Home Office Setup & Equipment

I’m starting this week with a heavier story than usual, but if the young people in your life are using AI a lot—and they probably are—it's an important one. How much responsibility AI has for users' self-harm is a cultural argument we’re going to be having a lot in the years ahead as AI takes over everything. But the rest of the column is lighthearted, so sorry in advance for the mood-swing What is TikTok's "Devil Couldn't Reach Me" trend?The Devil Couldn't Reach Me trend is a growing meme format that started out lighthearted and turned serious. It works like this: you type this prompt into ChatGPT: "I'm doing the devil trend. I will say 'The devil couldn't reach me,' and…

If you open a picture in the Photos app on your iPhone, and it inexplicably starts turning red, I wouldn't blame you for being a bit concerned. After all, that's not supposed to happen, and out of all the colors your photos could randomly fade into, red is among the creepiest. While you contemplate what angry and vengeful god you might have crossed recently, understand that this isn't necessarily a problem affecting all, or even most, iPhone users and their photos. In fact, it doesn't appear to be affecting photos taken on iPhones at all. Rather, the users reporting this issue see it when zooming in on photos taken on Android devices. It seems a new hue has been added to…

New Year's Eve is my favorite holiday. I love a designated time to look forward and to reflect back, ideally while getting tipsy with friends. The turn of a new year is also a time when I’m grateful for my habit of writing down every little thing—and I don’t just mean getting my thoughts and feelings down in a journal. I’m talking about tracking every book read, every mile run, and every beer crushed (approximately). So if you’re interested in documenting your life—and you should be!—I highly recommend using a wonderfully detailed spreadsheet. I’m not talking about bullet journaling (which can be cool, but which I find too artistically daunting). I simply create a Google …

You can do a lot with Android Auto, but what you can't do is install a web browser—at least not with the default, out-of-the-box configuration. It is actually possible to get a window on to the web with a little bit of tweaking, and the help of the open source AA Browser built especially for Android Auto. Getting a web browser up on your car dashboard may not seem like much of an improvement over browsing on your phone screen, but it also enables another feature on your vehicle's display: video playback. Through AA Browser you can get at pretty much any streaming site you want and load up some video. Some serious safety warnings are required here, though. You should only …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. 2025 was a fun year to review fitness devices. We saw three companies introduce devices that could have been Whoop killers, and one definitely came closer to the mark than others. One running watch gobsmacked me with its accuracy, one device was so inaccurate it sent me down an investigative rabbit hole to figure out why, and two devices delighted me with how well they solved a real problem no other device even tried to tackle. Read on for the winners of my very subjective award categories. Most accurate: Garmin Forerunner 570 …

There are a lot of methods to try in the never-ending quest for a way to sort through and slim down our bulging inboxes. They're different enough that there's certainly one out there that matches or comes close to matching your exact needs, but they do all have one thing in common: They rely on the chronology of when each email came in. Let’s try turning that approach on its head, and instead, sort by sender to weed through the mess. Why you should sort your inbox by senderWhen purging your messages, you probably have an organizational system you follow, like the 4Ds. You go through and decide what gets deleted, done, delegated, or deferred—but there’s not much pattern re…

If you've been following smart pet tech closely over the last couple years, you might know Pawport. I saw the company's smart pet door at the last two CES's, and was my first introduction to this specific product category. At the time, Pawport hadn't yet launched; now they have. But there's one key difference between the pet door Pawport showed off at CES 2025, and the one that eventually launched late last year. Pawport's smart pet doorIn a lot of ways, Pawport's official pet door is the product I saw last year: Pawport is made of aluminum, and is reportedly bulletproof. (The company has a model riddled with bullet holes on display). This smart door is designed to fit ov…

Hackers continue to find ways to sneak malicious extensions into the Chrome web store—this time, the two offenders are impersonating an add-on that allows users to have conversations with ChatGPT and DeepSeek while on other websites and exfiltrating the data to threat actors' servers. Beware these Chrome extensionsOn the surface, the two extensions identified by Ox Security researchers look pretty benign. The first, named "Chat GPT for Chrome with GPT-5, Claude Sonnet & DeepSeek AI," has a Featured badge and 2.7K ratings with over 600,000 users. "AI Sidebar with Deepseek, ChatGPT, Claude and more" appears verified and has 2.2K ratings with 300,000 users. However, th…

This weekly trip through the youth pop culture landscape takes us from turmoil in Stranger Things fandom, where many fans refuse to let the show end, to the kids' Wild West of Roblox, where age-verification is changing the landscape in a massive way, and all the way to Africa, where online mega-celebrity IShowSpeed is livestreaming a fascinating travelogue that people are watching all over the world. What is "Conformity Gate?"The final episode of Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things aired on Dec. 31 and it seems that many fans are not happy (shocking, right?). Some feel that the finale left too many loose ends, some that it all happened too easily, or that it was rushed…

This week's out-of-touch guide is a mélange of internet nonsense that reflect real world anxieties. A gritty part of London is going viral for a taxpayer-funded water park that only exists thanks to AI videos made to enrage racists. Inside the kid-centric videogame Roblox, users are protesting both ICE and age verification without ever leaving their avatars. And in the darker corners of the online world, looksmaxxers are determining who is a HTN, while everyone on TikTok is saying, "Screw it. We're going to pretend to be birds." What is a Croydon Water Park?It might sound like the name of an outré sex act or a cocktail from the 1980s, but a Croydon Water Park is something…

Have you ever wanted to browse the internet, but the thought of typing a URL into your address bar seemed just too exhausting? Now, Google's here to help. Today, the company announced a big expansion of its existing Gemini in Chrome feature, with the highlights including a new look for the AI companion, more-integrated image editing tools, and, perhaps most impressive (but also creepy), the launch of Auto Browse, which lets Gemini take the wheel when you're going online. The new side panel view Credit: Google Previously, Gemini…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The 2026 Winter Olympics will kick off in Milano Cortina, Italy, beginning on Friday, Feb. 6. With more than 3,200 hours of winter sports coverage spread across broadcast, cable, and digital streaming platforms, finding what you want to watch can feel like a full-time job. So here's where and when you can watch the Olympics. Watching the Olympics is a deeply personal experience. Some love the technical precision of a perfect luge run; others dig the emotional narrative of an underdog’s journey to the podium; and some just want to catch the meme of the week as it happens. Because everyone's "perfect Olympics" is unique, I’…

Trigger warning: I’m going to write about the upcoming midterm elections—but if it helps, I’m not going to be partisan about it. This should be a pretty straightforward topic, but lately social media has been rife with speculation that the upcoming midterm elections will somehow be canceled. And while election-related fear-mongering is hardly new, it’s usually a dull buzz. This year, whether you blame exponential cultural polarization, social media echo chambers, or the rain, election-cancelation fears have grown into an unmistakeable roar. It's alarming to be sure. But are the people who are worried about this stuff wrong, or was 2024 actually the last "free and fair" A…

Anime fans are about to feel a bit of a squeeze from your Crunchyroll subscription. For the second time in two years, the streaming service is raising prices, this time across all of its plans, including the entry-level Fan Tier. This comes shortly after the company discontinued its free, ad-supported tier on Dec. 31. The new tiers and their pricing will be as follows: The Fan Tier will go up from $7.99/month to $9.99/month. This tier offers basic access to the full Crunchyroll library, and the ability to download shows to a single device for offline viewing. The Mega Fan tier will go up from $11.99/month to $13.99/month. At this tier, you can stream on up to four devices…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Google is releasing their budget a-series version of the Pixel 10 on March 5, a whole month earlier than the 9a was released in 2025. There is not much dividing the 10a from the 9a, but there are a few software updates that can make it worth it for some people. Throw in a $100 Amazon gift card, and it's hard to say no. Google has the pre-orders for the Google 10a out already, going for $499, plus the gift card. Alternatively, you can get their Pixel Buds 2a instead of the $100 gift card for the same $499 price. …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Mechanical keyboard fans tend to know exactly what they want. Some want a compact layout that still keeps the arrow keys, while others want lag-free wireless support or the ability to swap switches without a soldering iron. The Keychron K8 QMK Wireless Mechanical Keyboard checks most of those boxes, and it's currently on sale on StackSocial. The ABS-frame version with RGB backlighting and hot-swappable Banana switches is $79.99, while the aluminum-frame models with Banana or Brown switches are $82.99. All three use the same 80% layout (which means y…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Samsung ViewFinity S50GC 34-inch Ultrawide Monitor is down to $199.99 on Amazon, a drop from $349.99 and the lowest price it has hit so far, according to online price tracking tools. That alone makes it worth a closer look if you’ve been thinking about an ultrawide. Samsung 34" ViewFinity S50GC Ultrawide QHD monitor (2023, black) …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The best value OLED TV is always going to be last year's model: still recent enough to have most of the latest technology and features, but sold at a discount compared to the latest and greatest—especially when you can score a deal. Right now, the 55-inch version of the LG B5 OLED TV, released in July 2025, is marked down to $799.99 on Amazon, a nearly 50% drop from its $1,491 launch price. And if you're looking for a bigger size, Best Buy is offering the LG B5 77-inch for $1,499.99 (originally $2,999.99)—and it'll throw in a 43-inch LG 4K TV for fr…

Remember that Hyrox fitness race trend I’ve written about? Welp, looks like I’m going to be doing a race. I’m teaming up with Meredith Dietz, our resident marathon runner, to tackle Hyrox NYC in the women’s doubles division. You can read here about how she’s training and what she sees as her strengths and weaknesses. As a weightlifter, I'll explain my approach. I could honestly distill the question of “how should I train” down to one word: running. Everybody tells me that running is the most important skill of a Hyrox race, it’s the thing you’ll spend the most time doing on race day, and it should make up most of your training, especially if you’re someone like me who has…

One of the main appeals of a Chromebook is its simplicity: You've essentially just got a row of browser tabs, running web apps, with minimal background activity going on and everything instantly saved and synced to the cloud. As Chromebooks have developed though, they've add more to this basic Chrome foundation. They can run Android apps now, for example, and they actually come with several pre-installed apps that are genuinely useful. Open up the Launcher (the Google icon, bottom left), to see what's available. These are the best built-in apps you get right now, if you buy a new Chromebook Plus model—that's the slightly higher spec series, capable of supporting all the G…

I'm strongly in favor of using password managers to store your credentials, but, so far, I've resisted the prompts that ask me to switch to passkeys—even though passkeys are better than passwords in just about every way. You don't need to remember or store a long string of random characters if you use passkeys, because they don't actually use a password at all. Instead, you use your device's authentication method, such as a face scan, a device passcode, or fingerprint unlock, to log in to your accounts. Passkeys are also more resistant to phishing attacks because your password manager won't let you use a passkey to log in to dummy websites created by scammers. Despite the…

Computers are supposed to be unambiguous. When you click a function, that function is supposed to do what it says it does. So, when you click "Update and shut down" on your PC, you assume your PC will install any available updates, then shut down. Simple. As you might expect from this headline, that isn't actually the case. For some reason, when you choose "Update and shut down," Windows only listens to the first half of the command. Sure, your updates will download and install, but if you watch your computer, you'll see that it doesn't shut down, but restarts instead. That might come as a surprise, especially if you walked away from your PC under the assumption that it w…

I am a frequent user of Google's NotebookLM, an AI tool that functions similarly to ChatGPT and other LLMs, but only pulls from sources and materials the user inputs. I noticed a few days ago that it has a new feature: A research function divided into "fast research" and "deep research." After playing around with it a little, these new features seem to completely defeat the purpose of why I started using NotebookLM in the first place—with one big exception. What the new "fast research" and "deep research" options in NotebookLM doIn short, "fast research" and "deep research" make NotebookLM work a lot like other AI tools—they pull information in from the web on your beha…

I'm routinely surprised by just how much technology Apple has managed to pack into the iPhone that I can carry in the palm of my hand. What's even more surprising is that underneath the layers, there's even more than what meets the eye. There's a better, faster way to use the keyboard, there's a faster way to select unread emails to archive, there are better ways to browse the web than just the usual Safari experience, and you can get way better photos out of the iPhone Pro cameras than what the stock Camera app shows you. The iPhone has become such a default product in all our lives that we just take it for granted. Yes, it's a great way to stay in touch with friends an…

Whether you want them to or not, appliances are getting smarter. It’s increasingly challenging to find even basic models without some kind of “smart” feature or embedded artificial intelligence. If you don't believe me, just try to find a “dumb” television at your local Best Buy. You will be disappointed. While it's true that many of the “smart” features offered by these nifty new appliances are quite useful. The ability to pre-heat your oven or adjust your thermostat by pressing a button on your phone is great, and getting alerts when the fridge door is left open or when you forget to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer is undeniably a boon. But sometimes, th…