IT General

The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times' revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.

With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.

So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player's flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable SEE ALSO: How to play Pips, the newest NYT game

Here are the clues and answers to NYT's The Mini for Monday, May 11, 2026:

AcrossItty-bitty insect

• The answer is Gnat.

"Excellent job!"

• The answer is Bravo.

Bird that "croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan," in "Macbeth"

• The answer is Raven.

Each and ___

• The answer is Every.

Swollen mark

• The answer is Welt.

DownDeathly serious

• The answer is Grave.

Belly button

• The answer is Navel.

Prevent, as a crisis

• The answer is Avert.

___ the Tiger, mascot of Frosted Flakes

• The answer is Tony.

Beer, informally

• The answer is Brew.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Mini Crossword.

If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.

There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.

An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.

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If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.

SEE ALSO: Hurdle: Everything you need to know to find the answers Hurdle Word 1 hint

He is ___.

SEE ALSO: Apple’s new M3 MacBook Air is $300 off at Amazon. And yes, I’m tempted. Hurdle Word 1 answer

RISEN

Hurdle Word 2 hint

Solver.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for May 11, 2026 Hurdle Word 2 Answer

FIXER

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Hurdle Word 3 hint

Topic.

SEE ALSO: NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for May 11 SEE ALSO: NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for May 11, 2026 Hurdle Word 3 answer

THEME

Hurdle Word 4 hint

Troubleshoot.

Hurdle Word 4 answer

DEBUG

Final Hurdle hint

Pungent.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Games available on Mashable Hurdle Word 5 answer

ACRID

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

The Moon is losing visibility each night as we approach the New Moon. With just a few nights left before it's total darkness, keep reading to find out what you might be able to see tonight.

What is today’s Moon phase?

As of Monday, May 11, the Moon phase is Waning Crescent. Tonight, 36% of the moon will be be lit up, according to NASA's Daily Moon Guide.

Without any visual aids, tonight you can see the Kepler Crater and the Aristarchus Plateau. If you have binoculars or a telescope, these should help you see the Gassendi Crater, Clavius Crater, and Mare Humorum.

When is the next Full Moon?

There are two Full Moons in May, with the next due to take place on May 31.

What are Moon phases?

According to NASA, the Moon takes around 29.5 days to complete a full orbit around Earth, passing through eight different phases along the way. Even though we always see the same side of the Moon, the way sunlight falls on it changes as it moves, which is what creates the familiar full, half, and crescent shapes. In total, there are eight main phases in the lunar cycle:

New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.

Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)

Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

For decades, one hybrid hatchback has stood above everything else when it comes to fuel economy. Even as the market has exploded with electrified SUVs, sedans, and crossovers, no rival has managed to dethrone the long-standing benchmark for efficiency. If your number one priority is spending as little money on gas as possible, there is still one clear answer.

I wanted to move my Adobe Lightroom library to a portable SSD so I could use it on both my desktop and laptop. Instead of purchasing a pre-built SSD, I built my own for a fraction of the cost (and I can upgrade it later if I need to).

Few computing-related things seem as straightforward as a simple USB hub. It's there, you grab it, plug it in, plug things into it, and voila: you suddenly tripled the number of your USB ports! Sounds great (and it is), but there's also a reason why USB hubs are often treated as disposable tech. Those extra ports often tend to malfunction and die off one by one.

Apex's reign at the top of Netflix might be coming to an end with the addition of two new movies in May. The first is Swapped, an animated adventure starring Michael B. Jordan and Juno Temple. The other movie is Remarkably Bright Creatures, an endearing drama starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman. Both movies have the potential to be the No. 1 movie when Netflix updates its rankings.

After a four-year wait, Euphoria has returned to television, but season 3 is providing a major shake-up to its formula. Not only have four years passed in the real world, but the in-universe tale has moved forward, taking the cast of the Zendaya-led teen drama out of high school and into the trials of young adulthood. As such, the series faces a new challenge of whether it can keep up its momentum with this drastic new status quo.

I've owned many portable external battery banks. I typically look at how much power they hold, how fast they can charge other devices, and how big they are—but my latest battery came with a perk I didn't know to look for.

A NAS is a great addition to any homelab setup. It can back up your photos and other files, run a Jellyfin or Plex server, and replace a few of your subscription services.

A two-year legal battle between General Motors and California prosecutors, led by Attorney General Rob Bonta, over the alleged misuse of customer driving data has concluded, with GM agreeing to pay $12.75 million in penalties. 

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In a press release announcing the settlement, the AG alleges that GM sold "the names, contact information, geolocation data, and driving behavior data of hundreds of thousands of Californians" to data brokers, including Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions. And, as the statement points out, "If you know the precise location of a person’s car, then you know an enormous amount of personal, sensitive information about that person — their home, work, children’s school, place of worship."

SEE ALSO: Apple AI lawsuit settled: Every iPhone included in the $250 million settlement

The original facts of the case were uncovered by The New York Times back in 2024, where the focus was on whether insurance companies were using this driving data to charge some customers higher insurance rates. But the attorney general's investigation concluded that "California drivers were not directly impacted by GM’s sales of data," because under California's strict insurance laws, "insurers are prohibited from using driving data to set insurance rates." 

In addition to the $12.75 million settlement, GM has agreed to stop selling driving data to any consumer reporting agencies for five years, delete any current driving data within 180 days (unless expressly permitted to keep the data by the driver), and develop and maintain its own privacy program to assess its data collection practices and mitigate the risks of a data breach.

While the settlement is definitely a win for consumer privacy, you shouldn't feel too bad for GM just yet. According to the attorney general's own calculations, GM earned roughly $20 million for the sale of its OnStar data, so even with the hefty settlement, they're still turning a nice profit. 

Popular proprietary voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant make it simple to control your smart home with your voice, but they lack personality. They're more like Computer from Star Trek than J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man or GLaDOS from Portal. Using two tools in Home Assistant, I gave my voice assistant a personality and a voice to match.

If you’re like me, you’re subscribed to many streaming websites, and one of those happens to be Amazon Prime. There are plenty of great shows on Amazon Prime, but one I love dearly and have had for many years is Invincible.

Cloud AI is powerful but not private. Local AI is private but less powerful. That trade-off is real, and trying to pick one over the other is the wrong framework. A better use of your time is to find tasks that require privacy, but not as much model intelligence, and then have local AI models automate them for you. Here are three such tasks that I’ve automated using on-device LLMs.

Power tools are a very personal purchase for a lot of people, and maybe even a sensitive subject. Just like tools in general, there's a lot of personal preference, brand loyalty, and most importantly myths that influence what people use.

The Adobe Suite is a mainstay of creatives everywhere, and one of the most common apps is Adobe Premiere—the video-editing software. However, I've switched to an open-source alternative, and I don't regret it for a moment.

If you've shopped for storage in the last few years, you've probably noticed the 2.5-inch hard drive quietly fading from the shelves. NVMe SSDs are tiny, fast, and increasingly affordable. The 3.5-inch drives still rule the desktop and NAS world. And yet, somehow, the humble 2.5-inch HDD keeps showing up.

I love having an Amazon Fire TV Stick, but the lag used to be a real problem. Initially, it felt like a great purchase because of the convenience and value, but over time, every click of the remote felt slower. The home screen felt heavy, menus lagged behind input, and trying to jump between Netflix and Disney+ was a test of my patience.

Homelabs are a fun, worthwhile hobby for many of us, but you don't always need to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars into your setup. I try to think of it as more of a sandbox where I’m making things, learning, and experimenting with hardware and software.

Good news for owners of foreign-made drones and routers: the Federal Communications Commission has amended its original deadline that would have banned firmware updates to these devices after March 1, 2027. 

In an announcement posted on May 8, 2026, the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) updated its previous guidance to allow new software and firmware updates to foreign-made drones and routers until January 1, 2029, adding nearly two years to the initial cut-off date.

SEE ALSO: The FCC's proposed plan to fight spam calls puts consumer privacy in jeopardy

The main concerns cited by the American government are espionage, unauthorized surveillance, and data exfiltration, all of which can be enabled by backdoor exploits built directly into both drones and routers. The most famous example of such a cyberattack is the ongoing Volt Typhoon "advanced persistent threat" (APT), which attempts to leverage compromised hardware, including routers, to steal data and establish "command and control" channels over American cyber infrastructure. 

And though drones are newer than routers, they have been used in corporate espionage since at least 2022, when drones were used to infiltrate the wireless networks of a major American financial firm. 

From a numbers perspective alone, the size of the vulnerability is frightening: around 60% of America's routers are manufactured in China, according to Reuters, while more than 80% of the drones operational in the United States were designed and built in China, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

But put yourself in the shoes of someone who just shelled out serious money for a drone or router, only to learn, after the fact, that the government had made your purchase illegal. The Consumer Technology Association, advocating on behalf of precisely those American consumers, issued an open letter to the FTC just last month, urging legislators to exercise leniency, as well as to better clarify which products might be affected by the ban. 

Their efforts are probably responsible for this two-year extension, but expect supply lines and manufacturers to re-localize in the coming years as the full scope of the cybersecurity threat becomes clearer.