Setting Up Your Home Office

OpenAI is officially rolling out its latest model, o3-mini, starting today, Friday, Jan. 31. The company shared the news in a blog post on its website, just over a month after officially announcing the model during its "12 Days of OpenAI." As with each refreshed generative AI model, o3-mini is an improvement over o1-mini—but not by as much as you might think. OpenAI says the two models perform the same in math, coding, and science, but o3-mini offers quicker answers to user queries—24% faster, in A/B testing. According to the company, testers comparing the models found o3-mini produces "more accurate and clear answers, with stronger reasoning abilities." And, with "medium…

Following a surge in popularity for Chinese AI app Deepseek and its free reasoning model this week, frequent OpenAI collaborator Microsoft is helping America’s AI leader drop the paywall on its own reasoning model, giving all Copilot users free access to OpenAI o1. Notice the distinct lack of a “Plus” or “Pro” after “Copilot.” You won’t need specialized hardware for this, nor will you need a ChatGPT or Copilot subscription. The news came via a LinkedIn post from Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, wherein the executive said Copilot’s “Think Deeper” feature is now “free and available for all users of Copilot.” Think Deeper began testing in October and essentially gives the …

We're now starting to see some rudimentary AI agents appear: tools that can not only write code and solve math problems, but also perform actions on your behalf. And Opera has announced the first AI agent for its browser, the aptly named Browser Operator. The idea is that Browser Operator can take care of some tedious online tasks for you, saving you time and clicks. It could arrange your next grocery order, for example, or check out hotel prices in a place you're thinking of visiting. "For more than 30 years, the browser gave you access to the web, but it has never been able to get stuff done for you," says Opera's Krystian Kolondra. "Now it can." Right now the feature i…

There's a lot going on right now. And it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. Especially when you're (maybe chronically) online. Most of your work life, and personal life, all happens online. And sometimes it's really easy to get carried away doomscrolling and forget that, sometimes, you need to touch some grass. Opera Air is a new browser, hoping, trying, to save you from all of that. Opera Air has built-in features that remind you to take a break every hour or so, and in that break time, suggests that you do some breath work, meditation, or some relaxation exercises. There's also a dedicated background music feature that plays customizable binaural beats to help incre…

I'm a full-screen apps guy on my Mac. I love sending each app to its own workspace and swiping between them to use the one I need. When I'm writing, it helps me focus on the task at hand, and it's not hard to use three and four-finger swipes on my trackpad get to my other productivity apps as I need them. However, messenger apps like WhatsApp and Slack are an exception. I need to be able to check these out at a moment's notice, like when I'm using my browser in full-screen. Luckily, that's where the Opera sidebar comes in. This handy tool is home to social media apps, messengers, and even some streaming services, keeping them from getting lost in separate tabs and letting…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. One of my biggest pet peeves about the Oura ring platform is getting some temporary relief, thanks to Amazon’s spring sale. Chargers for the gen 4 ring (the newest model) are available for $35.40 today, so you can pick up a spare for close to half the usual price. Oura Ring 4 Charger $35.40 at Amazon …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. The Oura Advisor, an AI feature formerly tucked away in Oura’s beta testing program, is now rolling out to all Oura Ring customers. It takes the form of a chatbot that you can start a conversation with at any time from within the Oura app—plus the Advisor promises to “check in” with you daily, weekly, or three times a week, depending on what you request. But do you actually want it to do any of those things? What does the Oura Advisor do? Credit: Beth Skawrecki Honestly, this s…

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 uses …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. You can now pre-order a brand-new Pebble Watch, which is a sentence that will confuse a lot of people and excite others. Pebble was one of the first smartwatches, launching even before the first Apple Watch. We wrote about it here on Lifehacker in 2013. Now it’s back in two versions, running $149 and $225, both expected to ship later this year. Some quick background on PebblePebble was an early smartwatch brand whose devices featured an e-ink display (like the kind you might see on an e-book reader). Its Kickstarter launches broke records for the platform. I had heard that the Pebble Time was the most successful Kickstart…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The original Peloton bike is currently on sale during Amazon's Big Spring Sale, dropping from its original price of $1,445 to an appealing $1,195, saving you $250. This is one of the most competitive prices I've seen for the original Peloton bike. Of course, you'll need to consider the true cost of a Peloton after bundling all the necessary accessories. For instance, Peloton sells its bike shoes separately—normally for $125, but you can get them for $100 during this spring sale. Another cost includes a monthly subscription to the app, which grants …

This week, OpenAI announced its latest models: o3 and o4-mini. These are reasoning models, which break down a prompt into multiple parts that are then addressed one at a time. The goal is for the bot to “think” through a request more deeply than other models might, and arrive at a deeper, more accurate result. While there are many possible functions for OpenAI’s “most powerful” reasoning model, one use that has blown up a bit on social media is for geoguessing—the act of identifying a location by analyzing only what you can see in an image. As TechCrunch reported, users on X are posting about their experiences asking o3 to pinpoint locations from random photos, and showi…

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, sur…

"Photoshop" is synonymous with image editing, and for good reason. The app is an industry standard, and has been for over 30 years. But while Photoshop has been available on computers and tablets for some time now, those looking to edit images on their smartphones have had to make due with alternative programs—or simply stick to their other devices instead. That changes today. As of Tuesday, Feb. 25, Photoshop is officially on iPhone. You can go to the App Store, search "Photoshop," and see not just the usual alternatives—like Lightroom, Canva, and Facetune—but the real deal, too. Plus, the app itself is free, in addition to a number of "core imaging and design tools." A…

Lock screens are a good way to protect your data, but thieves stealing your smartphone when it's unlocked (or after seeing your passcode), and then resetting everything in just a tap is still a real security risk. Apple deals with this vulnerability using its Stolen Device Protection feature, and now, in Android 15, Google has a similar feature called Identity Check. Identity Check ensures strangers out in public can't change your Android smartphone's account settings without first passing a secondary biometric authentication. First, you set up one or more trusted locations, like your home. Then, if someone outside of one of those locations has your phone and tries to acc…

Pixel users will soon get an extra layer of protection against malicious calls and texts, as Google's AI-powered, real-time scam detection is rolling out widely next month. The Gemini Nano feature, which is coming to both Google Messages and Phone by Google, runs in the background and will alert you mid-call if it identifies "conversation patterns commonly associated with scammers." You'll hear a beep at the beginning of possible scam calls to indicate that the conversation is being monitored, with subsequent beeps sounding every few minutes. You'll also see an on-screen prompt when suspicious activity has been detected, with options to "End call" or mark "Not a scam." F…

Want to turn a video file into an MP3? Or any video into an MP4? If you have PowerToys installed on Windows, you don't need a third-party application—a quick copy-and-paste will do the job. We've talked about Powertoys, the longstanding Windows utility that offers all kinds of customizations to the operating system. One of the many tweaks added is the Advanced Paste feature, which can convert copied text into other formats. This is triggered by using the keyboard shortcut Windows-Shift-V to paste, instead of the usual Ctrl-V. A pop-up window asks which format you'd like to paste your text as—Markdown, HTML, and JSON are all offered. You can optionally set this up to use A…

If you’re at all like me, spring cleaning can be something of a domino situation. I might start by cleaning the baseboards, but when I get to the stairs, I’m like, wow these handrails are dirty. And so on. By the time I’m done, I’ve also discovered coffee splashes on walls, cobwebs in ceiling corners, and the dustiest blinds one has ever seen—and I’m feeling rather disgusted with myself. I’m also feeling sore, because my back is not what it once was and it seems like the worst of the dirt is either way low or way high. You know who still has good backs, though? Our kids, that’s who. Spring cleaning should, I believe, be a family affair. From the inside of the home to the …

Raycast, which is a more fully featured alternative to your Mac's Spotlight Search, has finally added a "hyper key" to its long list of features. The idea behind a hyper key is simple: you press one button, but your computer thinks you've pressed multiple buttons. Raycast lets you map the Hyper Key to all of your Mac's modifier keys, which means you can use it to press Command-Control-Option-Shift without mastering some kind of complex finger yoga. Just hit the one button and your Mac will think all the modifier keys are being pressed at the same time. Why would you want to do that? Well, it means you can create completely new keyboard shortcuts that don't interfere with …

Not all apps are safe. It's why I always recommend downloading apps from official app stores, like the iOS App Store and Google Play Store, rather than a random website: Apple and Google both have policies to scan for malware and stop them before reaching app stores. But neither company is perfect, and apps infected with malware end up on official app marketplaces more often that we'd like to think. These apps usually pop up on the Play Store more than the App Store given that Apple is extremely strict, but that doesn't mean the App Store is impervious to malware—it definitely happens, and we've covered it before. In fact, researchers just found a batch of apps containing…

Ads are an unavoidable part of modern life. They support both free and discounted services, for better or for worse, and unless you pay for premium services like YouTube Premium or expensive Netflix tiers, it's likely you'll run into these commercials one way or another. But just because ads are deeply entwined in our digital devices, that doesn't mean they get a free pass in all situations. As reported by Ars Technica, it appears Roku is pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable here, experimenting with placing ads when you first boot up your streaming device. Moana 2 ads are rolling on Rokus at launchOne Reddit user noticed the change when they turned on their Roku…

Producing video content is a particular challenge for generative AI models, which have no real concept of space or physics, and are essentially dreaming up clips frame by frame. It can lead to obvious errors and inconsistencies, as we wrote about in December with OpenAI's Sora, after it served up a video with a disappearing taxi. It's these specific problems that AI video company Runway says it's made some progress in fixing with its new Gen-4 models. The new models offer "a new generation of consistent and controllable media" according to Runway, with characters, objects, and scenes now much more likely to look the same over an entire project. If you've experime…

Samsung may have announced three Galaxy phones today, including the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra, but that didn’t stop the company from teasing a fourth. Alongside detailed specs of the new lineup arriving on Feb. 7, Samsung also hinted at a more mysterious future phone called the Galaxy S25 Edge. This announcement came towards the tail end of Samsung’s Unpacked event, and didn’t give viewers much more to work off of than a name and some renders. From the looks of it, though, the Edge seems to be a thinner version of the Galaxy S25, with a dual lens camera bump swapped in to help accommodate the smaller body. …

Filling out CAPTCHAs to prove you're a human is one of the regular annoyances of the internet—but maybe it doesn't need to be. A new feature in the latest version of One UI 7 for Samsung devices promises to solve CAPTCHAs (or Completely Automated Public Turing tests, to name them in full), but it's not yet clear how effective it will be. Why sites use CAPTCHAsCAPTCHAs pop up on numerous websites, often when you're trying to log in, and their purpose is to prove you're not a bot. The idea is that websites don't want to be overwhelmed with bot spam or come under attack from a swarm of bots, and CAPTCHAs are one way to prevent those problems. The challenge that you're met wi…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Smart lights were there at the beginning of the smart home tech revolution, and over the years, these clever bulbs and LED strips have gradually evolved to offer more by way of both features and form factors—so much so that you might not be aware of everything you can do with smart lights, even if you've been using them for years. If your own smart light setup is mostly limited to switching your bedside lamp off with a voice command, controlling them remotely from your phone, or perhaps changing up the colors or adding an automation or two, then you're not taking advantage of everything these lights can do for you. These a…

When you buy a new home, it’s natural to get excited about wanting to move in and settle in as quickly as possible, putting off potential renovations—even the ones that will make you happier in the space—and other home projects until later. And sure, some renovations, like kitchen remodels or additions, require a lot of planning and are best scheduled when your bank account and stress levels have recovered from the home-buying process. That said, there are some home projects that are best tackled right away—because they come with a lot of disruption, take a long time to pay off on the investment, or both. Planting treesIf your property has outdoor space but no trees, th…