Setting Up Your Home Office

If you're a Verizon customer who's noticed your phone shifting into SOS mode throughout the day, there's now an official explanation: As confirmed by Verizon itself, the carrier has been facing a nationwide outage throughout the afternoon. "We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers," Verizon said to Lifehacker sister site Mashable. "Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience." The company also posted an acknowledgement over on X, while on popular service interruption tracking website Downdetector (whi…

There are benefits to training in heart rate zone 2, and you’ve probably heard all about them. But what happens when your heart rate spikes into zone 3, whether when you're on a run or doing cardio at the gym? Surprise: You don’t lose the benefits of zone 2 training. Zone 3 is arguably just as good for you, or maybe even better. Remember, the reason people are excited about zone 2 training is that it helps you build your aerobic base and burn calories without incurring much fatigue. Guess what zone 3 training also does? Yep, it helps you build your aerobic base, burn even more calories, and usually only incur a tiny bit more fatigue than zone 2. So why aren’t we all doing…

My Neato D5 Connected was once a willing workhorse, but, today, things aren't looking so good. I recently caught an email from the company alerting me that it shut down my vacuum's cloud servers. Now, my once capable Neato is just a LiDAR-equipped vacuum with a soul that's been deprecated. Without cloud servers, the "smart" is gone. This could be the lobotomized future awaiting Roomba users. Earlier this month, the company behind the pioneering smart vacuum, iRobot, filed for bankruptcy. The remainder of the business will go to its primary manufacturing partner—the one it owes all that money to—Shenzhen Picea Robotics. It's a stark reminder that the longevity of a connect…

Windows 11 users are getting a long-awaited Start menu redesign this week. While the features have been available in beta for awhile, Microsoft is rolling out the updated interface to everyone alongside November's Patch Tuesday. What's new with the Windows 11 Start menu The Start menu will now be scrollable, so you can see all of your apps on the homepage instead needing to click All apps to open a separate page. Below pinned apps and recommendations, Microsoft will now automatically categorize similar apps into groups—the Productivity group may include your browsers and Microsoft 365 suite, for example—and place remaining apps under Other. Categories are created with th…

After some harsh feedback about the quality of Windows 11, Microsoft is on a sort of apology tour. The company is promising to improve the operating system, addressing critical issues and features that annoy longtime Windows users. It started off with a way to delay Windows updates for longer than a week. Now, Microsoft is testing new settings that let users customize the placement and size of the taskbar alongside the start menu. The fact that you couldn't move the taskbar to the top or side of the screen has bothered Windows 11 users ever since launch. As with many frustrating aspects of Windows, there are multiple workarounds to customize the taskbar and its placement…

If you've ever sat in front of your Windows PC wondering exactly what is causing it to run so sluggishly, some clarity may be on the way: Microsoft is testing a new FAQ page in Windows 11 that will analyze your system specs and give you some advice about why you might not be seeing top performance speeds. The feature is currently hidden away in the preview release of Windows—it's not even active in the earliest testing version—but developer ‪@phantomofearth.bsky.social‬ has managed to access the relevant screens and find out how they work. The new page will apparently make its home in the System tab of Settings. As per the screens shared online, an example of a frequently…

One of the annoying things about using PowerShell in Windows, if you're used to Linux, is having to run it as an admin in order to make system changes. The simplest way to do this is right-clicking the application in the start menu and clicking "Run as administrator," which isn't exactly elegant. It's particularly frustrating because most Linux distributions fixed this a long time ago: the sudo command. Basically, on Linux, if you need to run a single command as an administrator you can just put "sudo" at the beginning and run it—you're asked for an administrator password and the process runs. It's such a useful feature that it even inspired one of the most famous XKCD co…

Installing a bunch of applications at once on Windows can be annoying. You need to find the installer packages, download them, then run them all, one after another. It requires spending a bunch of time clicking though menus and checking boxes. But you don't have to live this way. Linux users have long used package managers to accomplish this with far greater ease—as have some Mac users. Using a package manager, you can type a single command to install as many different applications as you want. And, it turns out, Windows comes with a package manager. It's called Winget. You can try it right now—just open PowerShell, which you can find in the start menu or by right-click…

The old turn-it-off-and-on-again adage has helped successfully troubleshoot computers for years, but there's more than one way to restart your hardware and software—including a lesser known option on Windows that may well be new to you. Having spent many years writing about tech, it isn't often that I come across something I didn't already know about. So when I stumbled across this old BetaNews article about an emergency restart feature in Windows, I was taken aback. It showed a screen and a keystroke combination I had genuinely never heard of before. A bit more digging revealed that this has been in Windows for decades, making it even stranger that I'd never come across …

Sharing files or accessing messages between a Windows PC and an iPhone can be an utter pain in the rear, mostly because, without third-party utilities, you can’t rely on AirDrop to do it. There’s the Phone Link app, but even that requires opening up a separate window—your PC won’t even be able to serve you iMessage notifications unless it’s open. Meanwhile, Android users currently have a smoother experience, able to access their connected phones’ battery levels, messages, and calls right from the Windows Start menu. Now, iPhone users are finally about to get the same. In a blog post on its site, Microsoft announced that its Windows Insider beta testers are currently getti…

Microsoft is testing a new way to make sharing files a lot easier. In a beta version of Windows 11, the company has released a temporary shelf that appears when you drag files to the top of the screen. You can use this to drop files directly to the apps you use the most, such as Outlook or WhatsApp. Additionally, the company is also testing an improved version of Windows Search on CoPilot+ PCs to help you find photos in the cloud, and two new layouts for the Start menu. All of these features are a part of the Windows Insider program, but they're available in different channels of this program. Here are some details about each new feature and how you can try it if you want…

Originally launched by Microsoft last July, Windows Recall was swiftly pulled in response to a barrage of security and privacy complaints. Now it's back, with some tweaks to make it more palatable for users—but there remain plenty of concerns about what happens when it's enabled. If you're new to the story, Recall is an AI-powered feature that acts like a memory for your computer. It regularly snaps and analyzes screenshots of whatever you're doing. It's handy if you want to get back to a document or message you vaguely remember from three weeks ago, while at the same time sounding several alarm bells in terms of having all your past Windows activity stored on your system…

Windows has a rather patchy history when it comes to native photo viewing and editing, but the latest Photos app is quietly becoming genuinely useful. It may not be a full-blown Photoshop alternative, but it does now offer a variety of basic editing functions, and even some generative AI to help get your images looking their best. Photos combines a photo viewer and a photo editor, so the first job it takes on when you load it up is cataloging all the pictures you've got on your system. Use the gear icon at the top to change the configuration of this photo viewer, and the buttons just above the images to alter the order that pictures are shown in. When you're ready to star…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Prime Day and Black Friday may get most of the internet sale fanfare, but as a deals writer, I can tell you that Woot quietly beats Amazon prices quite frequently. Right now, Woot (still an Amazon company, mind you) has an incredible sale on headphones and earbuds that beat Amazon prices by far, according to price tracking tools. Remember that Woot only ships to the 48 contiguous states in the U.S., and if you have Amazon Prime, you get free shipping; otherwise, it’ll be $6 to ship. This Woot sale on headphones goes on until Feb. 20 at 2:59 a.m. ET…

There’s an art and a science to picking a good starting word when you play Wordle. And now that the New York Times has announced it will start repeating previously used words, it may be time to rethink your strategy. While previous solutions used to be off-limits for future puzzles, that rule has changed. As of February 1, 2026, they're fair game again. That rule change matters because every word choice in Wordle has to be split between two jobs—gaining information about what to guess next, and trying to solve the puzzle with your guess. If you don't care whether your starting word might be a solution, then the rule change may not affect you. But some solvers prefer to us…

I find it satisfying to do a word puzzle (or three) each day. Wordle is great, but it’s not really exciting anymore. Crosswords are fun if you have the time (I love an NYT Thursday puzzle) but I don’t always bother. My sweet spot, lately, are games like Minute Cryptic and Parseword—which are entry points into the incredibly bizarre world of British “cryptic” crossword clues. What is a cryptic puzzle?Cryptics are a type of word puzzle unlike anything else. There exist whole crosswords full of them, but the daily puzzles I’m writing about are just one clue per day, so you can focus on exactly what’s going on in that single clue. Cryptics look like a regular crossword clue…

Here's a question you've probably never considered before: Would you buy a new iPhone if it didn't have any physical buttons? Sure, the part of the phone you interact with most is the touchscreen, so maybe it doesn't seem like such a big deal. But think about it: The side button, volume buttons, Action button, and Camera Control button would no longer click. Could you live without the clutter? While Apple sells no such iPhone, and likely won't release one next year, it very well might roll out a buttonless iPhone in 2027—at least, physically buttonless. That year will mark the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, and it'll come as no surprise that rumors suggest Apple is pla…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Over the past few years, the Chinese-made Boox Palma e-reader has gained a cult following in the U.S. for its phone-like form factor, Android compatibility, and less-addictive grayscale screen—I've personally credited it with helping me spend more time reading and less time scrolling on my iPhone. But as much as I love it, I do still always need to carry my phone with me, because the Palma—even the newer Palma 2 Pro with mobile data—just isn't a good match for many of the tasks I use my phone for, including navigation and tap-to-pay. Soon, though, there may be a dual-purpose device that will serve both masters. Bigme, ano…

If you use the X app on iPhone, there’s a good chance any links you open today will look different than they did yesterday. That’s because the platform is trying to up engagement on posts with links in them, by keeping the like, comment, repost, favorite, and share buttons active in a new footer even when you click through to an outside article. When you click on a link in X, it doesn’t actually navigate away from the app, but instead uses a special version of either Chrome (on Android) or Safari (on iPhone) to open the article within X. That hasn’t changed. But what has is that, on iPhone, you’ll now continue to see interactable elements at the bottom of the page, with b…

It's not just you: X is down, and will not load. I discovered the issue myself just after 9:30 a.m. ET. I was scrolling on my feed, when all of a sudden, new posts wouldn't load, and I was greeted by an option to refresh. When I did, the site reloaded, but now without any posts—only the futile option to try reloading again. You can see a steep spike in user reports on Downdetector (which, for full disclosure, is owned by Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis). At the time of writing, roughly 25,000 users had reported issues with X, I among them. There are a number of potential reasons why X won't load this morning, but it doesn't appear to be a larger issue with a cloud h…

While many X-pats have flocked to alternatives like Bluesky and Threads, there are still plenty of users checking Elon Musk's infamous platform. If you're one of them, you might have noticed something odd today: X is down. Depending on when you see this article, X may be back up and running. But multiple times Monday morning, the platform was unreachable. According to Downdetector, most of the complaints funneled in at three peaks: The first came around 5:41 a.m., the second at 10:11 a.m., and the third around 11:11 a.m., which is when I initially noticed the issues. There are a large number of reports associated with event, as well. Scanning through the Downdetector gra…

The site formerly known as Twitter has been "X" for over two years now. Nevertheless, many of us still call the site by its old, iconic name. In fact, anytime I feel the need to visit, I go to twitter.com, not x.com—even though the site always redirects to the latter. Is it muscle memory? A small protest? Probably a little of both. But my days of typing "t" in Safari's address bar and clicking the autofilled twitter.com URL are likely coming to a close, as X seems poised to finally retire its Twitter domain for good. That news started with a post from X's "Safety" account on Friday. The post stated that, by Nov. 10, all accounts using a security key for two-factor authen…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he repeatedly promised to reduce the amount of bots on the site, and pitched plans to "authenticate all real humans." Now, in 2025, the social media site known as X's true bot numbers are unknown, although a cybersecurity firm speaking to Mashable said that 76% percent of traffic coming from X during last year's Super Bowl was fake. Toss in the fact that those plans to authenticate real users have now been replaced by a paid verification scheme, and it's clear the site …

On Friday afternoon, X officially launched XChat, the company's proprietary chat app. Unlike other chat app options, like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, you need an X account to use XChat, which limits the user base to one specific social media platform. X users with a large enough social circle on the platform may find this new app to be useful, but XChat does come with some security contradictions that all new users should be aware of. XChat is a standard chat app for X usersXChat's biggest sell, apart from being a place for X users to communicate, is that it is end-to-end encrypted. As the app reminds you upon setup, this encryption means there is no way for anyone—i…

After weeks of pressure from both advocacy groups and governments, Elon Musk's X says it's finally going to do something about its deepfake porn problem. Unfortunately, after testing following the announcement, some are still holding their breath. When did the X deepfake porn controversy begin?The controversy started earlier this January, after the social media site added a feature allowing X users to tag Grok in their posts and prompt the AI to instantly edit any image or video posted to the site, all without the original poster's permission. The feature seemingly came with few guardrails, and according to reporting done by AI authentication company Copyleaks, as well as…