As an avid vanlifer, I have to carefully curate everything I carry in order to eke out every square inch of storage I can to support life off the grid for weeks at a time. That's why I jumped at the chance to review DJI's latest power station.The DJI Power 1000 Mini is almost half the size of the original DJI Power 1000 released two years ago with the same 1kWh battery capacity. And from my calculations, it's also the smallest 1kWh power station from the major brands that money can currently buy.DJI's little power station also has a few tricks up its sleeve, including a built-in retractable USB-C cable, a light that can be controlled rem …Read the full story at The Verge.

WhatsApp Plus subscribers will get access to premium sticker packs. | Image: WABetaInfo WhatsApp users are getting some new customization features - for a price. According to WABetaInfo, Meta is rolling out a WhatsApp Plus subscription to "a limited number of users," offering several cosmetic and quality of life perks, including exclusive stickers, different app themes, custom app icons, premium ringtones, the ability to pin up to 20 chats, and the ability to apply custom settings in bulk to lists of chats. A screenshot from WABetaInfo shows the subscription's monthly price as €2.49, or just under $3, similar to Snapchat Plus, which costs $3.99 per month and includes similar perks. WhatsApp Plus is currently only supported in …Read the full story at The Verge.

The long-term risks of the All-In Podcast, illustrated. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Turbosquid, Getty Images One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he'd made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most productivity hacks demand more of your time, but my favorite thinking tool doesn’t require a desk, a keyboard, or even a spare minute – it just requires a commute.

A good home lab doesn’t fall apart because the hardware is weak. It usually falls apart because you can’t see what’s broken, can’t reach it cleanly, or can’t remember where anything lives once the setup starts to grow. The apps below cover those pressure points better than almost anything else, and together they turn a pile of services into something that actually feels manageable. I’m not calling them the only tools worth using, but these are the ones that earn their keep fast and keep earning it later.

Claude Code has become the default agentic coding tool for a lot of developers, and for good reason. It understands a codebase, calls tools, edits files, and can plan multi-step tasks with very little handholding. I know many who use it daily, and for those using a Claude subscription, it's the only permissible coding harness.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta revealed the evidence of alleged price-fixing by Amazon. The state filed a request to the Supreme Court in February for a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon's behavior while the lawsuit it originally filed in 2022 proceeds, and is now making that 16-page document available, "largely unredacted." It lays out how Amazon allegedly schemed to raise other retailers' prices ahead of Prime Day, or worked with its vendors to make sure items available at a discount elsewhere were suddenly out of stock and unavailable for the lower price. Bonta says this document shows how the scheme works with Ama …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google has announced a new collection of touch-up tools for Google Photos' image editor designed to apply subtle enhancements, refinements, or fixes to faces in photos.The tools are gradually being rolled out on the Google Photos app globally starting today, but only on devices running Android 9.0 and up with at least 4GB of RAM. They'll be accessible after selecting a specific face in a photo and able to remove unwanted blemishes, whiten teeth, smooth skin, and make changes to irises, under eye areas, eyebrows, and lips. The intensity of the effects can be adjusted to ensure they're subtle enough to not be noticeable.The new tools come …Read the full story at The Verge.

Lately, I’ve been working on a lot of ESP32 projects, so I keep checking my router for connectivity. But those devices kept showing as connected even when powered off. That made me question whether my router was giving me the full picture.

A mesh network is often considered a silver bullet for all kinds of Wi-Fi problems. The most common mesh setup consists of a primary node connected to one or more satellite nodes to create an uninterrupted Wi-Fi net around the home. While a mesh network is designed to overcome the limitations of a standard router by eliminating dead zones and extending Wi-Fi coverage without major downsides, you might not need it (yet) in your home network. Before spending $200–$400 on mesh Wi-Fi, you should inspect and fix the existing deficiencies in your current network. Optimal router settings and position are free fixes that could make an expensive mesh setup redundant. And a better router will still be cheaper than mesh while solving your range issues. Lastly, repurposing an old router into a wired access point could be the only fix your network needs.

Though it's very common for entertainment writers to describe some narrative elements of the films and shows that they're covering, a Japanese court has determined that the practice can sometimes be tantamount to copyright infringement.Last Thursday, the Tokyo District Court ruled that 39-year-old Wataru Takeuchi was guilty of violating Japanese law that prohibits the creation of "a new work by making creative modifications to the original while preserving its essential characteristics." Takeuchi worked as administrator of a website that published lengthy, spoiler-heavy descriptions from popular movies and series. And two of Takeuchi's "ar …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most people building a PC 5–7 years ago wouldn't have worried too much about their motherboard's Ethernet port. It was nothing more than a way to get a stable wired connection on your PC. Whether it was a Gigabit port or something faster didn't matter to the average buyer, and frankly, it didn't matter at all, even if you were a power user. The internet speeds weren't what they are now, same as the popularity of NAS and home labs. With the proliferation of these high-bandwidth devices and faster internet plans, it pays to look deeper into the networking capabilities of your motherboard before you spend your money. Even if your home internet is still Gigabit or lower, you can't be sure that you won't want to set up a NAS or home lab in the future. The bandwidth of your Ethernet port might just prove to be the biggest bottleneck in your system.