IT General

The SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD has achieved cult classic status. SanDisk claims it is highly durable, impervious to shocks, bumps, and drops, as well as water- and dust-resistant. As a proud owner of one, I set out to check these claims. Smartphones have robust IP ratings, but they still crack and falter. Would an external SSD actually survive such a rough beating?

Google's product cemetery is littered with both bad and good ideas. Some failed because the execution was poor, others were simply released half-baked, or too soon.

If you've been using Plex for years, there's a good chance your server is getting a little creaky. You've added and removed thousands of videos, there's junk metadata gunking up your database, and some stuff doesn't work right even though you're all up-to-date.

Amazon has steadily tightened its control over Fire TV, making it harder to replace the default home screen, customize the interface, and use certain third-party apps. With the introduction of Vega OS, the future of Fire TV customization is becoming even more uncertain.

When Razer introduced me to its new Reclusa family of keyboards, I was immediately surprised by the $50 entry point. My Razer Reclusa X Mini 65% review revealed that $50 earns you a truly fantastic budget keyboard with an attractive design and reliable performance. Now, the standard Reclusa Mini is here, sharing the same chassis with massively upgraded performance, multi-device wireless connectivity, and the headlining magnetic switches. It's been a great opportunity to compare keyboards side by side to see if magnetic switches really are a selling point, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Every time my machine starts choking on browser tabs and background apps, the old joke pops back: just download more RAM. It's pretty scarce these days, so the joke has actually gotten more common, believe it or not. There’s a genuinely weird, if utterly unrealistic, way to get close to that joke, and exploring it tells us a lot about how memory actually works under the hood.

Tesla recently initiated preorders for its Cybercab, its first attempt at an autonomous taxi available to the masses, and it's already causing some online controversy.

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The self-driving two-seater with just over 20 cubic-feet of storage space will reportedly retail for just $29,990, fulfilling a promise Elon Musk made all the way back in 2024, at Tesla's "We, Robot" event, that production of the Cybercab would begin "before 2027" and that the car would cost under $30,000. 

But not everyone agrees that Musk has made good on his promise.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musks shares POV footage of Starship after the catch

Famous YouTuber and tech/car reviewer extraordinaire Marquees Brownlee was at that original event and expressed extreme skepticism about Musk's claimed timeline, going so far as to promise to shave his head if Musk met his delivery and cost stipulations. Now, he and Musk are publicly feuding over whether or not Musk won the bet.

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In response to Musk calling Brownlee a "chicken" for not shaving his head, Brownlee put his own money on the line and pre-ordered the Cybercab.

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For the purposes of their feud, the argument is simple: does an "invite only" early sale constitute public availability, and can Tesla really meet the projected December delivery date for first customers, or will delays push deliveries into 2027, invalidating the terms of Musk's promise? 

But there's another dimension to the public outcry that needs to be considered: the cost of ownership and the artificial restraints on the Cybercab currently in place. According to the terms of Tesla's purchase agreement, the Cybercab will only be available for personal use for the time being, meaning you can't use it as a robotaxi to help make money for you when you aren't using it, and the monthly operating fee, which enables autonomous driving, will cost a punishing $299, which is equivalent to financing a second car. 

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk insists Cybertruck demand is strong as Tesla scraps it

Worse still are the geofencing hurdles: Cybercab is currently "operable only within Tesla-enabled Robotaxi geofences," which at the moment are confined to a select few cities in Texas and Florida. 

But credit to Musk: he fully acknowledges how onerous these restraints are, and has promised that the Cybercab features "will be available nationwide, as we receive regulatory approval."  

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In the grand scheme of things, whether Musk or Brownlee wins this bet is irrelevant: The future of the car is autonomous driving, and it's coming a lot sooner than we all expected.

Fanfiction lovers, your global crisis is over. Archive of Our Own (AO3), the popular nonprofit, volunteer-run site for transformative fan works, is back online after a 17-day outage.

The site went offline on Oct. 29 following a reported security incident that prompted a wave of maintenance. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), which runs AO3, estimated that the maintenance could take up to a month.

SEE ALSO: AO3's outage has exposed a growing divide between fanfiction authors and readers

That the site is back after just over two weeks is a relief to fandoms all over, especially as the site's outage highlighted a larger divide between fanfiction authors and readers. However, there are still a few key things to know about AO3's earlier-than-expected return.

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AO3 wants you to change your password.

In an update about AO3's return, OTW addressed the security incident that caused the outage in the first place.

"We will not be sharing specifics about what mitigating changes are being made at this time," the update read. "However, we do want to share that we’ve partnered with a security firm to review the incident and analyze the site to help prevent future incidents. AO3's security is deeply important to us."

As of now, OTW does not believe that user data was compromised, although it "cannot rule out that possibility." Because of this, it encourages users to take some simple safety precautions: Change your password on AO3, as well as on any other sites where you may have reused your AO3 password, and make sure your email is up to date.

SEE ALSO: Tumblr is having a fandom renaissance amid the AO3 outage Some AO3 features aren't operational yet.

In the same update, OTW stressed that "some features have been temporarily disabled to allow us to bring the site back earlier than the four-week mark."

Among the features that have been temporarily disabled are icon displays and external importing. If you want to download any works, you can only do so in HTML format. These features will return, and no AO3 data has been deleted in the security incident or subsequent maintenance.

AO3 also made a temporary change to draft deletion. Usually, drafts that are 30 days old get deleted automatically. However, in the wake of the outage, draft deletion has been paused until Nov. 29. Starting Nov. 29, AO3's standard draft deletion rules will be back in effect.

If AO3 doesn't load for you, don't panic!

In the wake of coming back online, AO3 has implemented intentional traffic management measures to weather the surge of users. That means it might take longer for the site to load. When I tried to access the site, I was directed to a Cloudflare waiting room, where I spent two minutes before being sent back to AO3.

Logging into the site may initially prompt a bad gateway error as well, but this is due to a high volume of people trying to log in and no further outages. Keep refreshing and trying, and you'll be back to your beloved ships in no time.

Smart speakers are still important devices in many smart homes. They allow you to issue commands, get information fast, and enjoy music all over your house.

Computer parts were genuinely crazy in the 90s and throughout much of the 2000s. It seemed like every few months, some company would come up with a crazy new concept that completely revolutionized how everything worked.

John Mulaney spent a solid chunk of his seventh Saturday Night Live monologue going nuclear on US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

SEE ALSO: 'SNL's Weekend Update skewers FAA ground stop, Jensen Huang affairs, and more

The bit began with Mulaney talking about hosting his children's friends, and how one child always seems to have an old man voice, not unlike Kennedy's.

From there, Mulaney launched into a full-on impression of Kennedy, rasping, "Stop the science! Robitussin, when taken during menstruation, will cause telekinesis."

Mulaney then talked about how "no one likes [Kennedy] anymore," not even his right-wing friends who used to approve of Kennedy.

SEE ALSO: Bowen Yang plays ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in 'SNL' cold open

"You dumbass, your thing can't be the measles," Mulaney said. "That can't be your project, giving people the measles."

After riffing on Kennedy's poor health track record and his inability to live up to his father's legacy, Mulaney explained that he knew Kennedy during his early days in New York ("He wasn't hard to know"). He skewered everything from his work as an environmental lawyer to his organization Riverkeeper, which was in charge of keeping the Hudson River — "whose native fish is tied-off used condom" — clean.

Mulaney recalled how he and other comedians would perform at the annual Riverkeeper benefit, and how he once received a garbled voicemail from Kennedy thanking him for the performance.

While Mulaney described bombing at the benefit, this SNL monologue had the opposite effect. Watch the full set above.

Living in small spaces comes with its caveats, and one of them is that TVs cramp up the place further. I have a tiny bedroom, with hardly any legroom. As much as I wanted to mount a smart TV in the room, a Google TV projector just felt like a more sensible option. It does a fine job of replacing my TV, even though it's not as opaque as an LCD display with the lights turned on. In a strange way, it worked in my favor.

Using Spotify is a tough choice for me. There was a time when I liked the app itself as a way to listen to music locally (although VLC, MPV, and Clementine are better options; I was going through a phase, ok?). But I really don't like paying for streaming services. Occasionally, the convenience of it does get to me, and I'll use it once in a while. But I'm trying to quit. I've gotten really into self-hosting over the past few years, so I figured I'd start replacing Spotify with my own music library. It's fantastic, but I realized there's a bit of a catch. But it's nothing I can't handle.

Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update had a rich array of news stories to tackle this week, from the FAA's nationwide ground stop to former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's multiple affairs. Naturally, hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost kicked off the segment by joking about both.

SEE ALSO: Bowen Yang plays ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in 'SNL' cold open

"The FAA suddenly and mysteriously grounded all US flights yesterday," Jost began. "'Oh thank God, a different news story,' said Jensen Huang."

Che and Jost continued to poke fun at the FAA's grounding of all US flights. According to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, the ground stop was caused by a maintenance issue involving a switch from copper wire to fiber-optic cable.

"So one guy switched out one wire and took out all planes? I think that's literally a scene from the movie Airplane!" Jost continued.

Next up, Che and Jost delved into Huang's sex scandal, including his affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

"Jensen Huang agreed to testify before Congress about his extramarital affairs," Che said. "Anything to avoid going home."

The pair also touched on the economic ramifications of Huang's resignation.

"The Jensen Huang sex scandal has sent Nvidia's stock tumbling, which is scaring financial experts since Nvidia's chips are powering the AI boom that is propping up the entire US economy," Jost said. "Which means Jensen Huang had a midlife crisis so bad, you might lose your house in his divorce."

For more Huang and FAA digs, as well as jokes about Senator-elect Scott Colom's Mississippi victory and Russell Brand's 10-year prison sentence, check out the full segment above.

USB has become more than just a near-universal data connection standard; it's also almost the default power connection for small electronics.

Yesterday was a good day for SpaceX and Elon Musk, and a banner day in the history of man's quest for the stars.

Not only did the launch of Starship, the largest interplantery rocket in the SpaceX fleet, standing over 400 feet tall and weighing over 5,000 tons, go off without a hitch from the Starbase launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, but the vessel successfully delivered its payload of 26 Starlink V3 satellites over the course of its 22.5-hour mission, according to reporting from CNN, while orbiting the Earth 14 times. 

But the real sticking point was always going to be the landing, where the SpaceX team attempted to prove their "reusable" rocket theory by successfully catching the falling Starship with some well-timed rocket boosters and incredible feats of engineering. The catch has been attempted a few times before on prior missions, successfully for the Super Heavy Booster on three occasions, but yesterday marked the first time the actual Starship was caught by the company's giant mechanical arms.

Understandably elated, Musk took to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, to share his incredible POV from atop the tower, shortly after the Starship catch: 

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Because journalists and bystanders were relegated to a safe watch site far away from the Starship catch site, most of the photos and footage of the catch struggles to convey the sheer size of the spaceship, but Musk's perspective gives a better sense of the scale of the ship and, therefore, the incredible challenge of executing a soft landing.

And for a better sense of how incredible the maneuver itself was, check out this time-lapse shot also shared by Musk:

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If you missed the high drama of this most recent launch and landing, no worries: the next SpaceX mission, USSF-317, is around the corner.

This week's news about former NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's multiple affairs — including one with an alleged Chinese spy — felt tailor-made for a Saturday Night Live cold open. During last night's episode, hosted by John Mulaney, the show more than delivered.

SEE ALSO: John Mulaney roasts 'dumbass' Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 'SNL' monologue: 'No one likes him'

The cold open takes place at CIA headquarters, where an officer (Mulaney) has gathered some of the nation's top tech billionaires: Peter Thiel (James Austin Johnson), Sam Altman (Ben Marshall), Dario Amodei (Jane Wickline), Elon Musk (Jeremy Culhane), and Mark Zuckerberg (Andrew Dismukes). The CIA officer has assembled them all to teach them about honey traps, and how not to potentially reveal state secrets to foreign assets, Huang-style.

SNL tapped former cast member Bowen Yang to play Huang, or, as he dubs himself in the sketch, Jensen "Hide Your Wives" Huang. Yang also made an appearance in a later sketch: an elaborate musical ode to Central Park, part of the long-running tradition of Mulaney musical sketches. Yang played the "Mary Todd Lincoln Tunnel," a tribute to his current role as Mary Todd Lincoln in Broadway's Oh, Mary! (Yes, he's wearing his costume, along with Mary's signature bratty curls.)

To catch Yang's return, as well as some timely digs at the Microsoft Outlook outage and FAA nationwide ground stop, check out the full cold open above.

Self-hosting is a great way to save money on subscriptions and take control of your data, but getting everything running smoothly on one system can be difficult, especially if you have incompatible dependencies.

The Nexus One was a failure, but set the stage for what would eventually become the Google Pixel series.

If you've ever attended a middle or elementary school science fair, you must've seen the classic potato clock or potato lamp project. Inspired by this simple project, I started to wonder if I could build one myself, but with a higher ambition. Can a smartphone be charged by a modest tater battery? I put this brain worm to the test.