Life Style

If you've ever been intrigued by the mystery of a dusty cassette you found in a thrift shop—or if you're just looking for a new time-sink—you have to check out Intertapes, a website that digitizes "found cassettes" sent in by users all over the world, then posts them in full for anyone to listen to. The catalog is small at the moment—only 14 cassettes—but already really interesting. There's a bootleg cassette of music played at a Spanish nightclub in the late 1990s (lots of squelchy noises and relentless bass) and a 90-minute recording of New York hip hop station WBLS captured in '94 (Warren G.'s "Regulate" represent), amid more mysterious choices, like this haunting recording from a "destroyed cassette tape found on the side of the coast highway near Heraklion" in Greece; this tape full o...

The Kindle has become the default e-reader for many bookworms, and I get it. I've used Kindles for well over a decade, and I've enjoyed using my latest Paperwhite quite a bit. It helped me read more than 30 books last year, so I'm not complaining. The basic Kindle setup is okay, but if you learn your way around the device's gestures, hidden features, and additional services, you can really get a lot out of this unassuming reading device. Kindle Gestures that you really should knowThere’s only one button on the Kindle. Everything else happens using touch. And like every touchscreen device, there are countless gestures you need to know to use the device. The most obvious ones are for the page turns. You can swipe or tap right to go to the next page and swipe or tap left for the previous one....

If you've been running several email accounts through your Gmail, you might want to double-check your settings this month—that's because Google is ending support for the POP3 protocol that can sync emails from third-party accounts. And while there are some other solutions, they don't work quite the same.POP3 is an older standard of syncing emails between multiple accounts that allowed users to import emails from a third-party account and manage them in one spot. It's also a less secure method of transferring emails, so it's not a total surprise that Google is phasing it out, but the company hasn't broadcast the change too loudly, so it might come as a surprise to some users.How to keep your third-party accounts working in GmailIf you're still using POP3 to fetch your emails from a third-pa...

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...