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Level's New Invisible Smart Lock Looks Miles Ahead of the Competition

Level has always impressed me with its smart locks that look just like normal home deadbolts, but house compact tech features include card-tapping access, app controls and Apple Home Key support. Its newest Level Lock Pro, available now at Level's own websites, follows the same design and adds even more features, including more complete Matter support. Usually, with smart locks, you have to make compromises to get the features you want. A durable lock with lots of battery life may be quite bulk

You can try Android 16's new lock screen widgets - if you have one of these phones

Joseph Maldonado/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Lock screen widgets are returning to Android The feature is available now in beta for Pixel owners A public rollout is expected in December The latest Android beta is here, and it quietly dropped a pretty big surprise for Pixel owners. I've known for a while that widgets are returning to the Android lock screen, but they're officially back with Android 16 QPR2. Widgets are a staple of custo

Level Lock Pro is now shipping with Apple home key, Matter support, and more

Since Apple introduced home key, it has quickly become one of the most important features for smart locks. Basic HomeKit support just doesn’t cut it anymore. Unlocking your front door with just a tap from an iPhone or Apple Watch feels magical, and once you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to imagine going back to keys or even an app. Level was one of the first companies to embrace home key, and now it’s back with its most advanced product yet: the Level Lock Pro. It’s the smallest smart lock you ca

My favorite smart lock for iPhone users just got a major update - and it changes everything

Level Lock Pro ZDNET's key takeaways The Level Lock Pro is available for $350. This smart lock looks like a regular deadbolt, but supports Apple HomeKey, Matter-over-Thread, physical key, NFC fobs, and door status detection without extra sensors. You'll have to purchase a keypad separately if you prefer one to unlock, and Android users won't be able to use Apple HomeKey. View now at Level Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. As an iPhone user, Apple HomeKey has become one of

Topics: door level lock pro smart

Pixel owners just got a big surprise with Android 16 - what's new

Joseph Maldonado/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Lock screen widgets are returning to Android The feature is available now in beta for Pixel owners A public rollout is expected in December The latest Android beta is here, and it quietly dropped a pretty big surprise for Pixel owners. I've known for a while that widgets are returning to the Android lock screen, but they're officially back with Android 16 QPR2. Widgets are a staple of custo

Best Budget Smart Locks for 2025: Affordable Security Picks

Smart locks like the Vision Prestige are adopting a new trick: video doorbell-like cameras with embedded displays. Lockly When you’re looking for a lock well under $200 (or lower), it’s important to find one that will still last for years in the toughest conditions. Here’s what to think about. Design quality and size Look for smart locks that are very durable and won’t give into any forced entry. Ratings like the BHMA grade can help here, although not all locks have them. Look for at least a

Hands-on with the Level Lock Pro: sleeker, smarter, still very expensive

is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Smart locks are among my favorite pieces of smart home tech, offering convenience and peace of mind; I haven’t used a key in years. But most of them are big, clunky, and unmistakably “techy.” Keypads, bulky battery housings, and finge

Topics: door home level lock pro

Our favorite smart lock is on sale for the first time today

Setting up a smart home security system is important, even if you never want to think about having to use it. Thankfully, Kwikset’s Halo Select — the best smart lock we’ve ever tested — is currently down to $259 ($20 off) at Amazon, Lowe’s, and The Home Depot, marking the first time the lock has been on sale since its launch late last year. In her review, Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy praised the Halo Select for supporting four entry methods: a physical key, Kwikset’s app, a location-b

Netflix sets opening dates for its destination entertainment hubs

We now have the opening dates for Netflix's branded entertainment complexes that we first learned of in 2023. The 100,000-square-foot amusement centers will be centered around all things Netflix and will include a retail component, a restaurant called Netflix Bites and numerous "immersive story-driven experiences" based on the company's most successful properties. The Netflix House in Philadelphia will open November 12 at the King of Prussia Mall, and the Dallas location will open December 11 a

Changing these 6 settings on my iPad greatly extended its battery life by hours

Prakhar Khanna/ZDNET As an avid iPad user, I'm all too familiar with the internal struggles that course through me when the battery is about to die. I love using either the iPad 11 or iPad Air to write and work, but I also use it to stream content, play games, and browse the internet after work. This makes me appreciate the iPad's long battery life, yet my anxiety grows when I start getting 'low battery' alerts without a charger nearby. Also: How you're charging your tablet is slowly killing

MCP Gateway and Registry

MCP Gateway Model Context Protocol gateway & proxy - unify REST, MCP, and A2A with federation, virtual servers, retries, security, and an optional admin UI. ContextForge MCP Gateway is a feature-rich gateway, proxy and MCP Registry that federates MCP and REST services - unifying discovery, auth, rate-limiting, observability, virtual servers, multi-transport protocols, and an optional Admin UI into one clean endpoint for your AI clients. It runs as a fully compliant MCP server, deployable via P

A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website

My website: Publishing Germany's secret internet blocklist In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see. I decided to create a website, cuiiliste.de, to find blocked domains, as the CUII refuses to

A German ISP tampered with their DNS – specifically to sabotage my website

My website: Publishing Germany's secret internet blocklist In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see. I decided to create a website, cuiiliste.de, to find blocked domains, as the CUII refuses to

Recreationally overengineering my location history

2025-08-19 overengineering, software It’s been a while since I published my last #overengineering blog post. That’s not because I didn’t overengineer things, I was busier starting projects as opposed to finishing projects. Today, we shall fix this lack of content. I like data. That’s about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning. A big part of that is visualizing various aspects of my life. I consider myself lucky enough to be able to travel quite a bit, so I always liked having a visua

ArduinoOS (2017)

To get the uptime of the operating system use getElapsedMilliseconds or getElapsedTicks . Locks In order to keep your application thread safe you can use locks. With locks you can prevent an other thread to access a variable, function, ... in an unsafe state. Example for conflicting threads: void mainThread () { InitTask (thread2); while ( true ) { Serial. println ( " Thread1 " ); } } void thread2 () { while ( true ) { Serial. println ( " Thread2 " ); } } If you execute this code you will n

Ether notches first new record since 2021 after Powell speech teasing rate cuts

The second-largest cryptocurrency surged 15% late Friday, rising as high as $4,885.00 and surpassing its November 2021 record of $4,866.01. The price of ether smashed through its 2021 record on Friday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted at upcoming rate cuts and investors returned to risk-on mode. The moves came during Powell's annual address from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. "With policy in restrictive territory, the baseline outlook and the shifting balance of risks may warrant adjust

Bluesky blocks Mississippi under new age verification law

is a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011. Bluesky will block access from Mississippi IP addresses in response to a new state law requiring age verification and parental consent for underage users. The decision, outlined in a blog post, will stand until courts decide the fate of the law. “Mississippi’s approach would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky,” says the

Sound the alarm: Google Clock is now getting an Expressive overhaul

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority TL;DR The latest version of the Google Clock app is rolling out now and includes loads of visual changes. These changes include distinct backgrounds for active alarms, larger buttons for the stopwatch, and more. We also enabled the previously leaked timer page redesign with some tinkering. We uncovered Google’s Clock app redesign back in May, revealing a visual overhaul in line with the Material 3 Expressive style. Now, it looks like this redesigned app is s

Control shopping cart wheels with your phone (2021)

About Play the below sounds through your phone speaker and hold it next to a Gatekeeper Systems wheels to lock/unlock. Check me out on twitter @stoppingcart How It Works Most electronic shopping cart wheels listen for a 7.8 kHz signal from an underground wire to know when to lock and unlock. A management remote can send a different signal at 7.8 kHz to the wheel to unlock it. Since 7.8 kHz is in the audio range, you can use the parasitic EMF from your phone's speaker to "transmit" a similar cod

Colt confirms customer data stolen as Warlock ransomware auctions files

UK-based telecommunications company Colt Technology Services confirms that customer documentation was stolen as Warlock ransomware gang auctions files. The British telecommunications and network services provider previously disclosed it suffered an attack on August 12, but this is the first time they confirmed data had been stolen. "A criminal group has accessed certain files from our systems that may contain information related to our customers and posted the document titles on the dark web,"

One UI 8 could let you silence the most annoying system indicator (APK teardown)

Paul Jones / Android Authority TL;DR One UI 8 may add an option to hide the location icon in the status bar when only system apps are accessing it. The icon would still appear when third-party apps access your location, alerting you to unexpected behavior. The change addresses complaints from Galaxy owners about the icon being almost constantly on since One UI 7. For months, Galaxy owners have complained about the location icon constantly lighting up in the status bar, often triggered by Sam

Can’t recall that café from Tuesday? Google Maps has a new feature to jog your memory (APK teardown)

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority TL;DR The You tab in Google Maps has a new section called “Your recent places.” This section shows a list of all the recent places you visited. You can sort through locations with various types of filters, save a location, share a location, and delete a location from your history. Having trouble remembering the store you went to a few days ago? Or maybe you want to share the location of a restaurant you ate at the other day. Google Maps is getting a feature

Google Maps, Find Hub on the Pixel 10 just gained satellite-based live location sharing powers

TL;DR With the launch of the Pixel 10 series, both Find Hub and Google Maps now support satellite-based live location sharing. Pixel 10 users can send their live location even without cellular coverage, using Skylo’s satellite network. Google Maps, Find Hub, and Messages will also support live location sharing on the Pixel 10 with T-Mobile’s T-Satellite. Soon, other devices on T-Satellite will also get this feature on the above apps. As part of the Find Hub rebrand announced at Google I/O, Go

This new Pixel 10 feature will make it a little easier to sleep next to your phone

TL;DR Google is introducing a new screen saver trick on the Pixel 10. When you’re charging, you can have the clock switch to low light when the room gets dark. There’s also an option to let the display turn off completely during this time. After months of waiting, Google has officially launched the Pixel 10 series. Along with the launch, the company gave its latest flagship various new features like Voice Translate, Auto Best Take, and more. One new feature that shouldn’t be overlooked is a n

Linear scan register allocation on SSA

Much of the code and education that resulted in this post happened with Aaron Patterson. The fundamental problem in register allocation is to take an IR that uses a virtual registers (as many as you like) and rewrite it to use a finite amount of physical registers and stack space. This is an example of a code snippet using virtual registers: add R1, R2 -> R3 add R1, R3 -> R4 ret R4 And here is the same example after it has been passed through a register allocator (note that Rs changed to Ps)

Lock screen widgets are finally live on Pixel phones in Android 16 QPR2

TL;DR The first beta of Android 16 QPR2 finally brings lock screen widget support to Pixel phones, a feature previously only available on tablets. Users can swipe inward from the right edge of the lock screen to access a dedicated page that can be customized to hold multiple widgets. The feature’s arrival comes amidst the Pixel 10 launch and complements its new Qi2 support to turn the phone into a mini smart display on a stand. It’s a big day for Pixel fans. On the heels of the Pixel 10 serie

The Download: churches in the age of AI, and how to run an LLM at home

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s

Topics: big just llm local story

Ordered Insertion Optimization in OrioleDB

When many sessions try to insert into the same B-tree leaf page, classic exclusive page locking serializes progress and wastes time on sleep/wake cycles. We’re introducing a batch page insertion path that lets the session holding the page lock insert for itself and its neighbors. The result: dramatically reduced lock waits, and big gains at high client counts (2X throughput boost starting from 64 clients in our benchmark). In OrioleDB beta12, inserts into a B-tree leaf are performed under an ex

Life360 adds a new no-show notification to its app

Location-tracking app Life360 announced today that it is adding a new notification to its app that lets users know when a friend or a family member doesn’t arrive at a particular location at a designated time. This feature aims to help users from constantly tracking the location of someone to check if they reached a place safely. Life360 said it is launching the new no-show notification during the back-to-school season to reduce parents’ stress about their children getting to school. The compan

Amazon now sells used Hertz rental cars

is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Hertz has announced that it will start selling used cars from its rental business on Amazon Autos. The company’s pre-owned vehicles are now available in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Seattle, according to a new page on Hertz’s website, with “more loc