It's rare to find a piece of tech that can do so much without taking up a lot of space. The Anker 675 docking station is a great example, taking on the role of a docking station, while also seamlessly fitting into your setup as a monitor stand. Best of all, it's not all that expensive, despite taking on all these roles, coming in at a discounted price of $190.

After announcing a pair of lower-end Surface PCs today, Microsoft is raising prices on the rest of its available lineup by about 20%. That's right; the 13.8-inch Surface Laptop is now $1,199, $200 more than it was yesterday, also known as $200 more than a base model MacBook Air.

Samsung subsidiary Harman has agreed to acquire the audio business division of Masimo, taking ownership of audio brands like Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, and Polk Audio.The $350 million deal brings them under the same roof as JBL, Harman Kardon, Arcam, AKG, Mark Levinson, and Revel, which Samsung acquired back in 2016 with its $8 billion acquisition of Harman. The Masimo transaction is expected to close by the end of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals.“Finding the right home for this business has been a stated priority of the new Board from day one, and this transaction represents an important milestone,” said Masimo vice chairman Quentin Koffey. Masimo, you might recall, is the global medical technology company that launched a US patent infringement lawsuit against Apple over the pulse oximetry tech used in the Apple Watch. In its press release, Samsung says it “plans to solidify its global No. 1 position in the consumer audio market” by combining the Harman and Massimo businesses. Part of that plan also includes applying professional audio technology from Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, and Marantz to Samsung’s lineup of smartphones, wireless earphones, headphones, TVs, and sound bars, alongside expanding its car audio business portfolio with brands like Bowers & Wilkins.“Harman is proud to have grown into a world-class audio company with 75 years of history, and we expect that the acquisition of another luxury audio brand, B&W, will further solidify Harman’s position as a true audio powerhouse,” said Dave Rogers, president of Harman’s lifestyle business unit.

Using Home Assistant for smart home automation is for the brave. Want to make the IoT systems work with Home Assistant? You've got to put in some hours and embrace the learning curve. If you're game for a challenge, you can add Node-RED into the Home Assistant and level up smart home automation with some complex ones.

After abruptly pulling their support from what would have been the Senate’s first stablecoin regulatory bill, Senate Democrats announced Tuesday that they would introduce a new bill that would prevent federal officials and their families from issuing digital assets – a bill directed at Donald Trump and his family’s current stablecoin and meme coin holdings.“Currently, people who wish to cultivate influence with the president can enrich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who introduced the bill to the Senate floor, in a press release. “This is a profoundly corrupt scheme. It endangers our national security and erodes public trust in government. Let’s end this corruption immediately.”The End Crypto Corruption Act comes in response to concerns inside the Democratic party that the GENIUS Act, which previously had strong bipartisan support, was inadequate at preventing corruption. Though the Senate Banking Committee passed the bill in March with a bipartisan vote, two subsequent developments reportedly pushed the Democrats to change course. First, a New York Times report last week revealed that the Trump family could potentially earn $2 billion from a stablecoin transaction with a Dubai-based investment firm under the current regulatory framework. Second, Trump announced a contest in April wherein the top holders of his meme coin would win a private dinner with the president, and the top 25 holders would win an additional guided tour of the White House. According to a report from Chainalysis, the meme coin’s issuers, Official Trump, have earned $320 million from trading fees from the contest alone.Though they admitted that there’s not much they can do to stop the president right now (see: no laws), Senate Republicans also expressed skepticism over the $TRUMP contest to NBC, and at least one staunch Trump ally, Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, offered to partner with the Democrats on efforts to regulate lawmakers holding digital assets. “Even what may appear to be ‘cringey’ with regard to meme coins, it’s legal, and what we need to do is have a regulatory framework that makes this more clear, so we don’t have this Wild West scenario,” she told NBC.

In a scene where a triple-A developer can, and will, drop a gigantic game out of the blue, other game creators understandably get a bit anxious. For indie developers, the passion project they've poured years of their life into may be swept away because a giant company decided to shadow-drop their latest and greatest game, consuming all attention until the indie's critical opening window has long been lost.

The first photos of the Asus ROG Ally 2 have surfaced online thanks to regulatory listings, but with a twist: there are two versions of the gaming handheld, and one features a dedicated Xbox button.We reported two months ago that Microsoft was working with Asus to develop an Xbox-branded handheld codenamed “Project Kennan,” and this appears to be it. It’s a black version of the otherwise almost identical white ROG Ally 2, with a small button in the top-left corner bearing an engraved Xbox logo. That button is blacked out on the regular ROG, though will likely be replaced or removed in its production version.91mobiles found listings for the ROG Ally 2 at the Indonesian certificate, and VideoCardz linked those to an FCC listing for the Wi-Fi module included in the two devices, which includes photos of the hardware. That listing also reveals some limited specs, which include a 7-inch, 120Hz LCD display — about the same as the first generation — with an 8-core, 36W AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme CPU included in the Xbox edition, and a less powerful 4-core, 20W chip in the white version.The design has also been altered, with more molded controller grips on each edge, rather than the blocky, sloped design of the ROG Ally. That leaves the hardware as a whole looking thicker than before, but perhaps it’ll be more comfortable to hold.With certification already under way, it’s likely that a release is around the corner. Asus often launches hardware at Computex, which begins on May 20th — just one day after Microsoft’s own Build conference begins on May 19th.

Home labs may be the perfect testing grounds for your virtualization projects and computing experiments, but they can also double as rock-solid self-hosting workstations once you arm them with the right containers and VMs. However, remembering the credentials for each service can become a problem once you’ve deployed dozens of containers for your productivity, media consumption, and storage needs.

Adobe has dominated the creative industry for years with its suite of gold-standard tools. However, Audition feels a little outdated when it comes to audio post-production. It's powerful on paper but has clunky integration with other software, can get sluggish with large sessions, and simply lacks some key features I value in a comprehensive audio editor.

Amazon-owned Zoox says it issued a software recall for all 270 of its vehicles after an unoccupied robotaxi in Las Vegas crashed into a passenger vehicle on April 8th, Reuters reports. The update rolled out between April 16th and 17th to address a risky situation that could arise when the vehicle operating at over 40mph closed in on another vehicle that approaches its lane from a perpendicular driveway before stopping.In a press release on Tuesday, Zoox said there was only minor damage to both vehicles and no injuries were reported. Zoox shared how the incident played out in the voluntary safety recall report it sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on May 1st:The incident involved a passenger car quickly approaching the lane where our purpose-built robotaxi was traveling. Anticipating that the passenger car would proceed forward, the Zoox robotaxi slowed down and steered to the right. Instead, the car came to a stop, fully yielding to the Zoox robotaxi and remaining in the shoulder lane. The Zoox robotaxi braked hard, but contact was unavoidable.The report states that, prior to the update, the company says, “In situations where Zoox vehicles are operating at speeds greater than 40mph, and a vehicle incrementally encroaches from a perpendicular driveway approaching the Zoox vehicle’s lane, the Zoox vehicle may make an inaccurately confident prediction that the vehicle is going to proceed into the Zoox vehicle’s lane.” Reacting based on that inaccurate projection could cause a crash, as happened here.A March recall notice from Zoox also notes that after two incidents where its Toyota Highlander-based robotaxis performed sudden hard braking, causing approaching motorcyclists to rear-end them, it rolled out a software update to address the problem last November.

Like most kids, the first laptop I ever got to call my own was a clunky hand-me-down from my parents. That Dell was the sole reason behind a lot of my breakdowns. For instance, it refused to work unless it was plugged in, took hours to boot up when it did manage to turn on, and even stopped connecting to Wi-Fi at one point. I had to use an Ethernet cable just to be able to work on it, imagine!

Mother's Day is just around the corner, which means plenty of folks are making plans to celebrate, which can mean spending a day at home, going out for brunch or lunch, or gifting something to show appreciation. Of course, for those moms who are more into the tech scene, getting some new gear as a gift wouldn't be such a bad idea, which is why we've picked out some of our favorites to grab that are on sale ahead of the busy weekend.