GoKawiil
Tech News
Yoto's Mini, a screen-free portable audio player for children, has been named winner of the Best Design Europe, Middle East, and Africa category at the 2026 Innovation by Design Awards. The device lets kids listen to stories and music without a screen or algorithm-driven recommendations, relying instead on physical cards to select content.
Amazon now offers five distinct personality styles for Alexa—Brief, Chill, Sweet, Sassy and Original—that change the tone of responses without altering Alexa's functionality. Users can switch styles by voice command or through the Alexa app's device settings menu, with the Sassy option requiring an age confirmation due to its cheekier, more colorful responses. Each Echo device must be configured separately, since the personality setting is not shared across a household's devices.
Bradley Chambers argues that traditional software update cycles, like quarterly patches or annual macOS releases, are becoming obsolete as AI tools help attackers discover vulnerabilities faster. He outlines that IT teams now need a three-part strategy for patch management, starting with retraining end users to accept more frequent, less optional updates.
A survey of 1,517 US adults by data removal service Incogni found that people who say they have 'nothing to hide' are more likely to spy on others' phone or laptop screens in public than those who admit to having something to hide. The survey also found generational differences, with Gen Z most likely to peek at others' screens, and revealed that many respondents who dismiss their own privacy concerns still snoop through partners' or family members' devices without permission.
European startup Desert Ant Labs has released a suite of 18 small specialized machine learning models—12 stable and six in beta—for tasks like transcription, audio cleanup, PII redaction, and language identification, all designed to run locally on devices rather than through cloud APIs. The models are accessible through a single SDK covering Swift, Kotlin, and JavaScript, and are free to use for up to 100,000 monthly active devices.
A new speculative fiction piece from Nature Futures follows Melba, an employee managing the Lost Luggage Department at a nearly abandoned interstellar flight headquarters. The story details how travelers' bags are shrunk via molecular-reduction technology before space voyages, and how some end up misrouted for decades, eventually landing in Melba's basement office filled with stacks of miniaturized suitcases.
Windows 11 users can update graphics card drivers either through Settings > Windows Update or via Device Manager, where selecting the GPU under Display adapters and choosing 'Search automatically for drivers' triggers an update. However, Windows Update sometimes installs outdated driver versions rather than the newest ones available.
Android Auto, used by roughly 250 million people worldwide, sometimes drops apps from its launcher without explanation. This typically happens because a phone's battery optimization feature deactivates the app in the background rather than removing it entirely. Users can restore hidden apps or manually hide unwanted ones through their device settings in just a few steps.
Apple's September 9 event is expected to unveil only premium iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max models, alongside a rumored first foldable device, while the standard iPhone 18 reportedly won't arrive until spring 2027—possibly alongside an iPhone 18e and a second-generation iPhone Air. Analysts point to leaks and industry rumors as the basis for these expectations rather than official Apple statements.
A developer released an open-source bike computer that uses an eInk display and can record rides and navigate preloaded routes entirely on its own, without needing a paired phone. The companion app is used only to prepare routes or transfer data before a ride, not for ongoing operation.
A developer documented the process of bringing up the Linux kernel on a new platform by writing a lightweight emulator for a RISC-V CPU rather than using real hardware. The emulator, built in roughly 2000 lines of C++ and implementing the RV32IMA instruction set, provides just enough hardware simulation—MMU support, RAM, an SBI interface, a system timer, and a WD8250-based UART—for Linux to boot. The full source is published on GitHub under WerWolv/riscv-emulator.
Anker introduced MindBase, a device positioned as a central controller for connected homes, combining Matter compatibility with local AI processing and built-in network-attached storage. The product aims to manage smart home devices while also handling data storage and AI tasks directly on the hardware rather than relying solely on the cloud.