time. You get put into a video c…

By default, Google Photos now uses Gemini AI to search through your photo library. This is thanks to a new feature called Ask Photos that rolled out late last year. While this feature is great for locating specific photos, it's not as fast as the older search option, so it's not ideal for every search, especially more general ones. If you're tired of using Gemini's slower search in Google Photos for Android, there's a shortcut that helps you return to the classic search functionality. As spotted by 9to5Google, you can long-press the search button (which is labelled Ask and is located in the bottom-right corner) to use the classic, faster and AI-free search method instead.…

The healthcare sector is one of the most common targets for hackers and cyber criminals, and yet another data breach has put the personal data of more than a million patients at risk. Community Health Center (CHC), a nonprofit healthcare provider in Connecticut, has disclosed that hackers gained access to its system in October and stole sensitive health and personal information belonging to 1,060,936 individuals. What happened with CHC? According to reporting by Bleeping Computer, hackers had access to the CHC network for several hours on October 14, 2024, though the breach was not discovered until January 2, 2025. Stolen data may include names, birthdates, addresses, ph…

If you’ve ever hunted for a house, you know that it can be a long, involved process. While a lot of that time is taken up just finding the right house, another big chunk of that time is taken up by the negotiation. Most people focus on the price of the home, which makes sense—it’s a huge purchase for most people, so getting the price right is crucial—but you can negotiate for a lot more than that. You may already know that you can (and should) ask for repairs or financial credits if the inspection reveals problems, but it never hurts to ask for concessions or contingencies that can make your new home more appealing, comfortable, and affordable in the long run. Here are si…