Setting Up Your Home Office

Petkit just announced three new smart pet tech products ahead of CES. Despite the conference not kicking off until Tuesday, the company shared details around its upcoming devices that are likely to launch this spring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Petkit advertises all three pet devices as "AI-powered," and while that's been a go-to gimmick for companies since 2023, there are some unique applications here—assuming the devices actually do what Petkit says they do. Purobot Crystal Duo litterboxPetkit says the Purobot Crystal Duo is the first AI-powered open-top litter box, and that the Purobot uses the tech for health detection. This device has an 720p AI-powered camera that mon…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you actually want to stick to your healthy goals for the year, I'm warning you now, you need some kind of plan—something concrete to motivate you. Something that helped me stay on top of my workouts a ton over the last year was my Peloton Bike and subscription to the brand's app—they enabled me to work out from home, at the gym, or anywhere, basically. Right now, you can get both those (and other equipment, if you're so inclined) for a discount, so this might be the moment to consider an investment. The Peloton equipment sale …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Pebble, the early smartwatch pioneer, has added a new model to its relaunched lineup, and it’s the thin, round model Pebble fans have been waiting for. What’s even more intriguing to me is the fact that the Pebble Round 2 doesn’t have a heart rate sensor, signaling that a smartwatch doesn’t have to be a fitness watch, too. The Pebble Round 2 starts shipping in May, and is available for pre-order now at $199. The new watch is meant to be a modern remake of 2015’s Pebble Time Round. Pebble fans loved the round watch, and every thread about new products on the Pebble subreddit has at least a few comments begging for a new ver…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I do a lot of things on a regular basis that people might classify as “good habits.” I go for a walk every morning. I hit the gym nearly every day. I prep my meals on the weekends so I always have something healthy to eat for lunch. But I didn’t arrive at these behaviors solely through habit stacking or some other clever hack. Because the truth is, most “habits” are really skills that take work and time to develop—not simple set-it-and-forget-it hacks. Most “habits” aren’t that simplePsychologists define “habits” as things we do automatically in a specific situation. “For example, the act of hair twirling may eventually o…

What kind of New Year’s resolution you make depends on your unique goals—which means you need a way to track your progress that is just as unique. If your resolution is to cut back on social media use and your friend’s is to run a faster mile, you won’t measure success the same way. Even if you swear 2026 is the year you spend less time on your phone (which I've sworn every year), tap into the power of handheld tech and use these apps to keep yourself on track. I like all the best general progress tracking apps, but when it comes to resolutions, you are looking at something time-bound and specific by its very nature, so you should try apps that are tailored more to what y…

I’m sure you’ve heard it everywhere: Check with a doctor before beginning any exercise program. This is the standard disclaimer on fitness advice of any sort, which most of us probably ignore. But should you? Not necessarily, it turns out. Why are you supposed to check with a doctor before exercising?The concern underlying this oft-repeated statement is that there are rare cases where a person can die suddenly during exercise. When this happens, it’s usually in a person who (a) had some kind of underlying medical issue; (b) was not used to exercising; and (c) did very intense exercise that they were unprepared for. For a long time, there was a sense among many medical an…

Skinny is officially back in—not that it ever really left, if you ask me. Between "what I eat in a day" videos and before-and-after transformations, there's always been this undercurrent of weight loss anxiety masquerading as wellness. "Weight loss" is assumed to be synonymous with "healthy," but that's never been the whole story. And during this time for reflection and goal-setting, I urge you to think bigger than simply making yourself smaller. If you've struggled to identify health goals beyond weight loss, you're not alone. We've been conditioned to believe that smaller bodies are the ultimate achievement, when in reality, health is so much more expansive, personal, a…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Smart glasses have promised convenience for years, but few have felt practical enough to wear daily. The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses (Gen 1) come closer by keeping things familiar. They look like classic Wayfarers, not a tech experiment, which lowers the barrier right away. Right now, they’re also easier to justify on price. The matte black version with polarized lenses is 25% off at $246.75, down from $329, which is the lowest price so far, according to price trackers. A glossy black version with clear lenses costs less at $224.25 if you don’t need …

Like everybody else, at the end of every December, I start thinking hard about what I want the next year to be like for me. You can chalk it up to all the Capricorn placements in my birth chart if you want (and I do!) or blame the cultural obsession with a "new year, new me" approach, but I take my New Year's resolutions seriously and generally try to come up with realistic, actionable plans to improve myself and my life. It's easy to identify the things I want to change and even easy to figure out how, exactly, I should do that, but that doesn't mean it's easy to stick to the new plan. Real life gets in the way no matter what year it is, but the degree to which it does t…

Thanks to my gig teaching spin classes, I have a front-row seat to a reliable annual phenomenon: My classes are packed for the first few weeks of the year as people make New Year's resolutions—but by mid-February, I'm back to teaching normal-sized groups of people who are grateful the "January joiners" have cleared out. I'm always sad to see the new faces go, though, because I do think it's possible to set a New Year's resolution and stick to it, even if it's not the norm. There are plenty of self-betterment goals you can set as a new year approaches, both in and out of the gym, but no matter what you endeavor to do, it's important to have an implementation strategy that…

Rewarding yourself can backfire. If you tell yourself, “I’ll only listen to my favorite podcast while I’m at the gym,” it takes just one moment of weakness to realize you can cheat and listen to it any time you want. Instead, try this: Reward yourself with something that has no enjoyment value whatsoever. Like a checkmark on your calendar. I first heard this tip from writer Tim Clare’s podcast. If you want to stay motivated, he says, the reward has to be so crappy that you’re not actually working for the reward. He said that he puts a checkmark on his calendar every day he writes, and at the end of the week enough checkmarks earn a gold star. The same approach has worked…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. If you’ve been doing any kind of work around any kind of house for a while, you probably have a few trusty old-school C-Clamps on hand. The C-Clamp has been in use for thousands of years. It’s one of those dead-simple tools that just works. It’s also one of those tools you tend to collect multiple examples of, in different sizes. Typically, you use a C-Clamp to, uh, clamp stuff together, like two pieces of wood, or to clamp something into place while you work on it (I use them a lot to cut lumber so I can have both hands on the saw, as I am allergic to emergency rooms.) But the C-Clamp is actually a very versatile tool tha…

When it comes to digital note taking, you usually have two choices: Do you want E Ink, or do you want speed? Devices like the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft and the Remarkable Paper Pro have shown there's definitely an appetite for E Ink note taking, even if it can be a bit laggy. But for the most responsive digital notebook possible, you usually have to settle for something like an iPad with a stylus. Now, TCL wants to change that. The budget-friendly tablet and TV company has finally announced its first full-fledged digital notebook: the TCL Note A1 NXTPAPER. Launching on Kickstarter soon and releasing sometime in February, the trick here is a clever one: Notes taken on this d…

If you get a letter from a company called 700Credit, don't ignore it. Your information may have been compromised in a massive breach affecting more than 5.8 million consumers, and you should take the necessary steps to protect your data. 700Credit supplies credit and identity verification services to more than 21,000 vehicle, RV, powersport, and marine dealerships in the U.S., so if you've purchased a vehicle and applied for dealer financing—or even been pre-screened or pre-qualified to do so—your information could have been affected. What happened with 700Credit?According to the company's filing with the Maine Attorney General, 700Credit's systems were hacked between O…

When ChatGPT first launched, it was strictly about dealing with text. You could ask it to write you a poem, to check your code for errors, or to build you a grocery list from a recipe. Fast forward three years, and the app has changed completely—for better or for worse. Not only has ChatGPT's large language model (LLM) improved dramatically from GPT-3.5 to GPT-5.2, but the bot has gone multimodal. It can understand text, but also images, video, and the internet at large. 2025's ChatGPT is hardly the same product as 2022's. One of the many upgrades to ChatGPT over the past three years has been app integrations: You've been able to connect OpenAI's chatbot to ask it to do…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. As you build your DIY toolkit, you'll quickly discover there's rarely just one version of any given tool. Of course there are Phillips head and slotted screwdrivers, but even hammers—possibly the simplest tool of all—come in a surprising range of varieties designed for different tasks. When it comes to power tools, the differences can be more complex to suss out. Take drills: When starting out on a job, how do you know if you need a standard power drill, a hammer drill, or whatever an "impact driver" is? While you can get pretty far in your home maintenance career without knowing the difference, but there will come a poin…

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,…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Meta has made virtual reality accessible to many more people, offering good VR headsets for much cheaper than the competition. Right now, the 128GB Meta Quest 3S Gorilla Tag Bundle is on sale for $249.99 (originally $299.99) and comes with a $50 Amazon gift card by hitting the "redeem" button or using the code "QUEST3S50" at checkout. This is the lowest price it has been, according to price-tracking tools, and the gift card makes it an even better deal. You can also double the storage with the Meta Quest 3s Batman: Arkham Shadow bundle for $349 (ori…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Considering we're awaiting word of a (likely) sixth season renewal, it's undeniable that Emily in Paris has been an unqualified success for Netflix, a reliable hit that rivals the success of buzzier genre shows like Stranger Things. Lily Collins stars as the faux pas-prone Emily Cooper, who moves to Paris and lands a temporary job at a glitzy French marketing firm kind of by accident. She doesn't speak the language and doesn't get the culture, but slowly manages to ingratiate herself to the locals while juggling work and romance in a new country. The series hails from Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City, so her buddin…

One of the ways AI models are rapidly improving is in their image editing capabilities, to the extent that they can now quickly take care of tasks that would previously have taken a substantial amount of time and effort in Photoshop. This is undoubtedly one of the main reasons Adobe has decided to introduce its own ChatGPT plug-ins. Want your t-shirt to be blue rather than red? Need to cut out a person or an object from an otherwise perfect group selfie? These are tricks that AI chatbots are now able to do cleanly and professionally, from just a text prompt. You don't need to have any digital photo editing skills; you only need to describe what you want to happen. Over th…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Call me immature, but I’m about a thousand times more likely to participate in activities that are good for me when they can be gamified. Even the simple pleasures of watching a number go up or earning a digital milestone badge can motivate me to get to the gym, track my meals, or form a new habit. Gamification can be used for focusing and studying, too, and a wide variety of apps exist to serve this purpose. Here are some of the best. Gamification apps for focusingFocusing is notoriously difficult, especially in this hyper-connected era in which many of us can’t go five minutes without getting a text or eat a meal withou…

AirDrop is one of Apple's best features. I use it on a daily basis to share files between my various Apple devices, but it really shines when I'm sharing stuff with other people, or vice versa. It can be tricky to find a quick solution to send larger files. Emails have too low a file size limit, chat apps can compress files, and cloud storage can fill up fast, but AirDrop is simple, built-in, and reliable. It even works with Android now, albeit just the Pixel 10. If AirDrop has one flaw, it's that it's not particularly easy to use with strangers. Apple has changed how this side of AirDrop works over the years. For the longest time, you had two AirDrop settings: "Contacts …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. America is a car-centric culture—more than 90% of U.S. households have at least one vehicle. There are a lot of different kinds of cars, from old classics being maintained with love, to snazzy new electric rides, or luxury cruisers filled with cutting-edge tech. Whichever kind you drive, getting the most out of your vehicle demands regular maintenance and sensible driving practices, but you can also goose just a bit more out of any vehicle with these universal car hacks. Throw some anti-seize lubricant in your trunkIf you’ve been driving for a while, you know that flat tires only come at the worst possible times. Sunny day…

The AI wars continue to heat up. Just weeks after OpenAI declared a "code red" in its race against Google, the latter released its latest lightweight model: Gemini 3 Flash. This particular Flash is the latest in Google's Gemini 3 family, which started with Gemini 3 Pro, and Gemini 3 Deep Think. But while this latest model is meant to be a lighter, less expensive variant of the existing Gemini 3 models, Gemini 3 Flash is actually quite powerful in its own right. In fact, it beats out both Gemini 3 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models in some benchmarks. Lightweight models are typically meant for more basic queries, for lower-budget requests, or to be run on lower-powered hardwa…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’re in the market for a small TV that also doubles as a tablet and home hub, the Amazon Echo Show 21 is an all-in-one smart display with built-in Fire TV, tons of widgets, and other genuinely useful features. A step up in size from the Amazon Echo Show 15, the Amazon Echo Show 21 is rarely on sale, but right now, it’s $50 off on Amazon, dropping to its lowest price ever of $349.99 (originally $399.99), and is a great option for Alexa-powered households. Amazon Echo Show 21 …