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The best cheap portable power stations of 2025: Expert tested and reviewed

I remember when power banks were new. They were an amazing development, freeing us from the tyranny of having to be near an AC outlet to charge out gadgets. Next came the power stations. They packed even more power into an admittedly bigger space. Still, we were freed from needing to be near to AC outlets or use extension cables when working outside, or in the RV or camping. The original power stations were big and expensive, so manufacturers to came up with smaller, more affordable models. Her

Mixed DPI in X11

I'm writing this article because I'm getting tired of repeating the same concepts every time someone makes misinformed statements about the (lack of) support for mixed-DPI configurations in X11. It is my hope that anybody looking for information on the subject may be directed here, to get the facts about the actual possibilities offered by the protocol, avoiding the biased misinformation available from other sources. If you only care about “how to do it”, jump straight to The RANDR way, otherwi

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 27, #277

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition might be tough. The purple category might be one of those where you have to just fill in the other categories and see what you end up with. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sun

These Three Messaging Apps Are Encrypted, but One Stands Above the Rest

Key points: Most widely used messaging app Uses the same encryption protocol as Signal Collects heaps of your data Free, but owned and operated by Meta WhatsApp is the most popular private messaging app on this list, with about 2 billion monthly users, according to Exploding Topics. Because it's so popular, there's a higher chance that other people you might be chatting with have WhatsApp, and therefore your chats can be encrypted. And if the person you're chatting with doesn't have WhatsAp

My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is

This free Linux distro is the easiest way to revive your old computer. How it works

ZDNET's key takeaways Linux Lite 7.4 is available to download and install for free from the official site. This lightweight Linux distribution comes with everything you need and performs like an absolute champ. The default desktop is a bit bland, but it's fairly easy to customize. View now at Linuxliteos My friend recently wanted to bring an old laptop back to life. Her aging Intel MacBook was no longer supported by Apple, and instead of letting the machine wind up in a landfill somewhere, sh

'Cyber plague': Experts warn of growing infostealer threat after billions of login details exposed

"Someone, somewhere is having data exfiltrated from their machines as we speak," says Volodymyr Diachenko, co-founder of the cybersecurity consultancy SecurityDiscovery. Cybercriminals have intensified their efforts to steal and sell online passwords, experts warn. The alarm comes after the discovery of online datasets containing billions of exposed account credentials. The 30 datasets comprised a whopping 16 billion login credentials across multiple platforms, including Apple, Google and Face

America’s incarceration rate is in decline

For more than 40 years, the United States—a nation that putatively cherishes freedom—has had one of the largest prison systems in the world. Mass incarceration has been so persistent and pervasive that reform groups dedicated to reducing the prison population by half have often been derided as made up of fantasists. But the next decade could see this goal met and exceeded: After peaking at just more than 1.6 million Americans in 2009, the prison population was just more than 1.2 million at the e

OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

Want to make OpenAI transcriptions faster and cheaper? Just speed up your audio. I mean that very literally. Run your audio through ffmpeg at 2x or 3x before transcribing it. You’ll spend fewer tokens and less time waiting with almost no drop in transcription quality. That’s it! Here’s a script combining of all my favorite little toys and tricks to get the job. You’ll need yt-dlp, ffmpeg and llm installed. # Extract the audio from the video yt-dlp -f 'bestaudio[ext=m4a]' --extract-audio --au

‘They're Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls

On April 28, a nurse at the Aurora ICE Processing Center near Denver called 911. A woman in custody, four months pregnant, had arrived at the facility’s medical unit, bleeding and in pain. As the staff rushed to get vitals, the dispatcher rattled off questions: How old was she? Was the pregnancy high risk? The nurse hesitated: “She just came to us three days ago.” On 911 audio obtained by WIRED, the dispatcher’s voice cuts in: “Is there any sign of life?” “Have we heard a heartbeat?” “Does s

Proton Mail is rolling out a tool to help you get rid of those unwanted subscriptions

TL;DR Proton Mail is rolling out a feature called “Newsletters view.” Newsletters view is a focused space that organizes all of your subscriptions in one place to help you declutter your inbox. It features two separate tabs for quick access to active subscriptions and mail lists from which you’ve unsubscribed. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of email sitting in your inbox. Things like promos, job alerts, store updates, and more can often make up the bulk of the messages waiting for

PicoGUS gets CD-ROM emulation

(note: please use firmware v3.0.1, which fixes issues with MPU emulation in SB and USB modes) New features/changes CD-ROM emulation PicoGUS now supports CD-ROM emulation (in other words, PicoGUS is now an ODE)! It emulates a Panasonic/MKE interface and drive and supports CD images in ISO or BIN/CUE stored on a USB drive plugged into the USB port on the PicoGUS. CD-ROM emulation has been tested in DOS and Windows 9x and CD audio playback is fully supported. CD-ROM emulation is available in So

Topics: cd emulation mode rom usb

Primitive Kolmogorov complexity is computable

/ 5 min read This post is mostly AI generated, of course with significant guidance, feedback, iteration and some edits from me. There was little for me to gain writing this myself, but I felt it needed to be written down regardless. Kolmogorov complexity and Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference offer formal, theoretical solutions to measuring complexity and forming predictions. However, both are uncomputable, a fact that is often treated as having significant implications in computabilit

What Problems to Solve (1966)

What Problems to Solve - By Richard Feynman A former student, who was also once a student of Tomonaga’s, wrote to extend his congratulations. Feynman responded, asking Mr. Mano what he was now doing. The response: “studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.”

'They're Not Breathing': Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls

On April 28, a nurse at the Aurora ICE Processing Center near Denver called 911. A woman in custody, four months pregnant, had arrived at the facility’s medical unit, bleeding and in pain. As the staff rushed to get vitals, the dispatcher rattled off questions: How old was she? Was the pregnancy high risk? The nurse hesitated: “She just came to us three days ago.” On 911 audio obtained by WIRED, the dispatcher’s voice cuts in: “Is there any sign of life?” “Have we heard a heartbeat?” “Does s

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 26, #276

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition has a green category aimed at New Yorkers, and a purple one that could test your ability to make random connections. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a s

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for June 26, #746

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle could be tough. The purple category is, again, super tricky, relying on you seeing related words inside of four very different words. Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wo

Senators reintroduce App Store bill to rein in ‘gatekeeper power in the app economy’

The App Store is back under scrutiny from lawmakers in Washington. A bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced the 2021 Open App Markets Act, a bill aimed at curbing the gatekeeper power that Apple and Google hold over the so-called “mobile app economy.” Here’s what they’re going for. If passed, the legislation would effectively force Apple and Google (who are not specifically named in the text) to allow sideloading, support third-party app stores, permit alternate payment systems, and stop

My new favorite multi-port charging station is $50 off on Amazon right now

ZDNET's key takeaways A great charging station that's not just for those deep in the Apple ecosystem It offers a total of 140W output, and the USB-C ports and built-in cable support up to 100W There's a cool LCD screen, and this can be switched off if it becomes annoying or distracting. $99.98 at Amazon For a limited time, Baseus has discounted the Nomos 5-in-1 charging station by $50, bringing it down to near all-time lows. Chargers are giving way to charging stations, purpose-built gadgets

‘M3GAN 2.0’ Is an Antihero Upgrade, But at a Cost

M3GAN 2.0 delivers a bloody slay of a sequel, one that elevates Blumhouse’s sci-fi horror darling and gives its icon an action-packed upgrade–one that works, albeit at the expense of the original’s horror roots. You can’t keep a killer down, or a killer doll for that matter, as the end of the first film teased, as 2.0 opens with M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis, and physically portrayed by Amie Donald) having taken refuge in the cloud after he defeat. In the sequel, we discover that while Gemma (Al

Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost

Ubuntu users could see up to a 20-percent boost in graphics performance on Intel-based systems under a change that will turn off security mitigations for blunting a class of attacks known as Spectre. Spectre, you may recall, first came to public notice in 2018. Spectre attacks are based on the observation that performance enhancements built into modern CPUs open a side channel that can leak secrets a CPU is processing. The performance enhancement, known as speculative execution, predicts future

Hundreds of data brokers might be breaking state laws, say privacy advocates

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a nonprofit privacy rights group have called on several states to investigate why “hundreds” of data brokers haven’t registered with state consumer protection agencies in accordance with local laws. An analysis done in collaboration with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) found that many data brokers hav

The Architects of Project 2025 Are Suddenly Very Concerned About AI Safety

The Heritage Foundation — the group behind the infamous Project 2025, the conservative policy plan that outlined regressive social policies and the consolidation of executive power that's served as a playbook for the Trump administration — is suddenly really, really down with AI regulation. Who could have guessed! The conservative think tank has recently been sharing a clip from a May episode of the "Heritage Explains" podcast in which Wesley Hodges, the Heritage Foundation's Acting Director of

Anthropic just made every Claude user a no-code app developer

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Anthropic announced Wednesday that it will transform its Claude AI assistant into a platform for creating interactive, shareable applications, marking a significant evolution from conversational chatbots toward functional software tools that users can build and distribute without coding knowledge. The San Francisco-based AI company reveal

Google’s Find Hub network is unreliable, but this simple change could fix it

Andy Walker / Android Authority TL;DR Google could improve its Find Hub network by convincing users during device setup to select a more reliable, but less private, tracking option. This new setup screen rebrands the existing network options to better explain that the default option may be less reliable, while the alternative can find items anywhere. By getting more people to choose the more effective setting, Google aims to make its network a more dependable alternative to Apple’s and Samsun

What Problems to Solve – By Richard Feynman

What Problems to Solve - By Richard Feynman A former student, who was also once a student of Tomonaga’s, wrote to extend his congratulations. Feynman responded, asking Mr. Mano what he was now doing. The response: “studying the Coherence theory with some applications to the propagation of electromagnetic waves through turbulent atmosphere… a humble and down-to-earth type of problem.”

Information has been permanently deleted, for small values of permanently

As part of a periodic purge of unused online accounts, I deleted my account from a company ten months ago. Let’s call that company Contoso. I received a confirmation that said, “Your personal information and items associated with your account have now been deleted. This action is permanent and cannot be reversed.” Yesterday, I got an email from Contoso informing me that they have updated their Privacy Policy. So I guess their “confirmation” of “permanent” and “irreversible” deletion of my pers

Ring’s descriptive alerts take the guesswork out of checking your camera feed

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR Ring is rolling out AI-powered Video Descriptions that summarize camera footage in plain text. The feature helps users quickly distinguish urgent events from routine activity. It’s currently in beta for Ring Home Premium users in the US and Canada. Smart home cameras have long sent vague alerts, which can be a double-edged sword. You want to know what’s happening on your property, but it can be stressful to get the notification only to realize on pla

The battle-tested tips CEOs swear by when change hits from every direction

StudioGraphic / Getty Images As I interview some of the brightest minds in technology, business and leadership for my weekly podcast DisrupTV, one thing became crystal clear: we're not just experiencing an AI revolution -- we're in the midst of multiple technological revolutions converging simultaneously. This combinatorial effect makes this even more game changing than the internet, because the internet was just one revolution. Also: 4 ways to turn AI into your business advantage As such, th