Technology

Family SUVs have become the default choice for buyers who want practicality, comfort, and efficiency, but that convenience often comes at a steep price. With many new compact crossovers now pushing well past $35,000, a growing number of lightly used alternatives deliver the same everyday usability, better fuel economy, and a more refined driving experience while costing thousands less.

Backing up your files to the cloud is super convenient since you can access them anywhere and on any device. However, there is a chance that your cloud storage could become compromised. If that ever happens, you'll be glad not to have the things on this list stored in it.

Some movies are not comfort food. Some are the ones you brace for—punishingly realistic war epics that flatten you, thrillers that put your nerves through the shredder, true-crime documentaries that make you check your locks at night. You watch them once, feel all the feels, and then file the experience away for good.

If you own a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phone, you can enable a selection of audio features that will instantly improve the sound quality of your phone's speakers, the earbuds you're using, and more. The only catch is that most of them are hidden away, especially on Samsung phones. Even if you don't own a Pixel or a Galaxy, Android's Developer options menu hides a few handy Bluetooth audio settings every Android phone owner should tinker with.

I had used NVIDIA GPUs for about a decade until I replaced my trusty RTX 3070 with an RX 9070 XT in early 2025. The AMD graphics card was, and still is, impressive when it comes to gaming performance, but after making the switch, what surprised me most was the software, not the hardware.

3D printing is such a fantastic tool for so many reasons. However, one of my favorite things to do with 3D printing has to be creating upgrades for my office that I couldn't get any other way. Here are three office upgrades that I was able to do with 3D printing that gave me a huge quality of life upgrade.

Opening a garage door manually is no fun, but even a basic garage door opener can do the job at the push of a button. Smart garage door openers are even better, allowing you to control your garage door remotely, but they don't always come cheap. You may be able to turn your dumb garage door opener into a smart one for as little as $10.

Every few months, a new Android update shows up and promises to fix my day. A One UI 8.5 feature added expiry dates to routines. Android 16 rebuilt Do Not Disturb into Modes. Both are good additions. To be fair, Samsung's Modes and Routines already leaves Pixel's Rules far behind. But no update has ever known that my study block starts at 6 PM, or that 20% battery is already too late for me.

The Subaru Outback has long been the easy recommendation for buyers who want one vehicle to handle commuting, road trips, bad weather, and the occasional dirt road. But if most of your driving happens on pavement, its rugged versatility may matter less than the quality of the experience you get every time you climb behind the wheel.

X is overhauling how it pays creators, phasing out its long-running Revenue Sharing program in favor of a new system called the Original Content Rewards Program.

The platform's Creators account announced the change in a post, saying the program is meant to "reward creators who bring original ideas, expertise, reporting, creativity, and commentary to X."

According to the announcement, X stopped accepting new Revenue Sharing enrollments immediately and will wind the program down entirely after Sept. 7. Creators currently enrolled will receive three final payouts — two on the standard schedule in mid- and late August, and a final payment around Sept. 11 covering earnings through the cutoff date. Starting Sept. 8, existing Revenue Sharing members can apply for the new program if they meet its eligibility requirements, the company said.

Per X's announcement, the new program ties earnings to "qualified impressions" a creator's original content receives, rather than the advertising-revenue split that defined the old system. Qualified impressions must come from unique, verified Premium subscribers viewing at least half of a post on the Home Timeline; impressions that are duplicated, paid, promoted, or fraudulent don't count.

To qualify, X says creators must be at least 18, live in an eligible country, hold a Personal or Business account in good standing, subscribe to a paid X tier, and have at least 500 verified followers, along with 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users over the prior 90 days. Those requirements must be maintained continuously to keep receiving payouts, according to the announcement.

X's guidelines lean heavily on defining what counts as "original." Per the company's post, content that is copied, reuploaded without authorship, generated through automated means, or reposted with only minor edits — such as captions, watermarks, or basic text overlays — won't qualify. Users can earn from reposting others' material only if they add substantive commentary, analysis, or creative editing. So, simply describing what's already happening in a post doesn't meet the bar.

As noted in Engadget's report on the news, X adjusted its Revenue Sharing formula in March to weight engagement more heavily toward a creator's home region. That shift, they wrote, likely followed revelations that a number of popular accounts posting pro-Trump content and US-focused commentary were not actually based in the United States.

Whether the new Original Content Rewards Program carries over a similar regional weighting is not yet clear.

Time is a valuable asset. As someone who writes about entertainment for a living, I spend much of my time watching the latest movies that will dominate conversation in the coming weeks. When I do have a free moment, I try not to waste my time watching poorly reviewed movies or three-hour movies.

Photoshop's "Remove background" tool is great, but it comes with a pretty steep price. To use it, you need an active subscription.

The Rock 5 family of single-board computers (SBCs) includes multiple members, four of which are built on the RK3588. The RK3588 is very capable as SBC CPUs go—it has four "performance" cores running at 2.4Ghz, another four efficiency cores running at 1.8GHz, a decent GPU, and a 6 TOPs NPU.

I've always found resume writing to be a headache, and it's only gotten worse. There are ATS (Applicant Tracking System) tools scanning for keywords, design conventions I'm no longer up to date on, endless advice about mirroring the language of the job posting—and who knows what else. It's a lot to keep track of for a document I neither enjoy writing nor have much experience creating. I also don't have much incentive to get better at it, since I land most jobs through social outreach or referrals.

.Most people celebrated when Microsoft loosened its grip on Windows updates. The forced restarts were annoying, the timing was always wrong, and it felt like your computer was making decisions that belonged to you. I get it, but the more I think about what mandatory updates were actually doing, the harder it is to feel good about losing them.

I've had my Kindle 4 for more than a decade, and for most of that time I used the stock Kindle software. When Amazon announced it was dropping support for this model, I decided to jailbreak it. I wish I'd done it sooner, as the Kindle has become far more useful; I've found several ways that I can use it with Home Assistant, and you can find old Kindles on secondhand marketplaces for as little as $25.

Samsung is a leader in Android features and UI options, but that hasn't stopped it from continuing to up its customization game. If you're a seasoned Samsung owner, you probably know about the Good Lock app. It's a suite of tools that took me by surprise, especially when it broke Android’s own rules to deliver better experiences. Learning more about these buried apps and their features can drastically alter your device.

Losing your only charging cable in the middle of a long drive is the kind of thing that makes reasonable people take impulsive risks. Buying a charging cord from a gas station is one of the worst decisions you can make. Some of them are a legitimate security threat, and the ones that aren't can still do real damage to your hardware over time.

The whole point of running a home server is being able to reach your files, media, dashboards, and other self-hosted services whenever you need them. Unfortunately, the easiest way to use remote access is also the riskiest one: through port forwarding.

A sound system isn't a cheap proposition, and if you're going to spend the money, you don't want any regrets a year or two down the road. Rather than buying a soundbar, you should piece together your own system—it'll age better and offer better performance.