Ah, the relationship between animals and the technology they can’t quite understand. Today, it seems like there’s a high-tech solution to every element of pet ownership, with devices on the market designed to keep pets fed, cleaned, watched over, and entertained. And if you have a pet you know: nothing is too good — or too cutting-edge —  for your (furry, slimy, feathery) best friend.But while some tech can help care for your pet, it can be complicated when dogs and cats meet wires and waves. You might feel complicated about offloading elements of kitten parenthood to a robot. Some pet tech innovations over-promise or are over-hyped. And of course, your puppy (or parrot) might well mistake your gadgets for a snack. To that end, we’ve put together a week of stories that explore the intersection of technology and pet ownership. Read on for how to take a decent photograph of your cat, pet scales and the chunky companions who need them, and takes on our favorite tools, both simple and complex. Whisker’s AI-powered litter robot thinks my cats swapped bodies How to take better photos of your pets How I turned my fish tank high tech My parrot ate my keyboard Oops! My cat is an iPad kid Google’s Pet Memory forgot who my cats are

On August 6th, the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center lost radar and communications for around two hours. The outage disrupted more than 1,100 flights across the center's 330,000 square mile, nine-state airspace sector. Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside his Marine One military helicopter. As Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) protocol requires, the pilots tried to contact Reagan National Airport to tell them to halt commercial traffic during the flight. But the air traffic controllers never heard the transmission and cleared a different airplane for takeoff - which came clo …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the best things my smart home does is help me care for my pets, and security cameras are particularly useful for keeping track of my many critters. But the barrage of notifications they send often means I miss important ones. So, when Google announced its new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home, I thought this could be the perfect solution.Pet Memory promises to teach your Google Home smart home who your pets are, allowing connected Nest cameras to go beyond simply telling you they saw an animal to which animal they saw. It can then use that knowledge to adapt your smart home to your pet. My plan was to use it to keep a digital …Read the full story at The Verge.

I use the Alienware AW3423DW and AW2725DF OLED monitors with my gaming PC, and while both have built-in USB hubs, only the newer AW2725DF has a USB-C port. It's one of those features I didn't even care about when I first bought it because it had already won me over with its gorgeous OLED panel and 360Hz refresh rate. Now, I just wish the AW3423DW had one too, because I've realized how convenient it is to have a USB-C port sitting right beneath the display.

Ollama has been my default runtime for running LLMs locally. It makes the entire process almost stupidly easy. I can download a model with one command, run it immediately, and connect it to other apps through a local API without worrying about model formats or hardware configuration. I had no major complaints about Ollama, but I have this habit of messing around and keep trying new things.

ChatGPT for Teens includes safeguards and parental controls. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI is introducing a dedicated ChatGPT mode for teenagers, combining existing youth safeguards and new safety features under one roof. The launch comes amid mounting public scrutiny over how AI tools affect younger users, as other platforms implement their own age checks and teen-specific protections. ChatGPT for Teens is "an experience designed to help teens learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence," OpenAI said in a blog post published Tuesday. Teen mode will automatically apply to users who identify themselves as being between the ages of 13 and 17, as well as those the system estimates to be under 1 …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Fairphone 6 Plus is the first Fairphone to officially launch in the US. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge The Fairphone 6 Plus is a minor hardware refresh, but a major launch for the company: It's the first phone that Fairphone is selling directly in the US. It's on sale now for $649.99, available through Fairphone's website and Amazon, and is sold unlocked with support for both T-Mobile and AT&T. In Europe, it costs €649, a €50 increase on last year's phone. Fairphones from the 4 onwards have been available to buy in the US, but never from Fairphone itself. They were exclusively sold through a partnership with Murena, the developer of /e/OS, a "de-Googled" version of Android. That meant buyers were forced to use Murena's software - which is c …Read the full story at The Verge.

Wi-Fi is the most natural fit for most connections in a home, especially when you're trying to work around the restrictions of a rental unit or have great distance between devices. When these connections feel slow or interrupted in a certain area, the impulse is to buy more coverage in the form of a range extender or, better yet, a mesh node. More coverage, better signal, and more of the thing you already have. When I had done this in my own home, however, I found that this didn't actually solve the bandwidth problem, but it did inspire a solution that would. A cheap network switch gave me the connectivity I needed, but more importantly, it also freed up my Wi-Fi, and everything in the house got faster as a result.

Pets, like children, come with the responsibility to keep them happy, healthy, and mentally stimulated - obligations I readily committed to before getting my cat, Trevor. I work from home, so he's never lonely, and play with him using a mountain of toys at every opportunity outside of my working hours. But younger cats can be incredibly demanding of your attention. I simply don't have the capacity to physically entertain Trevor every time he yowls at me (constantly) or distract him from chewing every cable he can get his paws on (also constantly).Unlike children, one of the perks of having a blissfully simple animal is that there are far f …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I was a kid, I owned two goldfish that eventually outgrew the size of their tank. At the time, I didn't realize just how much actually goes into having fish and keeping them healthy. I've learned a lot over the past couple of years while keeping nano fish - a group of five celestial pearl danios and four corydoras habrosus - along with some live plants.After filling up a 10-gallon tank with water and adding a filter, I was eager to add my first fish, but I soon found out that the tank must run without fish for several weeks to establish beneficial bacteria and create a stable underwater environment. But the work doesn't stop there. Ca …Read the full story at The Verge.

Between customers explaining what they need when building a PC and meeting four days out of five, I spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time turning spoken instructions into text. The conversations are rarely short, either, and missing one detail can mean going through an entire recording just to find what mattered.

One of the great joys in life is having pets. The unconditional love, the snuggles, the excitement they show when you get home - these things add an emotional fulfillment to daily existence that can't be achieved in another way. I think everyone's life would be better with a pet (or two) in their lives. It's an incredible experience. Except for those few times when it isn't.Both my wife and I work from home, and in a two-bedroom Los Angeles apartment with a kid, two dogs, and a bird, we're constantly in close quarters. Kiyo, our Senegal parrot, has the best view of us all with his cage situated at a corner wraparound window in our living r …Read the full story at The Verge.