Home Office Setup & Equipment

While Apple has offered password management solutions for years, it was only this past fall that the company finally rolled out a dedicated passwords app, appropriately named "Passwords." It's a bit basic, but it's built into the OS, and it gets the job done. (It's also free, which helps.) If you're fully into the Apple ecosystem, it's an easy way to create, store, and access the passwords of your numerous accounts. However, as it happens, Passwords has a critical security flaw that Apple only recently addressed. Here's the situation: Passwords has a security feature that helps you change an account's password directly within the Passwords app. This is particularly helpfu…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I’ve always preferred to wear my Oura ring on my ring finger. The company says that “for optimal performance and accuracy,” it’s best to wear it on your index finger, but that any finger can work. And if you ask longtime Oura users, you’ll get a variety of opinions. Does it really matter which finger you use? I realized I have the perfect way to test this—I have two gen 3 rings that fit my index and my ring fingers. I wore both for nearly two weeks to compare their readings and answer the question once and for all. Oura Ring 4 …

Google is bringing back its free year of Google AI Pro for U.S. college students, after releasing its new Gemini 3 Pro AI model today. Because so many of the new model's biggest features are hidden behind paywalls, it's not a bad deal, even if it's not the first time Google's done this. The deal follows similar promotions from April and August, although the most recent one ended in October. That this offer is coming so soon after the last one means Google might plan to keep rolling out these trials on a regular basis. How to claim your free year of Google AI Pro as a U.S. college studentTo get your free year of Google AI Pro, first head over to gemini.google/students and …

Generative AI tools continue to improve in terms of their photo editing capabilities, and OpenAI's latest upgrade brings Adobe Photoshop right inside your ChatGPT app window (alongside Adobe Acrobat for handling PDFs, and Adobe Express for graphic design). It's available to everyone, for free—you just need a ChatGPT account and an Adobe account. As per Adobe, the idea is to make "creativity accessible for everyone" by plugging Photoshop tools directly into ChatGPT. The desktop version of Photoshop already comes with plenty of generative AI features of its own, so this is AI layered on top of more AI—but is it actually useful? How to get started with Photoshop inside ChatG…

Gmail already adds an Unsubscribe button to every promotional email or newsletter you receive in your inbox. That way, you can stop someone from sending you emails without first visiting their website. The service is now going one step forward, giving you a single place to manage all your subscriptions, and an option to unsubscribe from each with just a tap—kind of like the Subscriptions screen on YouTube. Manage Subscriptions is rolling out nowThere's a clear advantage to the new Manage Subscriptions feature. With it, you no longer need to go through your entire inbox to find all the newsletters, as Gmail will instead surface them for you. You'll see the names and email …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Netflix's streaming era began way back in 2007, right around the time the company had delivered its billionth DVD by mail (a copy of Babel to a woman in Texas). That’s the year when the company began development of an app that would allow you to watch video-on-demand content on your actual TV, rather than in a window on your PC via Internet Explorer—or whatever the hell browser you happened to be using during the George W. Bush administration. Internet speeds and interest built and, by 2011, the company had moved fully away from its DVD-by-mail business as streaming took on a life of its own. While distribution rights f…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Anytime you're looking for a good smartwatch, Garmin's name is bound to come up. The Garmin Instinct 3 came out very recently, and that means the Garmin Instinct 2 has dropped in price—and even though that model is now a generation old, it's still an incredible fitness and outdoor smartwatch. With this latest price drop, the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar is now $229.99 (originally $399.99), the lowest price it has reached, according to price tracking tools. Garmin Instinct 2 Solar …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Most of Beats by Dr. Dre's lineup of headphones and earbuds are on sale right now. The brand has been slow to release new products since the acquisition by Apple back in 2014, but the good news is that even its newest product (the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2) are included in the sale. At the moment, you can get the Beats Studio Pro, Beats Solo 4, Beats Studio Buds, Beats Powerbeats Pro 2, and the Beats Studio Buds+ for up to 51% off. Most of these options are at or matching their lowest prices ever, according to price-tracking tools. Beats Studio Pro…

Phone notifications are tricky to balance: too many of them, and you're constantly distracted by buzzes and pings. Too few of them, and you risk missing something important, from a relative in trouble to a great deal on headphones (two ends of the importance scale there, but you get the idea). Over the years, Apple and Google have tweaked and refined the notification systems built into iOS and Android, but there's still room for improvement. The native features that are currently in place work fine, but lack the sort of granular control you need to properly manage the alerts you want and the alerts you don't want. Enter BuzzKill: It's Android only (sorry, iPhone users), a…

Gina Trapani, founder of the website you're reading right now, popularized a plaintext format for to-do lists way back in 2006 (please excuse any weird formatting on that nearly 20-year-old article). Called Todo.txt, it is used by many people to this day, in part thanks to an ecosystem of applications built around the format. I recently stumbled on Calendar.txt, by author and teacher Tero Karvinen. It's a text document based on a similar philosophy—a stripped down, just-the-basics take on your overloaded calendar app. It's a concept worth considering. We're at least a decade into the "using a separate app for everything" era, and sure, a lot of those apps are pretty great…

For many, Microsoft Edge's only purpose is to download another browser entirely, like Chrome or Firefox. But this isn't Internet Explorer: Edge is a competent browser in its own right, whether you have a Mac or a PC. If you do use the browser, you might be pleasantly surprised by how snappy it feels after you update it—at least, according to Microsoft. Edge 134 and newer's performance gains In a Thursday post on Windows Blogs, Microsoft confirmed that, starting with version 134, Microsoft Edge is a tad faster than previous iterations. In fact, Edge 134 is up to 9% faster, when you run it through Speedometer 3.0, a benchmarking tool for web browsers. Microsoft says that wh…

Ultra HDR is a cool image format. Like traditional HDR, this format packs more image data into each media file, which translates into brighter highlights, darker shadows, and more vibrant colors. However, Ultra HDR files also contain the standard dynamic range (SDR) version of the image as well. That way, you can share Ultra HDR files with friends who don't have HDR-compatible displays, and the image will show up just fine. But there's a difference between being able to display an Ultra HDR image on a non-HDR display and converting an SDR image to HDR (or Ultra HDR, for that matter). Traditionally, the latter has been a more complicated endeavor, and not something off…

Dark or light mode: Some people prefer one over the other all day, every day, and they're wrong. The enlightened among us know the truth: It's best to use light mode when it's light and dark mode when it's dark. That's why macOS, in the Appearance section of System Settings, offers an Auto option, which switches to dark mode at sundown. This works well enough if you're working in a room with windows, I suppose, but that's not everyone's workspace. There are all kinds of reasons you might be in a dark room during the day and a light room during the night. These are the exact situations DarkModeBuddy solves. This tiny open-source application uses the light sensors built in…

Installing software on Windows can be a pain. You'll find some things for download in the Microsoft Store, sure, but a lot of other applications require you to find the official website and download an executable. It's an annoying process, especially if you have a bunch of software you need to install all at once—a lot of waiting around and clicking "Next." Manually downloading software is also a security risk. The increasing unreliability of Google search results means it's harder to find a legitimate sources for a given app, increasing your odds of downloading malware. Linux users don't have to deal with this cumbersome process—they install software using a package ma…

Chromecast as a brand has been going through it. Second-gen Chromecast and Chromecast Audio have been plagued with a strange glitch that essentially leaves these devices unusable. Users are not happy. Google, for their part, has advised not to factory reset the devices as a workaround, saying that the company is working on an official fix. In the meantime, Google rolled out an unrelated update for Chromecast with Google TV. The company no longer sells this device, but even still, issued a long-awaited Android 14 update for Chromecast with Google TV. The release notes say, with this update, “The Google TV Streamer Voice Remote supports Find My Remote and Customizable But…

If you haven't filed tax returns for several years, you're not alone: The IRS anticipates a $500 billion decrease in tax revenue this year. (That’s a more than 10% decline compared to last year.) More anecdotally, the IRS has also noted increased talk online from people saying they won’t pay taxes this year, and that they're willing to take the gamble that they won’t be audited. So, with just a few days left before the April 15 deadline, you might be wondering: What if I keep on ignoring my taxes? How long can this con go on? Unfortunately, that's a mighty risky gamble. You're better off filing as soon as you can, or else be on the line for costly penalties and interest.…

For all its faults as a platform, YouTube’s video player functionality is easily among the best online. It streams reliably to almost every device you can think of, in your choice of both video quality and playback speed. But it’s the array of hidden features and interface tricks that push it over the edge for me. (Other video players, take note.) Here are 10 of my favorite hacks that make YouTube easier to use. Search YouTube video transcripts with Ctrl-FAlmost every video on YouTube either has an official or auto-generated subtitled track. While these are mainly used for captioning, you can also pull up this transcript on the web and use Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on Macs) to sea…

It's been clear for some time that the Gemini AI app would be replacing Google Assistant, once it had learned all the necessary tricks and been granted all the required hooks into other apps. Now, Google is in the process of actively dismantling the features available in Google Assistant ahead of its retirement. As per Google's official support document (as spotted by 9to5Google), seven more Google Assistant features have recently been pulled across Android devices and Nest smart speakers and displays. These deactivated features add to a bunch of other capabilities that were taken away last year. On smart displays, you can no longer use your voice and Google Assistant to …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. There hasn't been a better opportunity for Android users to get a Google Pixel Watch, provided they don't mind being a bit behind the times: Woot is currently selling the first generation GPS + Cellular Google Pixel Watch for $79.99, 76% off the original $329.99selling price. This is the cheapest the wearable has ever been, according to price tracking tools. (Note that Woot only ships to the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. If you have Amazon Prime, you get free shipping; otherwise, it’ll be $6 to ship.) Goog…

Intrauterine devices, or IUDs, are an extremely effective and convenient form of birth control for many people—but it can also very painful to get one inserted. Current medical guidelines say that your doctor should be discussing pain management with you, and they also give advice to doctors on what methods tend to work best for most people. The newest set of guidelines is from ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. These guidelines actually cover a variety of procedures, including endometrial and cervical biopsies, but today I'll be talking about the IUD insertion portions. And in 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's released n…

The launch of the Google TV Streamer marked a significant shift for the company's streaming lineup, moving away from the behind-the-TV Chromecast dongles it popularized and introducing a pill-shaped set-top box that blends in nicely on a shelf of tchotchkes. It's hiding a worthy processor, double the memory you'd get from a streaming stick, and enough storage to download what you need to run all of your apps. It even acts as a smart hub, with Matter and Thread built in. It's taken me a long time to do anything with the Google TV Streamer. I reluctantly brought it into my home after realizing something more robust, but dated, like the Nvidia Shield, would be too much to m…

When Apple released the first beta for iOS 26.4 this week, testers immediately got to work looking for each and every new feature and change. To their credit, there's more new here than in iOS 26.3, including an AI playlist generator for Apple Music and support for end-to-end encryption with RCS (finally). But one update slipped under the radar, since it's not actually available to test in this first beta: CarPlay support for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. AI assistants are coming to CarPlay in iOS 26.4 As spotted by MacRumors, CarPlay's Developer Guide spills the beans on this upcoming integration. On page 13, the entitlement "CarPlay voice-based conver…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’re dreaming of ditching a multi-monitor gaming setup without sacrificing too much screen space, the Samsung 49-inch ViewFinity S95UC monitor delivers that idea in a single curved panel. A versatile option for both multi-tasking at work and casual gaming, it’s currently 33% off at $799 (originally $1,199). Samsung 49-inch ViewFinity S95UC Monitor …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. As Lifehacker's resident marathon runner and senior finance writer, there is one perfect point where my worlds intersect: buying sneakers. When it comes to investing in—and maybe even splurging on—running gear, nothing affects your running experience more than your shoes. Finding the perfect running shoes is about much more than style or brand preference. Proper footwear can be the difference between achieving your running goals and suffering through preventable injuries. Why proper shoe fit mattersMany runners unknowingly wear the wrong shoes for years. According to Jessica Lyons-Quirk, director of footwear merchandising…