Home Office Setup & Equipment

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The Steam Deck makes your PC games feel like they were built for handheld gaming, but it's kind of like a fancy illusion. Under the hood, the Steam Deck is essentially a Linux PC that employs a user interface made for a controller. What that means is that you, the user, can easily dive under that hood with Steam's Desktop interface and start modding and tweaking your games, just like you would on a regular gaming PC. When you're in Desktop mode, you'll find a full Linux desktop environment (specifically, KDE Plasma) complete with Firefox for browsing the web, a file manager, and the full desktop Steam interface. While it w…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Before you can lift a loaded barbell, you have to find a bar and load some plates onto it. At some gyms, there’s only one type of bar, and it weighs 45 pounds, and that’s all you need to know. But that’s not the only type out there, and if your gym has different bars of different shapes and weights, it’s possible to get confused. Check end of the bar first If you’re wondering about what kind of bar you're looking at or what it weighs, always check the end of it. Sometimes you’ll find a label with a brand name, a description of what the bar is, and its weight. For example, this one has a little endcap that says “The Rogu…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Whether you're worried about hurricanes, fires, or winter storms, a little bit of preparation can go a long way to making your home more resilient to extreme weather. Taking the time to plan ahead will make it safer and more comfortable to hunker down if an emergency occurs. Here are some home updates you can do yourself to keep yourself and your home safe. Check drainage and grading When there is a deluge of rainwater or water from melting ice or snow, it can test the strength of the water barriers on your foundation and siding. One way to give your home a fighting chance in a wet environment is to ensure that you have…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The tendency in movie runtimes seems to be trending toward length, and even if the data doesn’t really bear this out, recent, super-long installments in big box office franchises at least mean the bloat feels real. For some reason these wildly popular series feel the need to justify their existence by lashing us to our seats for well over two hours, when many of us might have happily paid the same price for a flick that would give us the hope of ever getting home to see our dogs again. Still, a movie’s quality isn’t determined by its length, and most of us are watching these things at home anyway. Some stories are just m…

WhatsApp is adding new choices for customizing your chats, with both preset themes and mix-and-match colors for backgrounds and chat bubbles, as well as a selection of 30 new wallpapers. Users on WhatsApp have been able to change chat backgrounds for a while, with options ranging from solid colors to patterned wallpapers to images uploaded from your camera roll. Now, customizations have expanded to include chat bubbles, with default themes that coordinate background and chat colors and options to customize one or both for individual chats or all of your WhatsApp threads. According to a blog post from WhatsApp announcing the update, chat themes are currently being rolled…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Housing is getting smaller and more expensive—which means many of us are putting our mental energy into making our existing homes work for us even if they’re bursting their seams with stuff. From storage unit strategies to time-honored ideas like making sure every stick of furniture comes with bonus storage capabilities, we’re all trying to cram two houses’ worth of stuff into one house. If your house appears to be at full capacity and you just don’t have any more room for shelves, cabinets, or anything else, you have one move left: Start literally carving storage out of the bones of your house. There are hidden voids ever…

Google is busy adding Gemini AI into just about every app it develops, and Google Drive is no exception. If you've got a Google One AI Premium subscription—or an organization you're part of is paying its Gemini AI dues for Google Workspace—then you get Gemini integration for your Google Drive account and Docs, Sheets, and Slides. There are a whole host of AI tricks you can do inside documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but here I'm going to focus on what's possible with your files and folders in Google Drive more broadly, including searches and summaries. Right now the best way to access these functions is through Google Drive on the web, though there is a Google D…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Amazon dropped the Kindle Colorsoft, its first e-reader with a color screen, last fall, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they were the first company to crack the concept: a device with a screen that offers all the benefits of e-ink—no harsh backlight, easy readability in any light—that wasn't just in muddy-looking greyscale. But while Amazon controls the vast majority of the e-reader market, lots of other companies are more innovative in their device designs, and others have been iterating on color e-ink for half a decade. One of the companies is Onyx International, a Chinese tech company that has been producing e…

I've never been a big fan of watching videos in music streaming apps on my phone. I want to listen to songs, make playlists, and look at lyrics, but I never pick up my phone to watch a video on Spotify. If you're like me, you're going to be happy to know that Spotify is now rolling out a new feature that lets you turn off videos in its app. This goes beyond disabling the looping videos that appear when you play songs: The new feature also turns off music videos and vertical videos added by authors, returning Spotify to an audio-only platform. How to turn off videos in Spotify …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Handheld gaming consoles are no longer dominated by Nintendo; PC games entered the handheld industry market with competition from Valve and ASUS. Valve’s Steam Deck was the best budget option available until ASUS released the ASUS ROG Ally Z1 in 2023, which is the budget version of the more powerful ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme. During Best Buy's 48-hour Flash Sale, you can actually get the more premium ASUS ROG Ally Extreme for cheaper than the basic Rog Ally. It's currently $449.99 (originally $649.99), currently the lowest price I have seen over th…

WhatsApp appears to finally be getting its iPhone app up to speed with its Android companion in a major way: allowing you to use multiple accounts on one device. The "new" feature, which has been available on Android since 2023, was spotted by WABetaInfo in the iPhone app’s most recent TestFlight beta program. If (but more likely once) multi-account switching eventually carries through to a public release, users will be able to manage and sign into multiple WhatsApp accounts within a single instance of the WhatsApp app, eliminating the need to keep multiple devices on hand to manage each of their WhatsApp accounts. This will be especially handy for small businesses. …

Paint is the cheapest, easiest renovation you can do: it makes everything fresh and new, it covers defects, and it’s something almost anyone can do to a reasonable level of quality. If you just read that last part and started shaking your head because your paint projects always turn out terribly—patchy, or with visible sheen or brush strokes, or a final color that doesn’t seem to match what you chose in the store at all—the cause probably isn’t your work ethic, or an evil spirit inhabiting your house. The problem probably lies in your prep work. If all you’re doing before you start slapping paint on the walls is applying some painter’s tape and covering the furniture, t…

This week, I explain why generations A and Z are eating rotten meat, making fun of cave explorers, showing off their emergency contacts, and becoming very emotionally invested in an angler fish. Everyone is having a very normal week. What do all the cave diving memes mean? If your various social media feeds are full of videos of upside down shoes and boots in different locations, you're witnessing "cave diving" memes. While "cave diving" actually refers to underwater cave exploration, the memes are not about that: Younger people are making jokes about the way cave explorers will wedge themselves into tiny crevices until all anyone can see are the bottoms of their boots.…

After OpenAI, Perplexity AI is joining the "deep research" bandwagon. And it's doing it in a fairly interesting way. Following in the footsteps of DeepSeek's "reasoning" model, Perplexity is the first major AI provider that's offering a Deep Research feature for free users, too. By comparison, OpenAI's Deep Research feature is only available in the $200/month Pro subscription. Deep Research is an upcoming AI feature that takes a bit of time, but performs dozens of related searches, goes over hundreds of resources, and uses a reasoning model to logic out each prompt in a step-by-step process. You can get similar results from tools like Copilot's "Think Deeper" feature, su…

Major data breaches and cybersecurity threats are now a fact of life, the consequence of which is our personal information being exposed at some point. One of the latest significant leaks involves data from PowerSchool, a software provider for thousands of K–12 school districts in the United States and Canada. The incident affected millions of users. What happened in the PowerSchool hack According to reports, PowerSchool discovered that personal information had been stolen from its customer support platform on Dec. 28, 2024. Hackers used compromised credentials to log into and export from its "Students" and "Teacher" database. BleepingComputer is reporting that the hack…

We know that cars are better connected than ever before, which is great when you want to remember where you parked or start defrosting the vehicle windows while you're still in bed—but this modern tech comes with security and privacy concerns, as a new hack of Subaru cars and their Starlink software has shown. Security researchers Sam Curry and Shubham Shah explain in a blog post how they were able to remotely hack into the Starlink connected vehicle service run by Subaru. Specifically, they targeted software on Curry's mom's car, but the same platform operates across Subaru vehicles in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With access to the driver's surname and their at…

From security and privacy concerns to good old-fashioned cringe, there are all kinds of reasons you might want to delete your old social media posts. And there are plenty of tools for the job out there. The problem: most tend to focus on one or two social media networks. Redact, however, is a paid tool with support for deleting posts on 28 different services. You can use it to scan for old posts and choose what to delete, or you can search for posts that mention specific topics. It can also be used to delete posts on a schedule—this is perfect if, for example, you wanted to delete all Bluesky posts a month after you post them. It's a lot of power, basically, and it runs l…

It should be as easy to cancel a service as it is to subscribe to it, and at long last, it's about to be. For anyone who's ever found themselves trapped in an endless maze of customer service calls trying to cancel a subscription—especially when the company doesn't want you to—relief is finally on the way. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has introduced a new rule that will require companies to make canceling subscriptions as simple as signing up for them. Here's what you need to know. The "Click to Cancel" ruleUnder the new FTC regulation, if you can sign up for a service online with a single click, companies must provide an equally straightforward cancellation process…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Oura, the smart ring, is finally taking menstrual cycle data into account when assigning readiness scores—a feature whose absence has baffled users for years. The ring’s app was notorious for assigning lower-than-expected scores during the luteal phase of users’ cycles, but that is changing thanks to an update to the Readiness score algorithm that Oura announced this week. If you don’t have a menstrual cycle, or if you have one but don’t track it, you probably won’t notice anything different about your Readiness scores. But this update is a big deal for anyone who uses Cycle Insights, the feature of the Oura app that use…

It's hard to escape AI these days. Apple just made Apple Intelligence opt out, and Google Workspace users are now seeing big, hard-to-dismiss Gemini buttons all over their apps. The world's biggest tech companies are doing their best to sell you on a generative AI future, but even when you can't turn AI off, there are steps you can take to fight back. Even outside of Workspace, Google is one of the most egregious AI pushers around. The company has tried to push its Gemini AI in almost all of its properties, even though it's shown inaccurate search results recommending everything from eating rocks to adding glue to pizza. Even if you have no interest in AI search results,…

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) …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. When you’re feeling awful because of a cold, you just want something to fix you—if not to cure you, at least to help you temporarily feel better. Unfortunately a lot of remedies are placebos, but some things in the drugstore work better than others. Before we talk about which medicines are best, here's an important note to consider: Cold medicines do not cure your cold, nor do they shorten its duration. If you're reading this because you want to know how to get rid of a cold fast, or what a doctor would prescribe you to get rid of a cold—sorry. Colds are caused by viruses, and there's no medication that will kill them of…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Jabra Evolve2 65 headphones, which earned an Editors' Choice and an Outstanding rating from PCMag, are currently $203.31 (down from $301). (Note that this is up from yesterday's price of 149.99, their lowest price ever on Amazon, according to price trackers, so the price may go down again. Also, the price seems to be fluctuating slightly depending on location.) Jabra Evolve2 65 UC Wireless Headphones with Link380a …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. There was a time when I would confuse the terms “Dutch oven” and “slow cooker.” I couldn’t tell you why, but it was probably because I had never really operated either of them before and these vague, old-timey titles fused together in my mind. (I envisioned a cauldron over a fire.) Well, let the record show that they’re not the same. Not only are they completely dissimilar in appearances, but they specialize in somewhat different cooking tasks. H Both cookers are known for their slow and steady cooking properties, and due to their deep shape, the Dutch oven and slow cooker are both good candidates for high-moisture foods…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. After the release of the Google Pixel 9 last fall, the Pixel 8 lineup dropped in price, as was expected. While the Pixel 8 Pro isn't the latest Pixel, it is still considered one of the best Android phones for 2025, according to CNET. The unlocked 128 GB Pixel 8 Pro is currently $599 (originally $999), a 40% discount. That's matching the lowest price the device has reached, according to price-tracking tools. Google Pixel 8 Pro …