Home Office Setup & Equipment

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I recommend a lot of organizational tools around here, from high-quality shelves to renter-friendly options. While having a bunch of designated storage space is crucial for maintaining the decluttering and organizational principles that keep a home in order, some of the products on the market are a little spendy. Sometimes, sure, you need to drop some significant cash on something that will really help you whip a space into shape, but most of the time, there are inexpensive options that get the job done just as well. Here are some of my favorite organizing staples, all of which cost me less than or around $25. Storage car…

Good news: Spring is around the corner. By the time the ground is warm enough to receive your flower, vegetable, and herb starts, it’s a race to see how much production you can get from these plants before the season is over. The bigger the plant you start with, the better. That’s why I give my plants a head start by growing seedlings inside. Here's everything I'm starting indoors this month, and a few seeds you can direct sow outside, too. (If you've never grown from seed indoors before, don't be intimidated. It's incredibly rewarding, saves money, and will give you the gardening high you need while the weather is still terrible.) Start long-germinating flowers todayIt…

This post is part of our Home Remedy Handbook, a tour of the landscape of home remedies from the iffy to the doctor-approved. Read more here. Thanks to a loophole in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, some of the “drugs” you can buy at pharmacies are actually nothing but magic water. I am, I promise, not exaggerating. I don’t mean supplements, which are legal because they are considered to be not drugs. And I don’t mean foods that make iffy or overblown health claims (nothing as boring as that). I mean that you can walk into a pharmacy and pay seven dollars of legal tender for a “natural” kids cold & cough remedy and walk away with a bottle of mostly wa…

The Leader Key is a popular concept in coding, and it essentially works like a hotkey. In old-school text editor VIM, a leader key is a shortcut starter, a first button to begin a special command. For example, it's similar to how you might enter the "#" key on your TV remote before pressing a code, to enter a hidden menu. Now, The Leader Key Mac app brings the same concept to your entire Mac. You press a predefined shortcut, and then a single key afterward to quickly execute a mapped action. In practice, this means you might press the Globe key and the Right Command key, then S to quickly open the Safari browser. It's similar to the default keyboard shortcuts you're prob…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Sony's PlayStation VR 2 headset is getting a permanent price price drop this March, down to $400 from $550. That'll include the headset, the controllers, and a pair of wired earbuds—but is that a deal worth getting excited over? Well, for Sony, maybe. The price cut comes a year after Bloomberg reported that Sony had stopped making new PSVR 2 units and shifted efforts towards getting rid of excess stock. That points to lower-than-expected sales for the peripheral, and it's easy to see why. Sony's VR loyalists were surprised to hear when the headset came out, for instance, that it would not work with the existing library of…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Running is hard. Sticking to a training plan is hard. But knowing that you have a race coming up is a great motivator to get you out on the road when you’d rather be watching TV. If you’ve never run a race before, putting one on your calendar might seem scary: Will I feel out of place? What should I wear? How long is a 5K anyway? (It’s 3.1 miles.) I remember being nervous for my own first 5K. Actually, I considered signing up for probably half a dozen before I worked up the nerve to actually do it. I actually signed up for a 10K first, which was probably just a way to put it off even further; I survived the 10K, just bare…

It turns out that getting your news from robots playing telephone with actual sources might not be the best idea. In a BBC study of OpenAI, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity’s news prowess, the news organization found that “51% of all AI answers” about news topics had “significant issues of some form.” The study involved asking each bot to answer 100 questions about the news, using BBC sources when available, with their answers then being rated by “journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article.” A few examples of issues include Gemini suggesting that the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) does not recommend vaping as a method for quitt…

While many of us only have one Apple Account to manage, many others have two, and are using both with their Apple devices. I know someone who once created an Apple Account using an employer-linked email address, and at some point, created a second account with their personal ID. Now, they're using two accounts on their devices, with one linked to iCloud and Apple Music, and the other one for all other apps. If you've had Apple devices for a long time, you might have two Apple Accounts of your own. Despite this, Apple didn't allow users to merge purchases onto one account. So, if you wanted to access purchases on an old Apple Account, you needed to sign into it, even thoug…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Presidents Day is not until Feb. 17, 2025, but as is often the case, retailers have started their sales well in advance. Best Buy has the best sale I've seen so far, with great deals on major appliances and tech products, including headphones, TVs, soundbars, washers, and more. Here are my favorite deals from the sale worth considering. Resolution: 4K, Size: 55 inches, Display: LED, Backlight: Edge Lit, Voice Assistant: Alex…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Garmin is introducing a feature to many of its watches that Apple Watch users have been able to enjoy for a while. That’s a device passcode, so you can lock your data when your watch isn’t on your wrist. The feature will be rolling out to Fenix, Forerunner, Venu, and Vivoactive users, or you can get it right now with the beta program. Garmin Vivoactive 5 GPS Smartwatch With AMOLED Display (Black) $239.99 at …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Ever since Apple released the new Apple Watch Series 10 earlier in September, it has been steadily dropping in price; it's currently sitting at $329 (originally $399) after a $70 drop, the lowest price yet, according to price-tracking tools. This price is for the 42mm case, 130 to 180mm size bands, in black, denim, and rose-gold case colors. The bigger 46mm case is down to $359 (originally $429). Memory Storage Capacity: 64…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The romantic comedy is one of cinema’s oldest and most reliable genres for good reason: Real-life romance is complicated and sometimes exhausting. That can be true for characters in movies, too, but their problems are generally funnier than our own and, anyway, they’re not our problems. We’re comforted either because we know everything will work out fine, or because we know we won’t have to deal with the hilarious and/or poignant consequences of interacting with other humans. Sadly, the golden ago of the rom-com has passed us by. Worse, Netflix in particular has pulled back on its selection of older (meaning anything much…

One of Apple's best recent features is iPhone mirroring, which lets you control an iPhone from a Mac. Scrcpy is a free application for Linux, Windows, and macOS that does the same thing: It allows you to control your Android phone from a window on your computer. This application takes a bit to set up—it launches from the terminal or command prompt, for one thing, and it only works if you enable developer mode on your Android phone. Once you set it up, though, you can control your Android's screen from your computer, or even turn on a virtual screen so you can launch applications while your phone is off. To get started, you will need to install Scrcpy (which is just "scree…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Anker Soundcore Space A40 earbuds are down to $44.99 from their usual $79.99. That’s nearly half off for a pair of noise-canceling earbuds that PCMag crowned their Editor’s Choice and Best Budget Earphones of 2022. Soundcore by Anker Space A40 Adaptive Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds $44.99 at Amazon …

There are many easy ways to launch apps on your Mac. You can click an icon in the Dock, use Spotlight Search (or better alternatives), or visit the Applications folder and fire up your favorite apps. None of these methods are as fast and as fun as launching apps with Pieoneer, a launcher that lets you add your favorite apps to a radial menu. It also has two other useful features—a built-in app switcher and an easy way to surface hidden features of your favorite apps. Using Pieoneer as an app launcher Credit: Pranay Parab This i…

We're now seeing significant AI upgrades from the big players in the field almost every week, with most new features quickly copied by rival companies as each one looks to stay ahead. Now it's time for Microsoft Copilot to play catch-up, as it adds a host of features we've previously seen tested by Microsoft or launched for other AI chatbots. Copilot now has Deep Research, for example, to match all the Deep Research tools elsewhere, while Copilot Search has been upgraded. Microsoft has also rolled out its own AI-hosted podcast generator, a tool that's been available for a while on competing services. There's a lot to explore, and each new feature is explained below. These…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Bose is a recognized name in audio tech and has been making capable active noise-canceling (ANC) headphones since 2016, when the company launched the QuietComfort line of devices. Right now, you can pick up the Bose's QuietComfort headphones for $179, $170 off the original price of $349. This is the lowest price they've reached, according to price-tracking tools, making them a good bet if you're looking to get a high-performance pair of ANC headphones without spending a fortune. You can get them "unopened" (which is exactly what it sounds like) from…

Prime Video has new installments of two familiar series coming in March. First up is season three of The Wheel of Time (March 13), an adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy books of the same name. Rosamund Pike stars as sorceress Moiraine Damodred, a member of the powerful Aes Sedai. The season opens with a magical battle between members of the order—viewers will get a three-episode premiere with five weekly episodes to follow. Also in its third season is Bosch: Legacy (March 27)—also an adaptation, this time of Michael Connolly's crime novels. A sequel to Prime Video hit Bosch, the series was originally canceled after its second season but was revived for a third and fi…

If you want to become a faster runner, you’ll probably end up doing a lot of speedwork on a track. Or if you live in a hilly place, you might wish you had a nice flat track to run on. But how do you find one that’s open to the public? Turns out it’s easier than you might think. Many public high school tracks are available for the community to use. Call local schoolsWord of mouth is your best option for finding the best local tracks; guaranteed there are tons of people in your community who know which schools have an open track. You can ask runners, ask parents (they'll know the schools pretty well), or cut out the middleman and call the school. I run on a local school tr…

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. For the past few months, I’ve had two salt shakers in my kitchen. One is Morton Salt Substitute, which is potassium-based, and I use it for the first few shakes of salt when I’m seasoning a dish. The other is regular table salt, which I use at the table. Now the World Health Organization is recommending that more of us try salt substitutes, and not just in the name of lowering sodium. Potassium is good for us, and it’s an easy way to get more in our diet. Morton Salt Substitute, 3.12 oz, 2 pk (Limited Edition) …

Back in December, OpenAI rolled out a new way to chat with ChatGPT: You can reach out to the generative AI by calling 1-800-CHATGPT (no, really)—or, if you have WhatsApp, you can text that same number to share what's on your mind. While many of ChatGPT's distinct features were missing, the core of the experience was still present. You text or ask ChatGPT something out loud, and the bot responds in kind. For WhatsApp users, that largely feels like texting a friend—only, that friend happens to respond right away with a detailed response generated entirely by AI. (We all have one of those friends, right?) Now, less than two months after rolling out this new way to contact …

Do you have a missing 401(k)? It’s more common than you might think. One U.S. Labor Department study suggests that people will have worked a dozen jobs by their mid-40s, with most of those barely lasting a few years. While you have a few options for handling an old 401(k), some strategies are better than others. The wisest path forward is typically to consolidate your old 401(k) into another qualified retirement plan. But what if you can't locate your old 401(k)? Did you forget which company was managing your retirement account? A new federal database should make it easier to track down. Use this new government databaseThis new tool been years in the making, as a part of …

Clicks, the iPhone keyboard accessory that went viral during CES 2024, is now coming to multiple Android phones—Google Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S25, and the Moto Razr+ (2024). Clicks adds a physical QWERTY keyboard to your smartphone, and also functions as a case for your device. Up until now, Clicks was available exclusively for all iPhone 15 and 16 devices, as well as the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max. When the first iPhone launched, it sounded a death knell for smartphones with physical keyboards, as the world moved to bar-shaped phones with big screens. Touchscreen typing is good enough for most people, but Clicks is betting on the fact that content creator…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. There are no surprises with the Blink Video Doorbell camera. Blink is an established brand and the doorbell camera has been around since 2022. What might be surprising is how cheap it has become. You can get the Blink Video Doorbell and Sync Module 2 for $34.99 (originally $69.99) after a 50% discount, the lowest price it has been according to price tracking tools. Blink Video Doorbell and Sync Module 2 …