Expensive HDMI cables, whether they're gold-plated or fiber optic, are often a waste of money and little more than elaborate marketing schemes designed to make you think you need to shell out extra cash for a top-tier, reliable connectivity experience.

Over the past few months, the automation that switches off my Philips Hue lights in my bedroom has been failing. Every time I had to pull out the Home Assistant app on my phone to toggle them off. Even that didn’t work, and it led me to restart Home Assistant. I unplug and replug the Zigbee coordinator to the Raspberry Pi 4 to work as the Home Assistant machine.

Welcome to the worst day on the internet! As Chaim Gartenberg pointed out years ago, brands and a holiday dedicated to hoaxes are rarely a winning combo. If you’re a company with any kind of social media, internet, or AI chatbot presence in 2026, you really, truly only have four options on April Fools’ Day:Don’t do an April Fools’ joke. Put the time and energy into doing something productive that will materially benefit the world (or, less idealistically, your business) instead. Or just don’t do anything. Abstaining entirely would still be a net positive over the drain of resources and mental energy.Do an April Fools’ “joke,” but actually follow through on your stunt. This is arguably not a prank since you’ve actually created a video game skin or a real product that people can buy — but it doesn’t really hurt anyone.Do an April Fools’ joke, but be extremely clear from the start that this is a dumb joke and you have no intention of doing the thing that you are “humorously” pretending to do. Does this defeat the purpose of doing an April Fools’ joke because you’re not “fooling” anyone anymore? Absolutely. (Please see my first two points.)Lie to your customers, successfully tricking them into believing you are making some product, rebranding, or service you are not. By doing so, you will almost certainly annoy everyone once your deceit is made plain for the extremely small gain of pointless PR. The aphorism goes that there is no such thing as bad publicity; the seemingly endless line of companies willing to make fools out of themselves has proven this false time and time again.So far, we’ve seen some socks that even you can’t lose, Snapchat “Reals” took a shot at Instagram’s Xerox machine approach to product development, and the monitor accessory cats want the most.If you see anything that particularly sticks out for good, bad, or just unusual reasons, send it to us. April Fools’ 2026: Oura’s smart ring for pets. April Fools’ 2026: Crusader Kings III dunks on Nvidia’s DLSS 5. April Fools’ 2026: MKBHD reviews a toy Bluey phone. April Fools’ 2026: Sanic, Shewdew, and Knackles get official t-shirts from Sega. April Fools’ 2026: Dyson AirWrap for your pets. April Fools’ 2026: A smart home controller that knows what you want before you do. April Fools’ 2026: Bass Magazine written by ChatGPT, sponsored by Suno. April Fools’ 2026: Yahoo’s Scroll Stopper stops doomscrolling. April Fools’ 2026: Fortnite now has big head mode. April Fools’ 2026: Capcom’s next big game might have a fun Mega Man crossover. Snapchat’s ‘Reals’ joke mocks Instagram’s many ripoffs April Fools’ 2026: a flippin’ good joke. April Fools’ 2026: Trackable socks. April Fools’ 2026: a cat holder for your monitor. April Fools’ 2026: Connor Storrie’s big butt dialing problem. April Fools’ 2026: Stream Deck Plus Lever. April Fools’ 2026: Who’s that pokémon? April Fools’ 2026: A backpack for the Macintosh and a stylish holster for the Newton. April Fools’ 2026: Pocketpair’s joke that never ends. April Fools’ 2026: Mini to Micro.

The vast majority of people buy or build a PC, boot straight into Windows, and start using it immediately, under the impression that they're getting the performance promised to them by the reviews and specs they researched before purchasing. The truth is, a lot of what allows your PC to run to its full performance potential lies in the BIOS, the firmware that sits beneath your OS.

Whatever your feelings about AI-coding are, it's not going away any time soon. Whether you're self-hosting a local LLM or using the heft of cloud-based models, they all work better when used by a harness. That's a software stack that wraps around the LLM, handling tool calls, memory, and file usage. It's not that far off an IDE in practice, and most AI-first coding tools are harnesses, whether it's Claude Code, OpenCode, or my current favorite, Pi.

I’ve spent a long time trying to build the perfect media center at home. I wanted a setup that lets me access everything on my TV without compromises. In practice, it never really worked that way. For a while, I used an old laptop as my media center, and in many ways, it was the closest I got.

I'd like to say I've traveled extensively with over a hundred countries under my belt. And the one piece of advice I give to everyone is, don't overcomplicate travel. You might want to bookmark a few must-visit locations, perhaps have a rough itinerary for the day, but I encourage everyone to figure it out on the go. But there are a few countries that break that norm. I've been planning a short getaway to Paris, and despite this being my fifth trip over, I can confirm that there's just way too much packed in that city. Every arrondissement has something interesting to see, and every time I'm over, I'm left juggling maps, pins, screenshots, and notes with no real structure to them. Let's just say that it's a problem.

NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft rest on Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 31, 2026, ahead of the crewed lunar mission. | Image: AFP via Getty Images With NASA planning to launch four astronauts on Wednesday on its Artemis II mission, the race to return to the Moon is back on. The current mission will see astronauts aboard the Orion capsule travel around the Moon before returning to Earth in 10 days' time. They'll be testing out the hardware and systems that could soon see Americans standing on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years in the Artemis IV mission scheduled for 2028. NASA isn't ready to land people on the Moon just yet, but that's the aim for the next five years: to not only get people onto the Moon but establish a lengthy human presence on its surface.That's NASA' …Read the full story at The Verge.

Recently, in a unexpected yet long overdue move, Microsoft announced its plans to undergo major changes in Windows 11 in order to regain user trust and deliver the experience fans have been asking for. It's a legitimately great step in the right direction, and it's great to see Microsoft directly address people's feedback for once.

This is part of our package about Apple's 50th anniversary. Read more here.The thing about the iPhone is that everyone knew it was going to be a big deal, and then it was an even bigger deal than that. Hell, it's still the biggest thing going.It's hard to remember, but almost 20 years ago Apple's first iPhone really was that good. The trick that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive kept pulling off in that era was turning the limitations of the available technology into focal points of the products they made. The first iMac was built around a big, heavy CRT display - but Ive made the translucent case wrap around it, transforming the internals into a …Read the full story at The Verge.

As a starry-eyed teenager, I was quite wonderstruck by Adobe’s premium application suite. After all, the neat UIs, rock-solid features, and interoperability between different tools made it hard not to love Adobe’s offerings. But the deeper I dove into the FOSS landscape, the more glaring Adobe’s flaws seemed to become. Getting rid of lifetime licenses and forcing their clientele to adopt subscription-based tools was already a massive red flag, and the enshittified tools drove the nail even further.

2027 EV3 | Image: Kia At the New York International Auto Show on Wednesday, Kia announced that its compact electric SUV, the EV3, will be available in the US "in late 2026." The EV3 has been available overseas since 2024, when it launched in South Korea and Europe. The 2027 model coming to the US appears to have the same slightly boxy design as the current 2026 model, and it looks like Kia updated the center console to remove the much-mocked "chopping board" armrest in the original design. The North American version will also have a new glossy black "Nightfall" appearance package option. The EV3 will be available in standard and long-range configurations, offer …Read the full story at The Verge.