MUO

Tapping a link is usually automatic. I see something interesting in a newsletter or group chat, tap it, and the page opens. What I rarely see are the tracking parameters and redirects that go unnoticed. Even short links hide where they land until you open them. I never thought much about what happens behind a tap until a network monitor showed me how many connections some apps make. That made me curious about the links I open from newsletters, group chats, and random clicks from other apps.

The weakest link in a modern smartphone is the battery. It’s the one component that degrades faster than anything else. So yes, it’s no surprise that manufacturers like Google, Samsung, and Apple have all started offering features like an 80% charge limit to help slow that process down. But out of all three, Google is the only one that throttles Pixel batteries after 200 charge cycles, and on newer models, you can’t turn it off. And that forced behavior is what makes it controversial.

When I replaced a handful of standard receptacles with USB outlets around my house, the tool that mattered most cost less than a pizza. It was the Klein Tools NCVT1PKIT, a plug-in receptacle tester and a non-contact voltage pen sold together for about $27. I bought it in 2024, and it has since caught at least one bad assumption I made about which breaker fed which outlet.

Consumer hardware has come a long way, to the point where some data-center workloads are now being replicated at desktop scale. To play with local AI, desktop GPUs are ideal companions for complex parallel processing, especially RTX cards with dedicated AI hardware. However, a bulky card is overkill for smaller AI tasks that don't need a separate GPU.

Scroll through most Kindle libraries, and you’ll find store purchases, a few Prime Reading loans, and maybe a free first-in-series novel. What you rarely see is anything from the biggest free library on the internet. Project Gutenberg offers more than 75,000 ebooks that are legal, DRM-free, and permanently free, and Amazon’s Send to Kindle service will deliver any of them to your e-reader.

My first try at local AI on a phone was a bare-bones chat app back in 2024. I loaded a tiny 1B model, asked it a handful of questions, and got slow, shaky answers. It lasted about a week before I deleted it. ChatGPT was always one tap away, and it was smarter. A drive through Central Pennsylvania brought me back. Long stretches outside State College drop my signal to nothing, and I had a pile of voice notes I wanted cleaned up before attending an online meeting. No cloud model could help.

Netflix remains the biggest and best streaming service out there because of the sheer depth and breadth of its offerings. It's always getting new stuff, and a lot of that stuff ends up being good, popular, or both. At the moment, the most popular show on Netflix is a new mystery thriller called Below, starring Josh Hartnett as an iceberg harvester (which is a real job, in case you're wondering) living in the remote Canadian village of Snook's Arm.

As a reviewer, my three eSIMs fly in and out of review units throughout the year. That said, I always buy an iPhone and Android phone for personal use. For the foreseeable future, that Android phone is the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8. I took advantage of a fantastic carrier deal that locks me into keeping the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for the next three years, and I'm completely fine with that. But before this Samsung foldable becomes my daily driver, I need to clean up One UI 9.

I have a network-wide privacy setup for my home network that works beautifully until it doesn't. Pi-hole blocked trackers on my laptops and phones, but the same aggressive lists periodically break smart TVs, delay camera notifications, or leave a cloud-dependent bulb hanging off the internet. This left me in a loop of allowing one mysterious hostname, testing again, and repeating until the device came back online.

It's easy to blame hardware whenever Windows starts dragging or when you don't seem to get the best daily performance from your PC. This might push you to start exploring prices for RAM and larger SSDs. These changes will help, but I've found that the most immediate fixes don't require a budget. I habitually swap out four of Windows' built-in tools and features. It doesn't always give me a faster computer, but it makes everyday tasks feel less slow or more cumbersome than they need to be.