A Blink video doorbell owner found that ringing the doorbell only alerted phones and played a sound outside the door, making it useless for a spouse who doesn't carry her phone. To route the alert to existing Google Home mini speakers without paying for subscriptions or exposing a home server to the internet, he built a chain linking the Blink doorbell to an Alexa routine, a Samsung SmartThings virtual light bulb, webhooks, and a small server on a VPS.
Cohere released Parse 5, a 2.3-billion-parameter vision-language model that converts PDFs, slides, and scanned images into structured Markdown in a single pass, avoiding separate OCR and formatting steps. On Cohere's own benchmark, Parse 5 trails larger models like GPT-5.5, Opus 4.8, and Gemini 3.5 Flash in accuracy, but Cohere prices it at $1.50 per 1,000 pages via API, with a higher-volume option through its Model Vault platform.
Android phones let users set alarm volume independently from media, ringtone, and notification volumes, which can cause alarms to stay quiet even when other sounds are audible. Users can adjust alarm volume through the expanded volume menu or via Settings > Sound & vibration > Volume, and should also check Do Not Disturb settings to ensure alarms aren't being silenced.
A user ran Alibaba's new Qwen3.8 27B model locally on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra for 10 days, using it for daily tasks like summarizing RSS feeds and renaming scanned PDFs, then formally benchmarked it against its predecessor. The Q4_K_M version generated at about 14 tokens per second versus 28.6 tokens/s for Qwen3.6 27B, but produced answers using roughly a third as many tokens, making total response time nearly equal. A 1-bit quantized version ran much faster at 27 tokens/s and stayed factually accurate but struggled to commit to definitive answers.
EasyEffects is a Linux application that taps into the PipeWire audio system to apply real-time sound processing—equalization, compression, bass enhancement, limiting and more—to a laptop's built-in speakers. Because it works directly with the audio streams entering and leaving the system, users can noticeably improve the thin, tinny sound typical of laptop speakers without buying external hardware. The tool bundles plugins from projects like Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer with adjustable presets, all managed through one interface instead of separate mixers or command-line scripts.
The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu reported that a barrier lake created by an ice-rock avalanche remains at a high water level and is overflowing. Officials from China and Nepal are jointly monitoring the site to assess the risk of the lake breaching its banks.
Archaeologists excavating a cemetery in Poland uncovered the skeleton of a woman, nicknamed Zosia, buried with a sickle placed across her throat and a padlock fastened to her toe. Researchers say these were deliberate protective measures meant to prevent the deceased from rising as a vampire or revenant.
Nvidia has registered a new federal political action committee that will collect voluntary donations of up to $5,000 a year from eligible employees to fund candidates and party committees. The company told staff that upcoming congressional decisions on AI regulation, export controls and infrastructure could significantly affect the industry. This move follows Nvidia's hiring of a new chief external affairs officer and five outside lobbying firms, alongside a jump in federal lobbying spending to over $2.5 million this year.
Affirm Holdings' stock rose 7% Friday after the buy now, pay later company posted better-than-expected fiscal fourth-quarter results. CEO Max Levchin told CNBC that elevated gasoline prices are straining household budgets, pushing more shoppers toward installment payment plans to manage costs.
A developer investigating containerized Rust performance found that musl's default memory allocator is significantly slower than glibc's, not just under high concurrency but even on modest 4-core EC2 instances. Swapping in mimalloc or jemalloc narrows the gap but doesn't close it—one workload remained 26% slower—because several of musl's core memory routines are themselves inefficient, not just its allocator.
A LendingTree survey of over 1,500 credit cardholders found that 41% typically pay only the minimum due on at least one card, a habit that jumps to 58% among Gen Z but falls to 19% among Baby Boomers. The average indebted U.S. cardholder carries a balance of $7,756, and 44% of respondents said they don't know the interest rate on their cards.
At the World Robotics Conference in Beijing, Oak Deer Robotics unveiled a suite of automated kitchen tools including a multimodal AI cooking model called CookingMuse and a humanoid food-cart chef named RobotCook, demonstrating stir-fried tofu and pork with peppers using a 300-degree robotic wok. Separately, Hikrobots showed humanoid robots performing basic fast-food prep, while a robot-run noodle shop opened for trial operation elsewhere in Beijing.
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