Technology

There are plenty of settings that you can scroll through on a Roku TV or streaming device, but there are some hidden menus that offer even more options. You can access these secret settings by pressing a sequence of buttons on your Roku remote, although none of them will give you 30 lives.

Building a homelab can get expensive quickly. A spare PC turns into a virtualization host, which leads to a dedicated NAS, a managed switch, and eventually a rack full of equipment that consumes electricity around the clock. For many homelabbers, the challenge is finding ways to keep experimenting without spending money on new hardware every few months.

The state of the open-source software community has never been better, with Windows being arguably the biggest platform for open-source apps. The most popular desktop operating system in the world has hundreds of fantastic open-source tools and utilities, with the best of them being able to compete with, and sometimes beat, their premium closed-source peers.

TL;DR: The Apple iPhone 18 Pro is free when you switch and bring your number on T-Mobile's Experience Beyond plan. The Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max is $1,200 off when you switch and bring your number on T-Mobile's Experience Beyond plan.

Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple iPhone 18 Pro Free when you switch and bring your number on T-Mobile's Experience Beyond plan. Shop Now Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max $1,200 off when you switch and bring your number on T-Mobile's Experience Beyond plan. Shop Now

The iPhone Duo launched last week, and naturally, there was a lot of fuss made about Apple's first-ever foldable. Not all of the chatter was positive, but the iPhone Duo did dominate the conversation at least. Now that the dust has settled, something truly wonderful has happened for Apple fans.

No, we're not talking about resolutions to any of the issues surrounding the launch. We're talking about the triumphant return of T-Mobile's free iPhone deals. For the last few weeks, T-Mobile pulled back on the free deals for the iPhone 17 and iPhone 18 Pro. Times were tough, but we made it through.

For a limited time, you can get your hands on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro for free with T-Mobile. To qualify for this deal, you simply need to switch to T-Mobile and bring your number to the Experience Beyond plan. Alternatively, you can save $1,200 on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max by doing the same.

The full savings are distributed as monthly credits over a 36-month payment plan. If you leave T-Mobile before the end of the three-year contract, you will be charged the remaining balance. You also need to pay local sales tax on the phone's full retail value upfront, plus a standard $35 device connection fee per line at checkout.

You're making a commitment to T-Mobile and getting a flagship phone for free in return. That sounds like a pretty good deal to us.

Get the Apple iPhone 18 Pro for free this weekend with T-Mobile.

When most people think of 3D printing, they imagine spare parts, clever home solutions, or, most likely, piles of articulated dragons. But you can create visual art in quite a few ways with a 3D printer.

Linux has thousands of commands, and most of us lean on the same few dozen. Many of you might not even use more than 10 unless it's absolutely needed. But it turns out, tucked away in the rest, are small utilities that quietly do the heavy lifting. Here are four that even seasoned users forget exist, along with the situations where they shine.

I put off trying ESP32 projects for a long time because I assumed they would be complicated and time-consuming, and I didn't have hours to spare. Building ESP32 projects from scratch can take time (though not nearly as much as I'd imagined), but you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Some commercial products contain ESP32 chips, and you may be able to flash them with custom firmware.

Your phone comes with Google Chrome, but you may want to swap it for Mozilla Firefox for privacy concerns and Google’s near-monopoly over the web. Yet there are many versions of Firefox floating around, and while the main version is fine for most, it may not be the best option for you.

That USB port on the back of your router looks like an easy way to share storage at home, maybe even set up a full-blown NAS. It does work, for what it's worth. But the router has a different main job, and using it as a file server comes with costs most people don’t expect until their network slows down. Here's why that's a bad idea.

If you're an adult, you're probably not going to spend your night getting candy from strangers, but that doesn't mean Halloween can't be magical for you as well. Whether you're going to a costume party or taking your own kids trick-or-treating, there are plenty of good reasons to dress up tonight, and plenty of great costume ideas floating around social media.

SEE ALSO: Halloween 2026 deals: Score free food from Chipotle, Dunkin', Krispy Kreme, Burger King, and more

Here are some of our favorite costumes, either because they're creative or funny or just incredibly well executed:

A throwback to one of the greatest children's shows of all time This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Total Drama Island fit we didn't know we needed This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Godfather of Soul himself This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. So cute you could eat them This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. And the streamers went all out This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. An homage to Willem Defoe This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Silver Surfer rides tonight This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

An alarming new survey from media and tech non-profit Common Sense Media has found that children begin interacting with AI chatbots at an alarmingly early age — with nearly half of 9-12-year-olds having bypassed the 13+ age restriction common to most LLMs. 

The survey is titled The 2026 Common Sense Media Census: Tech and Media Use by Tweens and Teens. In the paper, the organization conducted interviews with more than 1,200 American children aged 9 to 17, asking questions about AI use as well as television, gaming, and social media habits. More importantly, the interviews asked these young children how they feel about their own media consumption habits.

SEE ALSO: Lawsuit says ChatGPT persuaded person to stop taking epilepsy meds, leading to her death

Standout findings include the sharp rise in smartphone ownership, with more than half of 11-year-olds already owning a smartphone and near-universal smartphone access by age 17, as well as the incredible amount of time spent on screens: eight hours per day for teenagers and five hours per day for tweens. 

Because social scientists were caught unprepared by the massive impact social media has had on teen mental health, there's a strong push for more studies into the effects of AI interaction on teenagers, especially in the areas of school preparedness and mental health. 

A second study, titled "Exploring Artificial Intelligence [AI]: Understanding Relationships between AI Use and Mental Health Among Middle and High School Students," was commissioned by the JEF Foundation, a mental health advocacy group. They interviewed more than 5,000 American middle and high school students from 21 different schools between Oct. 2025 and April 2026, which resulted in the following four findings, taken verbatim from their report:

• Students use AI for a wide range of cognitive and emotional support, including turning to AI when they’re struggling emotionally.

• Certain uses of AI are associated with worse mental health and well-being outcomes, and greater lifetime history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

• Students who use AI while emotionally struggling have worse mental health and well-being outcomes, and greater history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

• Patterns of AI use differ across demographics, with important implications for mental health disparities.

JED Foundation psychologist Kayla Anderson summarized the findings to NPR: "When young people are using AI, when they're in emotional distress, they're more likely to report poor mental health and well-being outcomes," but she was also quick to stress that the study did not establish causality. In other words, they don't know if AI is making teen mental health worse, or if teens with worse mental health are gravitating to AI chatbots for help. 

Thankfully, there are already a slew of new studies set to conclude soon investigating whether causality can be established. If so, expect lawmakers to come down hard on AI companies to impose more stringent age restrictions and accept greater liability for poor mental health outcomes among teenagers.

Documentaries are a great weekend watch, giving you a glimpse into some of the biggest events in history. You get to sit back on your couch and watch something for an hour and a half, and you don't even have to feel guilty about it because you're learning something, or at least that's what I tell myself.

In the good old days, you could buy software outright and then use it forever without needing to pay anything more. These days, you're far more likely to have to pay a monthly subscription to keep using your software. However, the era of software subscriptions may be coming to an end, as AI-assisted developers are releasing free replacements for entire software suites.

While Ryobi tools at Home Depot are exclusive to the retailer, Ryobi is owned by TTI, which also owns Milwaukee and Ridgid tools. Home Depot is the only retail company authorized to sell Ryobi-branded products. You won’t find them at Lowe’s, Harbor Freight, Menards, or other big retail chains.

In a vacuum, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro is still one of the beefiest and most capable streaming boxes around. Its Tegra X1+ chip coupled with 3GB of RAM is powerful enough for any video file, you get support for most major HDR and audio formats, and the streamer also offers extra goodies such as excellent AI upscaling, gigabit LAN, and two USB 3.0 ports.

It's amazing what you can find when it comes to used computers. The current strange pricing of computer hardware notwithstanding, for the most part computers devalue rapidly. So a machine from ten years ago will have lost nearly all of its value.

One of the best things about Home Assistant is how customizable it is. Instead of installing a huge piece of software that supports every smart home device known to man, you can install specific integrations for the devices you own. There are also powerful plugins, including what were previously called add-ons but are now known as apps, that make Home Assistant even more powerful.

My keyboard doesn’t have a Delete key. It doesn’t have F1 through F12, Home, End, or even a tilde, and I type thousands of words on it every day without missing any of them. That’s because my keyboard has layers: hold one thumb key and the entire keyboard turns into something else entirely. Once I started building my workflow around layers, a normal keyboard started to feel like it was missing something.

After the success of HBO's horror TV show It: Welcome to Derry, released one year ago this month, it was no surprise that the network would renew the show for a second season, but nobody predicted that it would launch with a surprise special episode, released right on time for Halloween.

"A Story of Derry" is a 30-minute bonus episode that simultaneously points fans to the season ahead and takes them back in time to the very origins of the entity that would become Pennywise the Clown. 

SEE ALSO: 'IT: Welcome to Derry's chaotic ending, explained

Two YouTube/TikTok shorts were used to announce the special episode, the first more of a tease than the second, but both give us insight into the likely timeline of the series: sometime in the distant past, before the American founding. 

The episode itself follows three children venturing alone into the Western Wood, where they encounter not only a malevolent, terrifying spirit but also something cosmic and beautiful, a counterweight to the horror and violence of Pennywise.

Fans of the series will love this mini-episode, but they will also surely be disappointed because the second season of It: Welcome to Derry isn't in production yet and therefore has no release window, let alone a release date. In a recent interview with the New York Post, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane promised that the new season would exceed the terror and suspense of the last, and indicated that they're actively writing it now, so a late-2027 or early-2028 release date is still a possibility.

In the meantime, horror fans should definitely check out "A Story of Derry," not only for its own merits but for the additional backstory it brings to the Pennywise lore. 

In case you didn't know, the popular Plex self-hosting media service also supports music. You can take your CD collection, rip them as high-quality lossless files, and then play that music back through the Plex client.