Staying productive when your web browser is open is often an exercise in self-control. Sure, for some tasks, you could get your browser to read the text out loud to you, but you'll have to reach for the mouse and keyboard at some point. At which point, you'll have to resist staying away from YouTube, or social media, or any of the other millions of distracting elements online. However, you might be surprised at how productive you can be by just adding a few choice extensions to your web browser. Whether those extensions are for Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, or any of the underrated browsers, they can turn you into a person with a proclivity for productivity, and that's got a nice ring to it.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation extended its mission of providing an affordable, flexible computer by releasing the Raspberry Pi 400 in 2020. This keyboard-based computer provided a more accessible version of the Pi by putting everything except the display and mouse into one keyboard enclosure.

Mercedes-Benz’s MBUX Virtual Assistant will use Google Gemini on the cloud. | Image: Mercedes-Benz / Google Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent platform promises to “continue conversations and reference information” throughout users’ drives, and the first car announced with it is the new Mercedes CLA. That car has the next-generation MB.OS operating system with an upgraded MBUX Virtual Assistant. When Mercedes revealed it at CES in 2024, it didn’t say which company’s LLM it was running on. Meanwhile, the existing MBUX Voice Assistant system that could handle about 20 commands triggered with “Hey Mercedes” now includes results provided by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, but it’s not a conversational platform. According to Mercedes, there’s a plan to roll out this upgraded system to “further models” that run the older Voice Assistant, but it didn’t specify which ones.The new MBUX Virtual Assistant will feature four “personality traits,” including natural, predictive, personal, and empathetic. It can also ask you questions for additional clarity to get you what you need.Google’s new AI Agent is tailor-made to automotive uses, leveraging Google Maps data to find points of interest, look up restaurant reviews for you, give you recommendations, answer follow-up questions, and more. Google says MBUX Virtual Assistant users will get access to “nearly real time” Google Maps updates. It also says it can “handle complex, multi-turn dialog.”The agent uses Gemini and runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform, designed to help companies build out AI experiences. “This is just the beginning of how agentic capabilities can transform the automotive industry,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a press release.

Outfitting your computing lab with a new storage server can be quite thrilling, regardless of whether you’ve bought a top-of-the-line NAS unit or assembled one using your PC-building skills. With modern NAS hardware and operating systems housing more than enough firepower for a file-sharing-cum-backup server, there are plenty of cool things you can pull off using your storage system.

Are you tired of juggling between Notion and Asana, each with their own limitations (like the lack of offline mode) and their hefty subscription fees? I was, too, until I discovered AppFlowy. I know the name sounds a bit silly, but I've tried many Notion alternatives and project management tools, and this open-source marvel blew my mind. It blends the best features of these popular platforms while giving you something they can't – complete ownership of your data.

The CPU is one of, if not the most critical components in a PC — whether you use it for gaming or not. If your CPU has integrated graphics, you can even boot and use your computer without a graphics card. Most users don't upgrade their CPUs as often as they swap their graphics cards because they would likely need to purchase a new motherboard as well.

Have you given the new Outlook app a try yet? If you haven't, you will soon. Microsoft has been rolling it out to users worldwide, but people aren't fond of it. If you wake up one day and find the new Outlook installed on your PC, or you want to block it from installing itself in the first place, don't fret. A renowned third-party app received an update that lets it remove or block the new Outlook from your computer.

The increasing complexity of cyberattacks and the ease of automation means you should always have a well-configured firewall on your computer. That helps to filter unwanted traffic before it gets onto your PC, but it won't stop attacks from getting to other devices on your home network. Your Wi-Fi router also has a simple firewall on it, but these are often barebones and don't have a lot of options for customizability and other controls you might want on your network traffic.

If you're just stepping into the world of photo and video editing, you may be looking to add a good monitor to your setup. While the majority of the best monitors are multipurpose and can be used for photo and video editing, they lack certain aspects that may give you an advantage when working with creative tools. Whether it's better color calibration or higher brightness levels, there are certain features that you may want to look for when buying a monitor for editing purposes.

I switched to macOS a while back due to a few annoyances on Windows, and I've now become a macOS loyalist. There are several areas where macOS excels in terms of usability compared to Windows. However, one area where macOS is terrible is making use of space. I realized this when I hooked up my Mac to an ultrawide monitor. Coming from Windows, I was surprised to see how macOS is so poorly optimized to run on large displays. What made it worse was at that time, macOS didn't natively support resizing windows that snapped to different parts of the screen.

So we've heard about getting Doom on as many screens as possible, but what about Tetris? We've seen some truly insane implementations of the classic block-stacking game across multiple formats, such as that one time someone made Tetris in Excel. Now, another madman has re-created Tetris in a PDF, and you don't even need to install anything special to play it.

For weeks and months, we were waiting for Nvidia and AMD to announce their much-awaited RTX 5000 and RX 9000 series GPUs (changed from RX 8000) respectively. While Team Green stole the show with its Blackwell announcement, AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs announcement was conspicuously absent from its livestream. The company talked about everything from its new Ryzen AI mobile processors and Ryzen Z2 series handheld CPUs to Ryzen 9000 HX processors with 3D V-Cache.