Life Style

Garmin displays a real-time stress level from 0 to 100. Oura calculates "daytime stress" and resilience metrics. For Whoop, it’s the stress monitor; for Fitbit, a "stress management score." However it’s branded, some version of a “stress score” has become ubiquitous across smartwatches and wearables. This number is marketed as a window into our internal emotional state, turned into quantified proof of how our day is really going. The only issue: these numbers aren’t all that accurate.What your "stress score" actually tells youThe scores lighting up our wrists aren't measuring what most of us think they're measuring. When you check your smartwatch and see that your stress level spiked, you might assume the device somehow detected your anxiety about some direct stimulus, like a difficult con...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Laptop screen extenders help add more display area without costing as much as two separate monitors. They’re also tidier, more integrated, and more portable, making them ideal for remote workers or students who want a mobile workstation with as much visual real estate as possible. The KYY 15.6-inch laptop screen extender, with its triple-screen setup (one on either side of your laptop's display), is a solid choice for anyone looking to give their laptop some extra elbow room—and right now, it’s 35% off, bringing its price down to $227.99 (originally $349.99). This portable monitor is built around a single-cable USB-C-to-USB-C connect...

Unless you run an AI data center, Nvidia's announcements this CES have been more on the quiet end. There were updates to GeForce Now cloud streaming and its DLSS upscaling tech, but no new graphic cards. That's fine—it's normal for Nvidia to have a quiet year on consumer tech every now and then, and the RTX 50-series GPUs just came out last year. Unfortunately, it turns out those DLSS updates are actually making games run worse on older GPUs.The new version of DLSS, called DLSS 4.5, is pretty great when it works. It already makes lighting appear far more realistic even when ray tracing or HDR isn't being used, and in the spring, it will introduce dynamic frame generation, which can adjust how many AI frames are inserted into your game on the fly, so that it doesn't waste compute producing ...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. While we’ve reviewed Anker’s Solix C800 and covered deals on the C1000—whose second-gen version even earned a Guinness World Record for being the fastest recharging portable power station in the 1,000Wh category—Anker has added another new and improved solar generator to its lineup. The brand’s newest portable power station, released in October 2025, is the Anker Solix C2000 Gen 2, and it’s currently 52% off on Amazon at $719.10 (originally $1,499). The C2000 Gen 2 gives you up to 2,400W of rated power and up to 4,000W peak, paired with a 2,048-watt-hour battery, which can be expanded up to 4kWh. The LiFePO₄ battery chemistry provid...

Every year at CES, Intel and AMD announce their newest processors. This year, Intel debuted its first line of chips made with its 18a process, which stands for 18 angstroms, or under 2nm. To make that a little less nerdy, that means these chips can fit a lot of tech into a small area, which means big gains in performance.Colloquially called Panther Lake, the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips are focused on laptops and mini-PCs. But that doesn't mean they don't put out impressive numbers. During its keynote, Intel promised "77% faster gaming performance," and for everyone actually using their PCs to do work, "60% better multithread performance." Impressively, it also said its new chips would also enable "up to 27 hours of battery life," rivaling Apple's M-series chips and other ARM chips ...

Need some help writing your emails? Through the wonders of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), you can now get messages composed on your behalf in Gmail, in Apple Mail, in Outlook, and in many other email clients. Most of the time, the AI option pops up straight away, ready to give you however much assistance you need.The pitch is that you can offload the drudgery of dealing with email to AI, and move on to other tasks that may be more interesting and important. Anecdotally, I've spoken to quite a few people who now use AI chatbots in this way. But it's not something I'm ready to embrace, and I don't think I ever will.These are my reasons, which may or may not resonate with you, though I haven't mentioned the issues of energy use and copyright violations that hang over the use of AI more ...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Winter weather can be miserable, but there is one huge perk: snowball fights. Any time a deep carpet of snow gets dumped on us, you can count on a bunch of kids (or young-at-heart adults) engaging in epic snowball fights, sometimes involving surprisingly well-engineered snow forts and sophisticated tactics.This is the 21st century, however—if you’re still fighting your snowball fights with nothing but your bare hands and a sense of determination, you’re missing out. We can’t all be Buddy the Elf, shotgunning perfectly made snowballs like some sort of winter weather Terminator—but we can invest in some of the most fun snowball tech money can buy. If you’re looking to dominate your neighborhood’s winter wars (or put some...

There are a lot of ways I trick myself into meeting my goals, like coming up with various rewards and punishments for myself or outsourcing my progress tracking to apps. In general, I'm a deeply goal-oriented person and I am, for better or worse, obsessed with "winning"—which I always thought made me a perfect candidate for complicated productivity techniques like detailed to-do lists full of tasks in order of priority. While I do love a good technique, I decided to switch things up last year when I got worried that maybe I was spending so much time prioritizing and planning that I wasn't spending enough time doing. So I just focused on the doing—and it worked. Here's what I mean and how my bright idea helped me crush last year's resolutions. Adopting a "do it now" mindsetI've covered a lo...

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Clicks, the company behind those physical keyboard cases for your smartphone, has announced a new device, but it'll look pretty familiar to anyone who's used a Blackberry before. It's called the Clicks Communicator, and it's a pocketable little handset that's perfect for anyone who misses having physical buttons on their phone. It comes with a full, old-school style QWERTY keyboard and runs Android 16, and while you can pump it full of apps and use it standalone, Clicks says it expects many of its customers will prefer to use it as a minimalistic companion to a primary smartphone. In that way, this device is designed to be your secondary smartphone, where you only load it with the apps you need at a moments notice and ...

If you've ever looked into trading in your smartphone for a dumbphone, you might have stumbled across Punkt. The German-based company's MP01 and MP02 phone were purposely not "smart;" rather, they were minimalist slabs of plastic, sporting a tiny display and an array of large, physical buttons. The point of owning one of these Punkt devices isn't to sit scrolling on your smartphone for hours on end; it's to use your phone when you need to—privately, at that. The MC03 looks like any other smartphone at firstThe company's MC0 line flips the script a bit, and that doesn't change with the latest: MC03. While there's still a focus on privacy and minimalism, this newest device is virtually indistinguishable from other Android smartphones on the market—at least, in outward appearance. Gone are th...