Technology

Ryobi is a popular choice for DIYers and homeowners due to its large selection of 18V cordless power tools, but that's not all the company offers. Ryobi batteries can power a lot more than just tools, and the brand also makes some pretty great hand tools you'll love having around the house.

The best thing about Linux is that it respects its users. It does exactly what you tell it to do. Want to kill a program? Send the kill command and it'll be terminated without warning. However, the worst part about Linux is also that it does exactly what you tell it to do. Here's what I mean.

GitHub hosts an enormous amount of genuinely great free and open-source software. But as an interface for discovering and installing apps, it's one of the worst experiences out there. There's no browsing by category, no install button, and half the time the README assumes you already know what a build toolchain is. I got tired of it, so I used Claude to build myself a workaround—an app-store-like layer that sits on top of GitHub.

Most smart TVs you buy nowadays ship with Google TV software, which is basically a forked version of Android TV OS. Google TV promises to bring a content-first layout, powered by AI. The term "content-first" comes with a caveat. As soon as you switch on your TV, you’re presented with a big promotional banner, which is basically a show or movie in your region pushed to you. Following this banner are your apps and an endless list of recommendations from Google TV to watch, which can be overwhelming most of the time.

If you're still happy with your 3D printer, there's no reason to stop using it. However, if it's been a long time since you bought your machine, you might not be aware that the floor has been raised considerably.

Android Auto is quite literally the same Android that’s on your phone, but it doesn’t have the same level of customization. There are no alternate home screen launchers or icon packs. However, one thing you can do is move the taskbar—though the option is not easy to find.

Music giants Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have just filed a potentially multibillion-dollar lawsuit against Anthropic, and the publishers aren't mincing words.

The lawsuit, filed Friday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calls Anthropic "the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." Sony and Warner also named Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei and cofounder Benjamin Mann in the lawsuit.

• Play our Big Guessing Game: Make your predictions now for a chance to win a new Apple Watch. Time's running out!

In the lawsuit, first reported by Music Business Worldwide, the music companies claim that Anthropic has carried out "a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to train its popular Claude AI models. Sony and Warner accused Anthropic of having "reaped enormous profits" from the stolen music.

Sony and Warner are seeking $150,000 in damages per work as well as $25,000 per copyright violation. The music companies, which are the second- and third-largest in the industry, allege that thousands of titles have been stolen, putting compensation in the range of billions of dollars.

SEE ALSO: Midjourney pushes to expose studios' own AI practices in copyright fight

The publishers have specifically accused Anthropic of "blatant theft" of song titles such as "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas is You," "Eye of the Tiger," and "Here Comes Santa Claus."

Anthropic has been hit with intellectual property lawsuits before. In fact, Sony and Warner's lawsuit directly references the $1.5 billion settlement that Anthropic reached with book publishers earlier this year in a similar case where the AI company was accused of training models on stolen works.

The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group (UMG), previously filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Anthropic. UMG, along with Concord Music Group and ABKCO Music, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in 2023 and again earlier this year. Their latest suit seeks more than $3 billion in damages.

There's an absurd number of Windows keyboard shortcuts for mastering system navigation, beyond the simple Ctrl + C/V/X for copying, pasting, and cutting. Some I use regularly include Win + I for opening Settings, Ctrl + K for inserting hyperlinks into text, and Win + Shift + S for opening Snipping Tool for all my screen capture and annotation needs.

Plex is probably the easiest way to get started with building your own media server, but even if you choose to upgrade to Plex Pass, it still doesn't give you everything you might want. Fortunately, there are some third-party apps that can fill in the gaps. I keep my setup fairly lean and built around three main add-ons for detailed stats, different ways to stream and download, and adding a request service.

You never forget how to ride a bike, but you can be forgiven for not staying up to date with the latest cycling tech trends. These include new categories of bikes, safety improvements, and more gadgetry than ever before.

SSD speeds are far from the only thing that matters. In fact, many will say that they're almost irrelevant, and buying an expensive SSD is a waste of money.

Recently, my mini PC started acting up. It would freeze every so often, and Windows just didn't feel as responsive as it normally did. Nothing had completely stopped working, but the system had become unreliable enough that I knew something was wrong.

It seems like everything today has a subscription attached to it—whether a video streaming app, a food diary app, or even a calculator app. No matter the intent, there is a paywall for additional features.

TL;DR: Crumbl is teaming up with Minecraft on a limited-time menu featuring six square, Minecraft-inspired treats topped with fan-favorite mobs. You'll also have the chance to score a special limited-edition mystery spoon.

If you have a Gen Alpha kid in your life, you probably know more than you'd like to admit about Minecraft (and honestly, Crumbl cookies). Now, the two brands are banding together to give your teens and tweens the collab they've always wanted.

SEE ALSO: Herschel just launched a Minecraft collab in time for back-to-school shopping. Here's how to buy.

On Aug. 30, Crumbl is dropping a limited-edition menu featuring six different Minecraft-inspired treats. Every single cookie and cake on the menu will be square (obvs) and come with a mob topper.

The menu, which runs through Sept. 5, includes a Lemon Poppyseed Cookie (Bee topper), Cookies & Cream Sandwich (Enderman topper), Creeper Key Lime Sandwich (Creeper topper — and undoubtedly the one my nephew asks for), a Grass Block Cake, Cherry Blossom Cookie (Pig topper), and a Cookie Butter Cookie (Chicken topper).

If you're one of the first 200 people to buy a Minecraft 6-Pack on launch day, you'll get a Launch Day Exclusive spoon (limited to one per person). Credit: Crumbl

If you want to go all out, Crumbl is also releasing special-edition Crumbl x Minecraft Mystery Spoons. If you're one of the first 200 people to buy a Minecraft 6-Pack on launch day, you'll get a Launch Day Exclusive spoon (limited to one per person).

Some of Excel's most useful features aren't hidden behind complicated menus or obscure keyboard shortcuts. They're built into controls you probably pass over without a second thought. Here are some that can save you time every day.

I'd never considered getting a page turner for my Kindle. When my wife got hers, I finally understood the appeal, but I couldn't believe how the device actually worked.

NASA's latest flagship telescope is on its way to a million‑mile‑distant orbit to map the universe and hunt for distant planets.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off at 7:26 a.m. ET on Sunday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Riding a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the spacecraft separated from its rocket and began its space journey.

Mission leaders say Roman will reshape astronomy by pairing a wide, sharp view of the universe with powerful tools to probe dark matter, dark energy, and distant exoplanets.

• Play our Big Guessing Game: Make your predictions now for a chance to win a new Apple Watch. Time's running out! 

The observatory, with a lifecycle cost of about $4.3 billion, will make its data public as soon as it's processed. And what a firehose of data it's expected to collect. Hubble gathered 172 terabytes of science data in its first 30 years; Roman will downlink about 1.4 terabytes every day, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for science at NASA. What Roman can do in a single month to survey the Milky Way would take Hubble about 100 years.

"The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a sheer powerhouse," Fox said. "It is literally a speed machine. The speed at which we'll be scanning the sky, delivering vast amounts of data, and returning results will be at an unprecedented rate never done before."

SEE ALSO: NASA's Roman telescope is built to find what Hubble and Webb miss

Under the hood, Roman is about the size of a tour bus and as heavy as a male killer whale. Its nearly 8-foot primary mirror matches Hubble's in size but is less than a quarter of the weight, thanks to newer technology. A set of six solar panels, each about the size of a large door, will provide four kilowatts of power.

Roman is headed to a spot called the second sun‑Earth Lagrange point, or L2, the same orbit around the sun as the James Webb Space Telescope. From that vantage point, Roman can stare at a vast, steady slice of the sky without Earth photobombing the view.

"The images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in April. 

• Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable's Light Speed newsletter or get Mashable push alerts today.

The U.S. space agency developed the telescope with a five-year primary mission in mind. Fuel will determine the observatory's ultimate lifetime, but engineers designed the spacecraft so that it could be refueled in space, should future on-orbit servicing and fill-ups become possible.

The mission is named for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief astronomer and a key architect of the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. She championed space‑based telescopes that see above Earth's haze.

Roman carries two main instruments: the Wide Field Instrument, a 300‑megapixel infrared camera, and the Coronagraph Instrument, a tech demo that will try to directly photograph planets in the glare of nearby stars.

In most telescopes, the image is sharpest in the middle and softens toward the edges. Roman is the opposite. Engineers lined the camera's 18 detectors along that ring, so the telescope can grab big chunks of sky in a single image instead of stitching them together one narrow pointing at a time.

Roman will go after exoplanets in three main ways. With its camera, it will stare toward the crowded center of the galaxy and watch hundreds of millions of stars for brief brightenings caused by microlensing — when a foreground star and its planets act like a natural magnifying glass for a background star. That method is especially good at finding planets similar to the ones in our own solar system, including worlds as light as Mars, plus "rogue" planets that drift through space without a star. The same data will reveal transits — tiny dips in a star's light when a planet crosses in front of it, zeroing in on tens of thousands of hot, close‑in giants.

The coronagraph will zoom in on only a few nearby stars at a time. By blocking a star's light inside the telescope, astronomers should be able to see much fainter planets beside it. To pull that off, Roman will rely on optics that can subtly change shape to cancel out leftover glare, said Vanessa Bailey, NASA's coronagraph scientist for the telescope. 

"We’re using something called deformable mirrors — exactly what it sounds like. They are mirrors that have thousands of tiny pistons on the back that can move at nanometer, or even picometer, scales to correct the very small polishing errors or optical misalignment errors in the system to block out light better," Bailey told Mashable. "This will be the first time we’re using those in space."

Roman's panoramic view is what makes the observatory powerful for mapping dark matter, the invisible scaffolding that outweighs normal matter and helps hold galaxies together. Astronomers first saw its influence when they realized galaxies and stars were moving too fast to be bound by visible matter alone.

Roman will trace where this hidden material lies by watching how it slightly stretches the shapes of distant galaxies. By tracking those distortions across huge areas of sky, Roman can build a 3D map showing where dark matter clumps and how its clumps have grown over cosmic time.

A NASA team encapsulates the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the payload fairing at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Aug. 21, 2026. Credit: NASA / Sydney Rohde (Rocz)

Those maps will feed directly into Roman's study of dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to have made the universe's expansion speed up. Instead of slowing down after the Big Bang, galaxies are racing apart faster and faster, as if some invisible pressure is pushing them away from one another.

Three major surveys will drive this science. One will map more than a billion galaxies far from the dusty plane of the Milky Way, combining images and data to build 3D maps of structures. Another will repeatedly image the same region to make movies of the changing sky, catching around 100,000 explosive events — including Type Ia supernovas, star explosions that give off a predictable amount of light, making them handy tools for measuring distances in space.

The third will stare toward the crowded center of the Milky Way. Roman's sharp, infrared vision will let it watch hundreds of millions of stars through intervening dust, searching for the microlensing events.

"What makes me most excited about Roman is the discovery potential. With 2 billion galaxies, we'll have 2,000 objects that are one-in-a-million," said Julie McEnery, senior project scientist. "We'll find new things that go bump in the night."

Before science can begin, Roman will spend about three months traveling out to its orbit. NASA expects to release the first Roman images in January 2027, after early calibration is complete.

In my experience, there are two kinds of Ethernet cable users: those who buy one cable and use it for the next 10 years without ever thinking whether it's good or bad, and those who overthink the topic of these cables into oblivion, almost min-maxing every purchase and upgrading every so often. There is some in between, but not a lot.

Linux is having a moment, or rather, Microsoft is scaring people away from Windows. If you're making a transition, I highly recommend you consider the open-source GNOME desktop. Far from being a complicated hobbyist project for hardcore Linux nerds, GNOME today is fun, stylized, polished, and privacy-respecting in a way that feels foreign on Windows PCs, Chromebooks, and even MacBooks.

For many of us, we seem to get more spam calls than calls from people in our contacts list. The problem with strict call filters is that they run the risk of blocking the people you do actually want to hear from. Thankfully, that’s not something you need to worry about if you use an Android phone.