IT General

We all know our phones have become powerful enough to replace PCs, but far fewer of us have actually tried it. Well, I’ve embraced the pocket computer lifestyle, and I’ve tried out many accessories to make this possible — including many types of keyboards. If you picture yourself plopping your phone down on a table in a coffee shop and getting real work done, here’s the kind of keyboard you want.

I’m always on the lookout for ways I can use my 3D printing to make life a little easier, usually for minimal filament cost. I’ve been taking more chances and printing more models recently, but one recent print has proved its worth more than others.

To end the month, HBO Max is raising the bar in terms of the quality of its content. One of my favorite new movies of the year, The Invite, is now streaming on HBO Max. It's a comedy for adults, a genre that feels like a rarity in today's Hollywood landscape. Speaking of adults, documentaries are a staple for older audiences, and HBO Max has intriguing options.

Let's face it, GPUs aren't cheap right now. If you own one, be it the RTX 5090 or something from 10 years ago, you want to make the most of it. Unfortunate, then, that just one slider can absolutely wreck your GPU performance, but if you check it out, you might be able to turn things around for the better.

Gmail's inbox used to feel like a chore I could never finish. Newsletters piled up, the same questions kept landing in my inbox, and the one message I actually needed was always buried under everything else. But after tweaking a few free Gmail settings, my inbox now handles the repetitive work for me.

Google does a good job of walking you through your phone during the initial setup. From choosing your language and region to copying data from your previous phone and signing in to your Google accounts, the setup process is meticulously detailed and easy to follow. What's not explained explicitly or concisely, however, is the meaning of all those little icons nestled in your Android phone's status bar.

Grand Theft Auto VI is said to take up more than 200GB of space on your PS5 or Xbox hard drive. Thanks to South Park, we now know where some of that data is going.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker's animated sitcom, which is somewhat amazingly still airing new episodes in 2026, took its ripped-from-the-headlines comedic stylings back into the gaming world on Wednesday night. In a scene from the newest episode, the kids learn about GTA 6, which actually includes some new gameplay footage we haven't seen before, not even courtesy of Cyberleek.

Because it's South Park, though, the footage consists entirely of a dog pooping, the protagonist Jason picking up the poop, and Jason hitting an NPC in the face with it.

Yes, that is all they showed. As a bonus, it's narrated by Tish Hicks, a voice actress who narrated a gameplay trailer for GTA 5 many years ago, per IGN. According to IGN, Rockstar had previously confirmed that you could use dog poop in this way in GTA 6, and we have seen Jason petting a dog in an earlier clip, but this is the first time we've actually seen this particular mechanic in action.

We reached out to Rockstar to confirm if the dog poop clip was legit, and we'll update this story if the company responds. However, the episode's credits include a Rockstar callout, which suggests the clip is authentic. A snapshot of the credits circulating online includes this message: "Special thanks: Grand Theft Auto VI footage courtesy of Rockstar Games, Inc."

This is far from the first or only time South Park has waded into the zeitgeist around a major video game. There have been plenty of references to gaming on the show over the years, perhaps most prominently in the 2006 episode Make Love, Not Warcraft, which took place largely inside World of Warcraft during the peak of that game's popularity. Maybe Parker and Stone can make a GTA 6 equivalent whenever that game's online mode launches.

In the meantime, you still have time to preorder GTA 6 ahead of its Nov. 19 release.

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The latest foldables have incredible designs and outstanding performance, but they usually cost an arm and a leg. Smart buyers can save hundreds of dollars and still get flagship features by buying last year's model, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, now 33% off on Amazon. It's significantly cheaper than the latest Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra while matching many of its features, and you won't need to worry about a cracked screen.

Unsurprisingly, audiences are loving Nobody Wants This season 3, one of Netflix's new releases in October. The rom-com starring Kristen Bell and Adam Brody has been a hit across three seasons, and I expect the show to return for a fourth season. If you haven't watched Nobody Wants This, then consider throwing it into your rotation.

There are few things more terrifying to a fanfiction reader than opening Archive of Our Own (AO3) and discovering that the site is down. Except, perhaps, discovering that it could stay down for an entire month.

That's the nightmare scenario currently facing fans and fanfiction connoisseurs after AO3 announced that restoring the site could take anywhere from two to four weeks. And during the final days of Kinktober, no less. The cruelty of it all.

"We estimate that service restoration for #AO3 will take around 2 weeks, but it could be up to 4 weeks," the fan-run archive posted to its status account on X. "We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state sooner."

In other words, there's a chance AO3 could return sooner with limited functionality. But there's also a chance readers could spend the next month without access to their favorite fics. A month. Without AO3.

Naturally, fans are handling this news with all the grace and composure you'd expect. Which is to say, people are freaking out.

For the uninitiated, AO3 is a nonprofit, fan-run archive where users can publish and read fanfiction about everything from popular television shows and movies to books, anime, and video games. For many readers, it's also an essential part of their daily routines. It's where they go to unwind after work, escape into a favorite fictional universe, or read one more chapter before bed. (And then another.)

So the prospect of losing access for several weeks isn't exactly being met with enthusiasm. But while some fans are mourning their temporarily inaccessible reading lists, others are springing into action.

The Heated Rivalry fandom, for example, is already mobilizing. Fans are sharing Google Drive archives of fanfiction, ensuring that readers can still get their fix of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov even if AO3 remains inaccessible. And honestly, I'd expect nothing less from a fandom where people are reading upwards of 14 million words of fanfiction in a single year.

It's an impressive display of fandom resourcefulness. When the digital library closes, apparently you build another one.

Of course, there's something genuinely sweet about the way fandom communities rally around one another during moments like these. Fanfiction has always thrived on community, whether through recommendations, shared reading lists, or the writers who spend countless hours creating stories for other fans to enjoy.

And while the collective panic is certainly hyperbolic, it also speaks to how deeply fanfiction has become embedded in people's everyday lives. AO3 isn't just a website where people read stories. For many, it's a place of comfort, creativity, and connection.

In the meantime, there's always the option of revisiting those downloaded EPUBs you've been hoarding. You have been downloading your favorite fics, right? Right?!

A cluttered Windows desktop, while it could be better with a little bit of discipline, is partly not your fault. It usually comes from too many windows, too many repetitive tasks, and too few tools for managing them. Three Microsoft-made utilities can fix that, and none of them costs anything.

For the past few years, Mistral has tried to carve itself a name as Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s AI giants, moving from smaller, open models to heavyweight systems like Mistral Large 3 in late 2025. After raising €3 billion in September 2026, the French start-up has doubled down on its ambition to compete with leading US and Chinese AI developers. Now, the company is trying again to take on the AI behemoths with Mistral Large 4, a massive open-weight model built for coding, complex reasoning, image analysis, and business automation.

Multi-color 3D printing lets you combine multiple filaments into a single object in order to create ready-made items that don’t require painting. Unless you’ve invested in a printer that features a tool-changer nozzle, this can be a wasteful and time-consuming process.

Utah officials have brought felony criminal charges against prediction market Kalshi and its two co-founders for allegedly illegally offering gambling to the state's residents.

Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara each face one count of pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony; 12 counts of online gambling promotion, a third-degree felony; and one count of general gambling promotion, a Class A misdemeanor. All gambling is illegal in Utah.

Utah also recently filed a civil lawsuit against Kalshi, seeking to prevent it from offering Utah residents betting opportunities on sports, elections, and other events.

A special agent with the Utah State Bureau of Investigations signed up for an account on Kalshi as a fictional Utah resident and says he was allowed to place bets on several football games.

"Gambling is illegal in Utah, whether you place the bet, run the game, or promote it. Calling it a 'prediction market' doesn’t change what it is, and being federally registered doesn’t put a company above the law,” Utah Attorney General Derek Brown said in a statement. "A federal court has already ruled that Utah’s gambling laws apply to Kalshi. Kalshi kept taking bets from Utahns anyway."

Kalshi officials responded to the criminal charges by calling them "a crazy overreach" and accused state officials of "playing politics."

Kalshi is facing lawsuits from other states, such as New York, but those involve Kalshi allegedly failing to comply with online gambling rules or failing to fulfill tax obligations, Isaac Rose-Berman, a gambling policy fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, told Salt Lake City’s ABC affiliate. Utah, on the other hand, bans all gambling and marketing of the practice outright.

Meanwhile, the federal government has joined the fray. The Trump administration is suing Utah for trying to ban Kalshi in the state; it’s the 10th state the administration has sued for regulating prediction markets. In its suit, the federal government argues that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has authority to regulate prediction markets like Kalshi, rather than individual states.

Kalshi bills itself as a prediction market, not a gambling site, and allows people to wager money on everything from "Who will control the Senate?" to who will win the latest season of Dancing with the Stars. And, of course, Kalshi offers wagers on professional sports games, college sports, and even chess matches. Kalshi's website had nearly 20 million visits in September, according to Semrush.

Just days before Halloween, Obsession director Curry Barker returns with a new project to spook us.

Barker posted short film Mama Bear to his and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson's YouTube channel, that's a bad idea. The short was created in partnership with Windows.

Mama Bear stars Jon Lee Richardson as Floyd, a house cleaner who's fallen asleep on the job. When he wakes, he finds himself in a living nightmare, plagued by a series of distressing phone calls and doppelgängers. While the film has far less to hold onto than Obsession, it stills carries over some familiar elements from Barker's directorial debut. Think shadowy figures lurking in corners, along with a woman (Katie Sarife) in major distress. (No, the title Mama Bear does not appear to connect to Obsession's Bear, played by Michael Johnston.)

Mama Bear marks Barker's first post-Obsession project. His next feature, Anything But Ghosts, premieres in 2027. It stars himself and Tomlinson as a pair of fraudulent paranormal investigators who find themselves dealing with real ghosts.

Bryce Dallas Howard, Aaron Paul, Violet McGraw, and Chris Reinacher are also attached to star in Anything But Ghosts.

Four years have passed since Bluetooth SIG announced Auracast, and we now have it readily available on the latest Android smartphones. Yet somehow, the average smartphone owner barely uses it. Most folks I know or socialize with haven't even heard of the feature.

It's Avatar: Seven Havens finale eve, and what better way to get ready than by checking out a sneak peek of what's to come?

In an exclusive clip from episode 10, titled "Ghosts and Spirits," viewers get to witness the fallout from Seven Havens' penultimate batch of episodes, in which Nisha (voiced by Aishu Devan) revealed herself to be the Avatar. Instead of being welcomed, the citizens of Ellora turned on her, and she fled into the Harshlands with her cat monkey Ruhi.

While Nisha has left Ellora, her twin sister and fellow Avatar Pavi (voiced by Saheli Khan) is still in the Haven. She has to keep a lower profile than ever, as wanted posters for Nisha have gone up all around the city. Security in Ellora has grown even harsher since Nisha's departure, with new checkpoints popping up around the city. Over loudspeaker, Chancellor Kayoko (voiced by Jennifer Sun Bell) urges citizens to stay indoors and report any suspicious activity, further proof of the fear and paranoia that now dominate Ellora.

Amidst this foreboding crackdown, Pavi still somehow manages to find hope. She reunites with crystal beetle Sang, whom she rescued at the very beginning of Avatar: Seven Havens. With a familiar face by her side, maybe she'll be able to seek out Nisha and learn the answers about their parents once and for all.

Avatar: Seven Havens is now streaming on Paramount+. Its final four episodes premiere Oct. 30.

A 4-bay NAS isn't cheap—they'll often cost you around $500 before you start including hard drives, which are now quite pricy. Even budget 2-bay NASes come in at around $200.

Using a single charging cable for all my devices was a pain, so I switched to a 3-in-1 charger and never looked back. Acer's 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station for Apple is 45% off and lets you wirelessly charge your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods wirelessly at the same time.

You might often hear Plex and Kodi being mentioned in the same breath, which makes it sound like the two media applications are ones that force you to choose a side.