Technology

There was a time when a luxury car was defined by the logo. Those lines have blurred today, as many mainstream manufacturers offer vehicles in their lineups with advanced powertrains, upscale interior layouts, and connectivity technologies that hold their own against luxury namesakes at a lower price.

When Android phones first took off over a decade ago, custom launchers were all the rage. The idea of completely transforming your phone’s look and feel was a huge draw for enthusiasts—and even non-techies. Today, however, launchers are almost unheard of. They’ve largely fallen out of favor in favor of whatever your phone came with, and frankly, I think that’s for the better.

When you buy a new smart TV, you expect a quality viewing experience as soon as you turn it on. Still, you may be accidentally accepting lower picture quality, unreliable connections, and privacy issues by keeping the default settings. The best performance gains are already inside the device you own. By following these steps, you can fix these distortions, stabilize streaming, stop the data tracking, and speed up your TV to what is now standard in the industry.

Your smart home hub won't last forever. It might be due to the hardware dying or becoming outdated, or because your smart home provider pulls the plug. Whatever the reason, you need to be prepared.

I consider myself part of many fandoms. Some are from my childhood, others from college, and now, as a young adult, but they all mean something to me on some level. One of those just happens to be Star Wars.

Just because your Android phone is starting to get old, it doesn't mean you have to replace it. There are things you can do to keep it running for longer. I recently decided to factory reset my old Pixel to try to freshen it up. Then, after I set it up again, I changed a few key settings. The result is that it feels almost as good as new.

When I was growing up in the '90s I always read about this mythical connection called FireWire. It was a connection mainly found on Macs, and I had never even seen a Mac in person until I was an adult, but long before then it had lost to USB decisively even on its home Macintosh turf. Or did it?

When Android phones first arrived, there wasn’t a built-in flashlight feature. So, flashlight apps were extremely popular—and profitable. One particular flashlight app got caught doing something not so bright, and the US government had to get involved.

AI companions are quietly becoming a staple across the industry, and OpenAI is now joining the trend. The company has launched Codex Pets, an optional animated companion baked into its AI coding tool.

Like most AI companions, it isn't doing any heavy lifting. But Codex Pets earns its keep as a floating overlay that surfaces project status updates in real-time, so you don't have to switch tabs. Users can monitor active threads and track whether Codex is running, waiting on input, or ready for review, all without ever leaving whatever they're working on.

Getting started is straightforward. Head to Settings, select Appearance, then choose Pets to pick from the built-in options. Once activated, the floating overlay can be toggled on or off by typing /pet in the composer, using Wake Pet or Tuck Away Pet in Settings > Appearance, or by pressing Cmd+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows.

The feature ships with eight built-in variations — including a cat and dog — but the more interesting play is the custom pet creator. Users can prompt Codex directly to generate their own companion, then share it online. A quick scroll through the homepage reveals the community has already gotten to work. Current creations include Goku, Patrick Star, Microsoft's long-retired Clippy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and — naturally — a goblin.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

True-crime documentaries are always a sure-fire hit on any streaming platform. 2025 saw the release of some doozies—beyond the usual SEO suspects, such as Chaos: The Manson Murders, American Murder: Gabby Petito, and The Fall of Diddy—that proved to us the true crime genre is moving in a direction that values education over exploitation.

I consider myself to be an expert procrastinator. Over the years, I've tried no shortage of tools and techniques to fix this problem. Pomodoro timers, distraction blockers, minimalist writing apps. Most of them are well-designed and do exactly what they claim. They help you track time and encourage focus. What they don’t do is enforce it.

The internet is global, but thanks to a complex set of pre-internet rules and legal agreements, there are virtual borders in place that restrict what you can see and do. Sometimes, it is also useful to appear as if you're accessing the net from a different location than you really are. In both cases, the preferred tool is a VPN or Virtual Private Network.

Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update has always been a reliable source of joy — or at the very least, a place to laugh — in what continues to be a genuinely strange moment in history. The jokes are great, but they're also, increasingly, hitting a little too close to home.

Hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost do their level best to navigate the week's headlines, tackling the abrupt collapse of Spirit Airlines and the continued, inexhaustible chaos emanating from the Trump administration. The latter is fertile ground at this point, and the pair works through them with ease.

Personally, the best bit from this involves King Charles' recent meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the conspicuous absence of any attempt by the British Crown to walk away with yet another piece of Indian cultural heritage.

I experimented with Android Auto for a while, but I just wasn't terribly happy with its performance. Recently, however, all of that changed. I decided to give Android Auto another shot, and here are five ways it's improved since I last used it.

If you have a 3D printer sitting idle, it’s time to put it to work. Your PC gaming setup can be made so much better by printing instead of buying off-the-shelf parts. Here are five things that you should definitely 3D print before you ever consider buying.

Even having a super speedy fiber connection won't make you immune to various bottlenecks. The reality is that if you use the internet, you're bound to have some issues with it at one point or another. For many, this can lead to a long stretch of frustrating troubleshooting that ends in an annoyed phone call directed to your ISP.

For most people, the Linux terminal is where you troubleshoot issues or run sudo commands—not a place where you do your day-to-day work. I used to think the same way until I stumbled into the world of TUI (Terminal User Interface) apps—terminal-based tools with real interfaces. I tried a few, and while most didn’t stick, these five did. In fact, they’re so good they’ve replaced several graphical desktop apps I used before.

Everyone has at least one bad breakup they'd rather forget. For Olivia Rodrigo's character Saturday night, that breakup was very much front and center.

The sketch finds Rodrigo at a party, freshly face-to-face with an ex she's determined to make jealous. Her solution is to recruit the perfectly nice, completely game guy standing next to her, played by Tommy Brennan. A solid plan, all things considered.

Her ex, played by Ben Marshall, has the exact same idea. Unfortunately, the woman he recruited for his scheme is being played by Ashley Padilla. So, while Rodrigo and her easygoing pretend date have a genuinely lovely time, the ex's night devolves into something approaching a minor psychological crisis. Padilla has a particular gift for playing characters who exist just slightly outside the bounds of normal human behavior, and this sketch is a showcase for exactly that.

A great time all around.

Being an avid reader on the modern internet sucks. After the disastrous pivot-to-video debacle of 2015 and experiencing the excessive amount of ads, pop-ups, consent forms, and overlays that plague modern websites, I yearn for the days of Google Reader and the simple RSS feed.

Let’s set the scene: your phone or some other gadget is on its last battery percentage, and even though there’s a USB port nearby, you don’t actually have a cable to use it. I’ve run into that situation more times than I can count, so I picked up a tiny USB-C keychain cable that I can carry everywhere, and it’s been way more useful than I ever could’ve expected.