Setting Up Your Home Office

As part of Mobile World Congress, happening this week in Barcelona, Google has teased that its Gemini AI is finally ready to see the world. Literally. Originally teased as Project Astra in May of last year, Google’s Gemini Live with Video and Gemini Live with Screenshare features each have a new trailer, showing how the search giant plans to catch up with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode. Soon, Google One AI Premium subscribers will be able to share their phone screens and real-time video with Gemini, which the chatbot will then be able to use to answer questions. ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode got these features late last year, but it also requires you to shell out …

I'll confess: my MacBook's keyboard has seen better days. I've been meaning to clean it for a while, but I always put it off because of how hard Apple makes disabling the keyboard in general: Whenever I switch off my MacBook, pressing literally any key powers it on again—not just the power button. That makes cleaning it tricky, since since an accidental keypress could trigger unwanted actions on my Mac. Luckily, there is a way to disable a MacBook's keyboard to make it possible to clean the laptop properly: It's just not obvious. Disabling your MacBook's keyboard for cleanupApple recommends turning off your MacBook before you try to clean it. To keep it switched off, you …

Planning to express your love with flowers this Valentine's Day? While the gesture is timeless, the pricing certainly isn't. Waiting until Feb. 14 to purchase that perfect bouquet could cost you nearly double the regular price. But there's a smart solution that can help you save money while still delivering that heartfelt message. Here's why you should order your valentine's flowers as soon as possible. Order Valentine's Day flowers right nowThe bad news: Ordering back in January could've help you snag the lowest prices of the season. Nevertheless, the sooner you order, the less likely you are to pay the top-dollar prices the last-minute shoppers will shoulder. When prope…

Part-time work is great for increased flexibility, but a significant bummer when it comes to benefits. Luckily, a new rule now opens the door for millions of part-time workers to start building their nest eggs earlier through employer-sponsored retirement plans. This rule—part of the Secure Act 2.0 passed in 2022—reduces the waiting period for part-time employees to join their company's 401(k) or 403(b) plans. Here's what you need to know to take advantage of this change and maximize your savings this year. How part-time workers can save more for retirementUnder the new rules, part-time workers can qualify for their employer's retirement plan after just two years of servi…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. It can get a bit confusing to decide between the standard iPad, the iPad Air, and the iPad Pro. For the most budget-friendlyoption, the iPad 10th gen is your best bet. For those looking for top-of-the-line specs, the iPad Pro is the way to go. If you're somewhere in between, that's where the iPad Air's sweet spot is. Right now, the latest 11-inch M2 Wifi iPad Air is $499 (originally $599), and the Wifi + Cellular version (if you don't want to rely on wifi) is $649 (originally $749)—for both models, those match their lowest-ever prices, according to …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Push-ups are a great exercise, and almost everyone can find a starting point to train them. But if you’re running into problems because of discomfort in your wrists, here are some things you can try. I’ll suggest quick fixes for positioning, drills that can make your wrists more comfortable, and stretches that can help you to have an easier time with this wrist position in the future. For a quick fix: use push-up handles, or do push-ups on your knucklesIn a standard floor push-up, our hands are at a 90-degree angle to our forearms. This is a position that most of us will eventually be comfortable in, but it’s OK if you wan…

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…

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 …

Max's March slate includes the fourth and final season of original comedy series The Righteous Gemstones (March 9), featuring Danny McBride, Adam Devine, John Goodman, and Edi Patterson, among others, as members of the famous televangelist Gemstone family. Episodes will debut weekly on Sundays. At the end of the month, Max Original reality series Paul American (March 27) will premiere, with weekly episodes stretching into April and May. The eight-installment show gives an inside look into the lives of Jake and Logan Paul. HBO is also releasing a nine-part sports documentary, Celtics City (first episode premieres on March 3), about the NBA franchise from its orig…

After teasing the device in January at Unpacked 2025, Samsung is ready to make the Galaxy S25 Edge official. The company revealed latest device in the S25 series during a special Monday night event. While there are many similarities between the Edge and the other S25 devices, what makes this particular model stand out from the rest is how slim it is: The S25 Edge is just 5.8mm thick, 1.4mm thinner than the standard S25, and Samsung's thinnest phone yet. Everything Samsung revealed about the S25 EdgeJust like the rest of the S25 phones, the new Galaxy S25 Edge is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip. That SoC (system on a chip) brings a number of imp…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Before you can lift a loaded barbell, you have to find a bar and load some plates onto it. At some gyms, there’s only one type of bar, and it weighs 45 pounds, and that’s all you need to know. But that’s not the only type out there, and if your gym has different bars of different shapes and weights, it’s possible to get confused. Check end of the bar firstIf you’re wondering about what kind of bar you're looking at or what it weighs, always check the end of it. Sometimes you’ll find a label with a brand name, a description of what the bar is, and its weight. For example, this one has a little endcap that says “The Rogue O…

CSV, or Comma Separated Values, are files used for all kinds of things, from managing large datasets to exporting data to move it between web services. You might think CSV files are just spreadsheets, similar to Excel files, but it's a lot more interesting than that: Open any CSV file in a text document and you'll learn that the "comma separated" thing is literal. Really, these files are just text documents—every line break is a row in the table, and columns are the items in each row, all separated by commas. There is nothing stopping you from editing the values right there in your text editor of choice, but doing so would be extremely annoying. And while you can import …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Amazon dropped the Kindle Colorsoft, its first e-reader with a color screen, last fall, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they were the first company to crack the concept: a device with a screen that offers all the benefits of e-ink—no harsh backlight, easy readability in any light—that wasn't just in muddy-looking greyscale. But while Amazon controls the vast majority of the e-reader market, lots of other companies are more innovative in their device designs, and others have been iterating on color e-ink for half a decade. One of the companies is Onyx International, a Chinese tech company that has been producing e-i…

Most video editing software works through re-encoding—essentially, uploading the file so it can be broken apart and stitched back together. This is necessary for advanced editing techniques but has some downsides. It's slow, for one thing, and the encoding process isn't lossless, meaning videos can look worse over time. This is a particularly vexing problem when all you want to do is cut a bit from the beginning or end of a file. Lossless Cut is an open source application for Linux, Windows, and Mac that can trim videos without the need for encoding. The changes to the original file are basically instantaneous and totally lossless. It's a great tool if all you ever do whe…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. You've probably heard of Oura's smart rings before, one of the best sleep and recovery trackers, but a new player entered the ring last summer: Samsung. It's the first time a big tech company has produced a smart ring, the Samsung Galaxy Ring. As the name implies, it's mostly geared to Samsung users, although any Android user can use it with some limitations. Right now, most sizes and colors of the Samsung Galaxy Ring are $279.99 (originally $399.99) after a $120 discount at checkout (some have the green checkmark under the listing price and others …

Searching for a job can feel like a full time job itself. It’s easy to feel defeated when it feels like you’re sending your resume out into the void and hearing nothing back the majority of the time. Maybe you’re graduating soon, or making a career pivot, or jumping back into the workforce after some time away—the job hunt humbles us all. An action plan is key to turning your overwhelming job search into a much more manageable process—both in terms of your sanity and to increase your chances of getting hired. Personally, I love a good spreadsheet. Whether or not you’re Team Spreadsheet, you should create some form of a career search action plan. Why you need an action pla…

Rest is a crucial part of strength training. Depending on the exercise and your goals, you may find yourself resting 30 seconds, or one minute, or three to five minutes. So what do you actually do during that time? Let’s talk about your options, both in terms of training effectiveness and gym etiquette. Literally do nothingAs awkward as it may feel at first, this is the best option for most people, most of the time. Actually rest. Don’t stretch, don’t work a different muscle; just allow your body to recover. Some gyms will have stools, benches, or folding chairs near the platforms where people are lifting heavy (and thus need the longest rests). I’m mostly thinking of po…

Lately, I’ve noticed my grocery money isn’t going quite so far, especially with meat. I’ve needed to change things up a bit. Specifically, the chicken that I usually toss into my salads, pasta dishes, and soups, well, I’m swapping it out for slabs of fried cheese. Is it weird? Maybe. But I love an excuse to eat cheese, and it’s really working for my wallet. Let me start by saying that my household consumes a great deal of chicken. What can I say: It’s a wonderful bird. And when you’re buying multiple pounds of it, and if it’s the bougie air-chilled chicken that I like, you can see how this quickly ends up being unaffordable. While my problem may be the price of chicken, …

We may earn a commission from links on this page. I know I’m not the only person with exercise equipment an arm’s reach (or a short walk) from where they spend most of their day. And you can pop down to your home gym a couple times a day, is that better than doing a whole workout all at once? Or if not better, is it just as good? Sometimes it is! Let’s discuss the nuances. For purposes of argument, I’ll assume you’re trying to decide between two schedules: A traditional strength workout, where you warm up and then do four or five different exercises, with several sets of each. The whole thing might take you anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on wha…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. In 2023, I decided to update my Apple Watch after consistently failing to wear my Series 4 for a number of years. I sold that one on Poshmark and began looking at newer models to find one with enough features to convince me to actually wear it. I opted to get a Series 8, although the Series 9 had just been released, as I was buying two: one for my mom and one for myself. As it turns out, that was a great decision. If you're searching for a new wearable or considering upgrading yours, you might also be wondering which of the older Apple Watch models is still useful today. My Series 8 is holding up beautifully three years af…

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…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. People tend to start gardening the same way: They grow their first plant outside, feel the pride of eating their own sun-ripened tomato, and decide to plant two plants the next year. Most of those plants are bought from a nursery, but as you build a garden, buying starts from the store begins to make less sense. If you’re at the point where you’re considering planting, say, eight tomato plants, it might make sense to start growing your own. And you should. You can save a lot of money by growing your own from seeds. Buying garden starts makes sense at firstPeople buy garden starts for simple reasons: By the time the weathe…

Building a Spotify playlist isn't exactly difficult, but it can be tedious, especially if you want to assemble a mix with dozens or even hundreds of songs. Spotlistr is a free tool that can do the work for you—it can automatically turn any list of songs into a Spotify playlist, even if it's just in simple text format. You paste the text containing your list of songs, let the app run, check that the tool identified the right songs, and click a button. A playlist appears. Even better, Spotlistr can convert a playlist for pretty much any other music streaming service, including YouTube, Soundcloud, Reddit, and Last.fm. To get started, go to Spotlistr.com and sign in using …

Despite the prevalence of wireless devices, wrangling cords and cables in the home is still a pain point for most people. If you own your home, you might be able to hide your wires inside the walls, but if you rent or simply don’t want to drill into or open up your walls, that isn't ideal. Besides, there are many much easier ways to hide them without needing to learn drywall repair. Behind furnitureOne of the easiest ways to hide your cables is to clip them behind conveniently placed furniture. Adhesive clips like these stick to the legs and backs of tables and consoles and secure all those wires in place. If you’re neat about it, you can magically make those wires invisi…

As with other AI bots like ChatGPT and Copilot, there are free and paid options for Google Gemini: For $20 a month, you can upgrade to a Google One AI Premium plan, which includes Gemini Advanced. Chances are you're already signed up to a host of digital subscriptions, so is Gemini Advanced shelling out even more cash? Here's how the features on the free plan and the Google One AI Premium plan stack up against each other right now—bear in mind the paid plan includes some extras beyond the Gemini Advanced AI, which I've listed at the end. As a Google One AI Premium subscriber, I've talked a little bit about my experience of these features, too. Comparable features …