Setting Up Your Home Office

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. If you’re anything like me, you might have moving app icons on your iPhone Home Screen right now. It took me a few days to notice this, but now when I tilt my phone up, down, left, or right, my icons will actually shift in that direction, and the highlights the new Liquid Glass effect added around them will move as well. Technically, this isn’t a new feature. Apple calls it the “parallax effect,” and if you’ve ever played an old 16-bit sidescroller, you’ve probably seen it before. It’s when a background m…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. At the company's Meta Connect 2025 event yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially unveiled its long-rumored and recently leaked display-focused smart glasses. Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses will cost $799 and go on sale on Sept. 30. The next generation of Meta smart glasses will feature a full-color, monocular, 600 × 600 pixel HUD in one of the lenses that will only be visible to the user. Display smart glasses will also include improved versions of the audio, video, and AI capabilities of non-display Meta glasses. …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. If you’re looking for in-ear earbuds with superior sound quality, long-lasting battery life, and a secure fit, the Beats Powerbeats Pro wireless earbuds are a reliable option, especially for those who are fans of Beats headphones. Right now, you can get an open-box pair for just $100 on Woot, a 60% discount. Open-Box Beats Powerbeats Pro Ear…

One of the main reasons I've always insisted on having a keyboard with a full number pad—apart from being able to bash out numbers quickly—is that it lets me type out the Windows shortcut codes for an em dash (ALT+0151) and en dash (ALT+0150). They're punctuation marks I use a lot, and apparently AI bots do too. What you'll notice about those shortcut codes, if you've spent time with both Microsoft and Apple operating systems, is that they're longer and more awkward to type than the equivalents on macOS. On a Mac, you can type an em dash by holding down Shift+Option and pressing the hyphen ("-") button. For en dashes, it's even easier: Hold down Option, then press hyphen.…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’ve been planning to tighten up your home security without spending much, the Blink Wired Floodlight Camera is worth a look. It’s selling for $49.99 (down from $99.99), which is its lowest price yet, according to price trackers. Blink Wired Floodlight Camera $49.99 at Amazon …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. As a new parent, it’s unfortunately pretty normal to be paranoid about whether your baby is breathing when you put them down for a nap. Gadgets promise peace of mind—like heart rate or movement sensors that attach to your baby or their crib. But the FDA is warning against most of them. As the FDA writes in a safety communication to parents and pediatricians, no devices are approved to prevent or reduce the chances of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or sudden unexplained death in childhood (SUID). If a device says it will do this, the FDA advises avoiding that product entirely. When it comes to devices that just claim …

Hisense is all about TVs at this year's CES—specifically, how those TVs display color. If the company's keynote is any indication, Hisense is extremely invested in leading the charge in color reproduction. Though its tagline this year is "Innovating a Brighter Life," the pitch is less on how bright their TVs are, and more on how true to life their colors are, especially when it comes to accurately displaying the filmmakers' original intent. Will consumers buy a TV because their favorite movie looks a bit more how the director intended it to be? I'm not sure. But that's largely the idea behind Hisense's new RGB MiniLED Evo. RGB MiniLED Evo …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. When I put the new Viwoods AiPaper Reader through its paces for my review, published yesterday, I made the mistake of trusting the company's own statements when I described its capabilities. According to Viwood's website, the phone-shaped device has mobile data functionality (specifically, 4G/Wi-Fi 2.4G), which I tested using a data-only SIM card. Nowhere does Viwoods advertise that its new e-reader call make and take phone calls. But it can. I'd love to say I figured this out on my own, but I actually first saw a post about it on Reddit shortly before I went to bed last night. By the time I woke up, I had an email in my i…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’re tired of websites bombarding you with banners, pop-ups, trackers, and ads, this AdGuard family plan is worth a look: It's a lifetime subscription that is currently $39.99 on StackSocial (down from $119.99), but applying the coupon FAMPLAN drops the sale price to $15.97. The sale runs through October 5. It's a lifetime of ad-blocking for less than what some services charge per month, but it's only available to new users, and you’ll need to redeem your code within 30 days of buying it. You can access and utilize this plan across nine devices…

SMART goals are a helpful way to turn your ideas and to-dos into actionable plans for the near and far future, but they're not always the best approach. If you work on a larger team or need to track highly ambitious, long-term goals, for example, SMART might not be the best method to turn to. Other goal-tracking methods, like FAST and PACT, may be a better fit. You'll need to start by familiarizing yourself with these alternate methods, but once you do, you'll see that they are more tailored to specific needs and might just be your best bet. When should you use SMART goals?SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—that's what the acronym s…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Black Friday sales officially start Friday, November 28, and run through Cyber Monday, December 1, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it's over. Follow our live blog to stay up-to-date on the best sales we find. Browse our editors’ picks for a curated list of our favorite sales on laptops, fitness tech, appliances, and more. Subscribe to our shopping newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox. Sales are accurate at the time of publication, but prices an…

There are warning signs that your home network may have been compromised, such as unusual traffic patterns and slowdowns in system performance, but now there's a simple tool to help determine if your router or connected devices are being used to conduct malicious activity. IP Check, from threat monitoring firm GreyNoise, will alert you if your IP address has been observed scanning the internet as part of a botnet or residential proxy network. As GreyNoise outlines, residential IP compromise often isn't obvious to the user because you're still able to conduct business as usual, such as streaming, emailing, and web browsing. All the while, though, threat actors are routing…

Malicious extensions do occasionally find their way into the Chrome Web Store (and similar libraries in other browsers) by posing as legitimate add-ons. They are particularly difficult to catch when they are benign to begin with, only morphing into malware after gaining user trust. That's what happened with a number of extensions on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge: researchers at Koi Security identified add-ons across both browsers that operated legitimately for several years before receiving malicious updates that allow hackers to surveil users and collect and exfiltrate sensitive data. The scheme, known as ShadyPanda, reached four million downloads and is still active…

Netflix's December lineup has a little something for everyone, from familiar original series to live sports. Emily in Paris returns for a fifth season (Dec. 18), this time set in Rome. The final installment of Stranger Things is coming at the end of the month—the first half of season five premiered in November—with volume two releasing at 5 p.m. PT on Christmas Day and the finale at 5 p.m. PT on New Year's Eve. There's also Love Is Blind: Italy (Dec. 1) and My Next Guest with David Letterman and Adam Sandler (Dec. 1), in which Letterman joins Adam Sandler backstage on his comedy tour, and What's In The Box? (Dec. 17), a new game show hosted by Neil Patrick Harris. On the…

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. Earlier this month, we saw a new running world record—more specifically, running backwards. In heels. Christian Roberto López Rodríguez claimed the fastest 100m backwards in high heels with an impressive time of 16.55 seconds. I may not be setting that sort of record, but I do see running backwards crop up time and time again as a trendy idea for the average runner. Sometimes called "reverse running," it's exactly what it sounds like: runners literally turning around and jogging backwards. But does running b…

The internet has become a vital tool for human connection, but it comes with its fair share of risks, with the biggest being your privacy and security. With the big tech giants hungry for every ounce of your data they can get and scammers looking to target you every day, you do need to take a few precautions to protect your online privacy and security. There's no foolproof approach to these two things, and unfortunately, the onus is on you to take care of your data. Before you start looking for a VPN or ways to delete your online accounts, you should take a moment to understand your privacy and security needs. Once you do, it'll be a lot easier to take a few proactive ste…

iOS 26 is one of Apple's biggest operating system updates in years. The new "Liquid Glass" design, while controversial, offers the first major UI overhaul since iOS 7, while new features like call screening and hold assist might change the way your make and receive phone calls. If you have an iPhone, you may be tempted to install the new update—and, seeing as it has been out for a week and a half now, you might have updated already. If you haven't installed iOS 26, yet, however, think twice before you do, because you're going to be stuck with it: Apple has made it impossible to downgrade and return to iOS 18. You can't go back to iOS 18As reported by MacRumors, Apple sto…

No matter how dedicated you are to responding to and archiving all your emails, there will always be one thing preventing you from hitting true inbox zero: all of those mailing lists you're subscribed to. These horrors will visit you at all hours of the day, making it harder to spot the truly important messages in your inbox—and it gets worse once you've gotten fed up enough to disable push notifications and they start to really pile up. It’s time to banish these buggers. And, if you're using Gmail, there’s an easy way to do it. Use filters to manage mailing list emails in GmailYou can use a third-party add-on to go through your mailing lists and unsubscribe, saying good…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. We travel for a wide variety of reasons—vacations, business, family obligations—and in a variety of different ways, but there’s one constant: The actual traveling can be hectic, stressful, and expensive. Considering Americans took nearly 2 billion trips in 2025 alone, that stress can be pretty epic. From planning to de-boarding, travel can be a challenge—that is, unless you know and utilize these hacks. There are a lot of travel hacks out there in the wild, many of them dubious, but when a hack actually works to lower your costs, increase your comfort, or simply solve an irritating problem, it’s kind of magical. Here are …

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. It's an exciting time to be an iPhone user. There's iOS 26, of course, which brings a number of major changes to the platform. For the daring, there's the iOS 26.1 beta, which continues to build upon the foundation of Apple's latest OS. If that weren't enough, however, it seems Apple is also working on yet another iPhone update—this time intended mostly to fix problems with the last one. The update, iOS 26.0.1, could drop any time in the coming days. These types of updates aren't necessarily unusual: Apple …

I really like my Pixel 9a, but there’s one glaring issue with my Pixel that stares at me every time I unlock my phone. And it’s the At a Glance widget on top the screen that Google just won’t let me remove. I like a clean lock screen, and eventually, I got so frustrated looking at this totally uncustomizable widget that shows the time and the weather that I gave up and switched to Niagara Launcher. And if you think that this is just my own pickiness, I can confidently say it’s not just me; Reddit is filled with people complaining about this. But seems like after 10 iterations of Pixels, Google is finally letting people get rid of this widget, clearing space for something,…

Season's greetings and all that. In honor of this most special time of the year, I'm taking a look at commonly held Christmas myths and misconceptions. I busted a ton of Jesus myths a couple weeks ago, then got secular and finally revealed the truth about Santa Claus, so this week I'm doing a round-up of seasonal misinformation, both religious and secular. Religious Christmas mythsJesus was born in a stableThe Gospels aren't specific about where where Jesus was born, other than "Bethlehem." Here's how Luke 2:4–7 is traditionally translated: "And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room f…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. My smart home routines are ready for a refresh. As new standards have emerged for connecting gadgets in the home, and Google and Amazon have been updating their respective hardware and apps, I've been lagging in keeping things sharp and running smoothly. So, I'm doing something about it now. If you've been feeling bored by your smart home and its current routines too, keep reading. These are ways to configure the smart devices around you to make them for more than just turning the lights on and off (although there's always plenty of that). Although my personal smart home is in the Google Home ecosystem, these features als…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Here we go again. After hiking the price of Xbox consoles earlier this year, Microsoft just announced it is already raising prices again—the second price hike in four months. Now, even Microsoft's cheapest console, the Xbox Series S, will cost at least $400. As someone who got an Xbox Series S for $150 a few years back, that stings. (Granted, I got a really good deal. Still.) Microsoft is blaming "changes in the macroeconomic environment" for the new prices, so read into that what you will. How much more expensive will the Xbox be?Here is what Microsoft's consoles will cost after the new pricing takes effect: Xbox Series …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. 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. Early October Prime Day Deals are here, and some good ones are rolling in. Amazon devices have big discounts right now, and that includes Kindle readers. Right now, Amazon is offering Prime Members bundles for the Kindle, Kindle Colorsoft, Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Scribe, where most of them are cheaper than getting the standalone tablet, making…