While the smart home is packed with handy devices, not all are as easy to start with as the humble smart plug. These mainstays of the smart home are inexpensive, provide smarts to dumb appliances, and can be controlled from your smartphone or sometimes from a voice assistant. While many plug into your existing sockets, they sometimes come as socket replacements for a more streamlined look. The better models offer power monitoring, API access, and the ability to trigger automations. And yes, they cansave you money on your power bill, but that's a happy by-product in my eyes, because they can do so much more.

Picture this — you're about 16 years old in the mid-2000s. You're either studying for a math exam, or getting ready to head out to the movies with friends, and the most constant interruption you face isn't the landline ringing or mom calling you for tea.

Though there's no telling if a Chrome extension is really entirely safe, anyone could fall for an extension with a verified badge on the Chrome Web Store, promising reviews and over a hundred thousand installs. Unfortunately, an extension that fits exactly this description reportedly captures screenshots of users’ screens without their knowledge.

Your productivity gets a huge boost if you install Microsoft's PowerToys on your Windows 11 PC, and it keeps getting better with every update. Not only does Microsoft introduce new tools, but the software giant also keeps fixing bugs and removing pain points to improve the overall experience.

As our data collection grows, it's become even more important to find a proper way to store it all. And while some prefer to store their data in the cloud, others prefer a more hands-on approach with a local solution like NAS, DAS, or portable storage drive. Well, if you've been thinking about setting up a NAS of your own, or already have one and need to add more storage, this 24TB HDD is going to be a great way to go. The Toshiba N300 Pro is a fantastic performer and is now $150 below retail, coming in at $400 for a limited time.

Sometimes you just want to tell Excel what it is you want your formula to do. It'd be a lot easier if you could just say "sort this data in ascending order and find its average" instead of messing around with cells. However, for the longest time, you either had to learn how to turn that sentence into code or tell someone else to do it instead.

This is one of those drives that doesn't fail to deliver. You're getting awesome speed, mixed with great reliability from a brand that's been in the business for quite some time. The best part about all of this is that the WD BLACK SN850X 2TB SSD is now down to one of its best prices of the year, coming in with a steep $60 discount, which brings it down to just $130. This is one of the cheapest prices we've seen this year for this SSD, so grab it now while you can.

While it was President Joe Biden who signed the law that would force  ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has yet to fulfill his promise of arranging a deal to keep TikTok running, legally, in the United States. The current deadline for a deal is September 17th. Still, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which published its first post on Tuesday night: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments. The ban has only seen TikTok shut down in the US for one day, and its impact has been delayed three times. The first time was in January, when Trump took office and signed an executive order delaying enforcement of the ban for 75 days; then there was another delay in April, after a potential deal fell through due to Trump’s harsh tariffs against China, and then in June, when he stated that he believed Chinese President Xi Jinping was open to a deal if a buyer emerged. While Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, his stance softened during his re-election campaign once his team learned how many supporters Trump had on the platform. In 2024, the Trump campaign launched its own official account, @TeamTrump, and quickly dominated the platform, getting more followers and views on their content than former Vice President Kamala Harris’s now-dormant campaign account — 2.8 billion to 2.2 billion, according to journalist Kyle Tharp.  A Republican digital operative close to the campaign heavily credited Trump, a former reality TV star, for his ability to generate attention-grabbing moments that could be transformed into viral content. “TikTok is primarily an entertainment app,” he previously told The Verge, “and our usage of it was just significantly more savvy than [the Democrats].”Although the legality of and ulterior motives behind a TikTok ban remain a serious question, the Trump administration, for now, appears to find utility in maintaining an account on the platform. “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Trump said on Truth Social in January, sharing a post about the billions of views his campaign account continued to rack up. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated this stance after the government account was launched. “President Trump’s message dominated TikTok during his presidential campaign,” she said in a statement to The Verge, “and we’re excited to build upon those successes and communicate in a way no other administration has before.”

You don’t have to worry about battery life with the Hyperkin Competitor since it’s a wired-only Xbox controller. | Image: Hyperkin There’s good news if you’re an Xbox gamer who’s longingly stared at the sleeker design of Sony’s DualSense controller for the PlayStation 5. After revealing the final form of its Competitor gamepad at CES 2025, Hyperkin has announced it will be available sometime in October for $49.99 in black and white color options for North America, and red, blue, and gold for Europe and Australia – although the company says those colors will also launch here at a later date.The Competitor was first teased as far back as 2019, and while Hyperkin revealed a blander design in 2023, it’s now fully embracing comparisons to PlayStation controllers, given that the Competitor features a symmetrical, side-by-side joystick arrangement. The Competitor’s features remain in line with what was revealed earlier this year at CES, including anti-drift Hall effect joysticks and impulse triggers, separated D-pad buttons, a pair of back buttons with locks, and a mic mute button.It’s far from being an exact clone of the DualSense, and it lacks the advanced haptic feedback and adaptive triggers of Sony’s controller. And don’t worry about battery life, the Competitor is a wired-only Xbox controller.

Despite tech giants rushing to incorporate artificial intelligence into their products, AI features usually leave a lot to be desired – and it’s gotten to the point where I’d just groan every time a new app developer or hardware manufacturer touts LLM-powered facilities as the next big thing. That said, there are a couple of examples where AI tools can be surprisingly effective, with NotebookLM being a prime example of how artificial intelligence can simplify complex tasks.

Setting up virtual local area networks or VLANs in your home network or home lab makes management of your network easier. You can use one as a guest network to share your internet connection with friends, separate off noisy devices like smart TVs, and keep IoT devices on their network so they don't interfere with the devices that need low-latency connections. VLANs aren't challenging to set up or use, but I've made several missteps along the way and seen plenty more on other people's networks. The most common tend to be the easiest to fix, so let's run through what those are.

Are you tired of wrestling with email attachments and slow cloud services just to share a few files between your phone and a computer? You are not alone. I have been there, and that’s why I’m excited to share a tool that completely changed the game for me: LocalSend. It’s a free and open-source application that makes sharing files with nearby devices simple. It’s like a cross-platform AirDrop that works on all the operating systems.