Technology

Misplacing an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch can be infuriating, especially if you’re sure it’s around here somewhere, but just can’t put your hands on it. If you have Find my iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch active, ask Siri to find it for you.

You’re probably already aware that you can find an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch by using the Find my iPhone app, but there’s an altogether cooler, more friction-free way of doing it. Asking Siri to “find my iPhone” or other device is a quick way to do exactly that, and Siri can even initiate a ping to the missing device, making it easier for you to find it.

Things get even better if you own a HomePod, too, because you can ask it to do everything just as you would any other Siri-toting device. There’s something magical about shouting at a HomePod and having your iPhone ping like crazy from behind the sofa cushion.

For any of this to work, you’ll need to have enabled Find my iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch during setup. Assuming you did, here’s how to find any of those devices using your voice, thanks to Siri.

To get the ball rolling, invoke Siri the way you normally would and then ask it to “Find my x” and replace x with the device for which you’re looking.

• “Find my iPhone.”
• “Find my iPad.”
• “Find my Apple Watch.”

If you have multiple devices, like two iPads for example, Siri will ask you to confirm which one you want to locate. If you have multiple family members, you can even ask Siri to find their device too. Simply add their name to the request; “Find Rachel’s iPhone” will have Siri do exactly that.

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PC gamers drop big bucks to feel immersed in their games. But some new smarthome tech is enabling amazingly immersive effects with just a few lights. Take this Philips Hue plugin for Minecraft as an example.

There are plenty of bias lighting setups that can observe data from a monitor or TV screen and match the light color to the average color on the screen. This tool isn’t doing that: it’s actually using Minecraft’s API to gather light source data from the game itself, matching the color of the bias lighting behind the screen to the objects actually emitting light in the in-game environment.

So if you’re traversing a sunny day in Minecraft, your Hue light will shine almost pure white matching the sun. At sunset you get a slowly-darkening orange, and lightning will flash white then fade to a darker blue. Travel to the game’s final environment The End, and your walls will light up with the ethereal purple glow from the horizon. Inside your cabin you’ll get the flickering reds and yellows of the fireplace. In a nod to utility, it will flash red when you take damage.

It’s a super-cool effect to watch in motion. Since it uses the APIs from Minecraft and Hue, it only works with those specific lights and single game. But as smarthome tech becomes cheaper and more prevalent, you can expect to see this sort of thing more often. To implement the plugin you need to download the source code from Github, then compile it and install it on a Minecraft server. HIt the link for full directions.

Source: Reddit /r/Minecraft

If you’re giving a presentation for a company or teaching a lesson in a math class, it’s likely you’ll be using fractions in the presentation. PowerPoint provides several different fraction structures, including skewed, stacked, linear, and small. Here’s how to use them.

There are a few ways to write fractions in PowerPoint. If you’re happy with the default fraction structure that you get by simply typing in the fraction, that’s great! If you’re discussing more complex equations, it might be worth looking at the other available structures in PowerPoint.

As mentioned before, the default fraction structure that you get by simply typing the fraction in PowerPoint is called a linear structure. Here’s an example of how that looks. In this case, the fraction maintains the current font style and size settings as the rest of the text in your paragraph.

When you use the tool provided by PowerPoint to insert the linear fraction, it reformats it a bit. Here’s an example of how that looks.

As you can see, it looks a bit different than when you type it in directly. The inserted version italicizes the text and uses the Cambria Math font.

PowerPoint also provides several other fraction structures if linear doesn’t work for you. Here’s a list of the different styles:

• Stacked Fraction
• Skewed Fraction
• Linear Fraction
• Small Fraction
• dy over dx
• cap delta y over cap delta x
• partial y over partial x
• delta y over delta x
• pi Over 2

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Ring

Video doorbells are one of the most useful smarthome gadgets to have for your house, but if you’d rather not deal with the wiring situation, you can buy battery-powered models that you simply just mount to an outside wall and connect to your Wi-Fi.

So why exactly would you want a battery-powered video doorbell? Perhaps the biggest reason is so that you don’t have to replace your existing wired doorbell, either because you want to keep the traditional doorbell there as a backup, or maybe you just don’t really have the knowledge on how to take your doorbell’s wiring and hook it up to your new video doorbell.

It’s also possible that your existing doorbell just doesn’t work all that great, either because the transformer is crapping out or it just doesn’t work at all. You may not want to hassle with fixing it or calling a handyman to do the same, especially if you’ve been wanting a video doorbell anyway.

RELATED: The Best Video Doorbells with HD Video, Motion Detection, and More

Unfortunately, there’s really only one reputable company that makes a decent video doorbell that can be completely powered off of battery—Ring. The good news is that Ring makes really good products, which have made appearances in several of our roundups.

Keep in mind, though, that if you go the battery-powered route, you’ll need the Ring Chime device in order to get traditional doorbell chime alerts inside your house. If you have an Echo smart speaker or display, you can set up chime announcements whenever someone comes to the door, but if not, the Ring Chime is highly recommended. Otherwise, you’ll just get alerts on your phone whenever someone rings the doorbell, which you may or may not see in time.

Without further adieu, let’s check out the best battery-powered video doorbells

If you want a battery-powered video doorbell, your best bet is the Ring Video Doorbell 2. You have the option of hooking it up to your existing doorbell wiring, but it can also just be powered off of the battery, which will last you a good few months in between necessary recharges.

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Still rocking those old wired headphones? Now might be the time to grab some stylish, wireless Beats by Dre.

Right now, Best Buy is selling the matte gold Beats Solo3 for just 160 dollars. That’s almost a 50 percent discount. These headphones also come with three free months of Apple music, making this a killer deal that’s hard to pass up.

If you aren’t up to speed on these new Beats headphones, then you’ll be excited about them after a quick run-down. The Beats Solo3 headphones are completely wireless, and they use Bluetooth to connect to your phone or computer. You don’t have to worry about charging them too often, because they have a massive 40-hour battery life. They’re built with comfortable, lightweight materials, and they have a built-in microphone that makes hands-free calls easy.

Of course, all of these features are compounded when you consider the well-known sound quality of Beats headphones and their famous flashy branding. A pair of Beats Solo3 headphones for just $160 is a crazy deal, and it won’t last forever. Just don’t forget that Best Buy is only discounting the matte gold color of these headphones. If you want a different color, you’re going to have to fork up more cash.

New Vizio TVs use motion smoothing to make the content you watch appear smoother. This looks good for some content, like sports, but can ruin the feel of movies and TV shows.

Motion smoothing works by increasing the framerate of content you watch on the TV. It does this by artificially adding extra frames in between each real frame, to sync up the content to the refresh rate of the display, which can sometimes double or even quadruple the perceived refresh rate and “smoothness” of the picture.

However, this doesn’t always look good, and often leads to blurry images and nasty artifacts. Plus, some people just don’t like higher refresh rates and would prefer to disable the option.

RELATED: Why Does My New HDTV’s Picture Look Sped Up and “Smooth”?

On Vizio TVs, open up the settings menu, select “Picture,” and then switch to the “Advanced Picture” tab. Here you can set different levels for the “Smooth Motion Effect,” like adjusting how much interpolation and motion blur is applied. You can disable it entirely by setting it to “Off.”

On some TVs, you might find the option may be under Picture Mode > Advanced Video Features.

If you have an older TV with the feature, you may have to consult your TV’s manual if you can’t find the option, which you can find online.

It’s no secret that the best games on the Nintendo Switch are made by Nintendo. Sadly, Nintendo tends to sell these games at full price year round. So when a good deal comes by, it’s irresistible.

Right now, Walmart is selling six of the best Nintendo Switch games for just $45. While a $15 discount may not sound like much, you have to remember that good Nintendo games are rarely ever discounted. To put it in perspective, Nintendo games didn’t even get a discount on Black Friday.

So if you’ve been avoiding the new Zelda and Mario games because of their price point, now may be your only chance to grab them at a reduced price. Who knows how long you’ll have to wait for the next discount?

Here are the six games that are on sale for $45:

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Starter Pack)
• Splatoon 2
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Super Mario Party
• Mario Tennis Aces

Some of these games are by far the best single player titles on the Switch (play the new Zelda ASAP), but most of them are killer multiplayer titles. Since this is one of the few discounts you’ll ever find for Switch games, why not grab a couple fun multiplayer games for the next family get together?

Nejron Photo / Shutterstock

Windows lets you assign individual apps to different playback devices, but all your Chrome tabs are treated as a single application. Here’s how to split up your Chrome tabs and play sound from different tabs through different audio devices.

A word of caution: installing Chrome extensions is more dangerous than you’d think, so we generally advise against adding too many of them. However, this one seems okay and is open source to boot. If you’re still cautious, you can manually set it to only work on certain sites, like YouTube, in Chrome’s extension settings.

RELATED: Browser Extensions Are a Privacy Nightmare: Stop Using So Many of Them

Click “Add to Chrome” on AudioPick’s download page, and accept the permissions. You’ll have a new icon in the menubar, which brings up the interface:

By default, it’s set to use your system’s main audio output, or more specifically whatever you’ve set Chrome to use in Windows’ per-app sound settings. You can change the current tab to use any other output you have set up in Windows.

AudioPick remembers your selection for each tab. Your selection also won’t affect other tabs. Current tabs keep using whatever you set them to, and new tabs will use the System Default Device.

This works with any device, even virtual ones, which makes this extension useful if you’d like to play music through your speakers while listening to something on your headphones, like game audio.

One bug we’ve found: occasionally, when hotplugging audio devices, the extension can get stuck and mute output. If this happens, just set it back to the System Default Device, and then re-enable your preferred device.

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Smartwatches aren’t just for adults any more. These kid-centric offerings are ideal for a kid who wants a smartwatch just like their mom and dad. There’s seemingly a smartwatch for every situation now, which is why your kids can also enjoy having their own smartwatch. We’ve checked out the best wearables for your kid, no matter their age or taste.

Now, in recent years, smartwatches for kids haven’t had the greatest of reputations. Some are littered with serious privacy and security flaws that are a major concern. We’ve made sure to pick out high-quality smartwatches that don’t have any such issues. That way, your kid can have fun, and you won’t have to worry about who’s snooping on them.

Here’s our pick of the best smartwatches for your child.

The VTech Kidizoom DX2 is a solid offering from VTech, a company well known for manufacturing durable tech toys for kids. It’s well priced, while also feature packed, and splash proof.

Kids can learn to tell the time with the analog and digital watch faces, as well as play some games. There’s a monster catching game that uses augmented reality technology, along with active play challenges in conjunction with the watch’s motion sensor and pedometer. Two cameras add to the fun with kids able to take videos, pictures, and selfies before customizing them or opting to turn them into watch faces.

It’s sure to be a hit with most kids, as well as practical too.

For parents, they don’t have to worry about kids accessing anything they don’t want them to (connectivity is super limited with everything about this watch being self-contained), plus they can limit their child’s usage via parental controls.

It is worth noting that a few years back, VTech was in the news for a serious data breach via its Learning Lodge service (the company’s online portal that covers everything from education apps to cosmetic downloads for connected VTech products). Some serious security patching and fines from the FTC later, they’ve fixed things up, but if you’re worried about that you can skip using the Learning Lodge functionality altogether.

Kids want to be able to chat to their friends, just like anyone else. The Kurio Watch 2.0+ is a watch that offers messaging features but with some security conscious limitations thrown in. The watch allows kids to message their friends via Bluetooth. They can share texts, emojis, selfies, doodles, and voice recordings with other Kurio watches and Android devices, providing you have the Kurio app installed.

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Sony/Blizzard/343 Studios

The future of game streaming is an open road. But we already have some markets we can use to draw a map: online video streaming services. If we’re not careful, game streaming will hit the same speed bumps.

As Microsoft, Sony, NVIDIA, Google, and others start to ramp up their game streaming subscription services, we can already see what the biggest problem for gamers will be: an increasingly fragmented selection. As platforms and consoles fight to get the biggest and best games on their streaming service, and only their streaming service, gamers will find that it’s impossible to play all the titles they want on just one of them. Not that this is anything new for the gaming industry, of course: it’s the good old-fashioned platform exclusivity problem, now spread out among more and more platforms.

To be clear about our terms: the “game streaming” in this article refers to playing video games in your home over a broadband connection, where the actual hardware that hosts the game (the PC or game console doing the number-crunching) is on a server somewhere.

Current examples include PlayStation Now, which streams a selection of PS2, PS3, and PS4 games to either a regular PS4 or a program running on your computer, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, which can stream full-power PC games to either the NVIDIA SHIELD set-top box or PCs, and Google’s Project Stream, which used a single PC game in a test run earlier this year.

We’re not talking about streaming video of someone else playing a game that you watch on a service like YouTube or Twitch.

If you’re not familiar with it: game streaming is very cool. It enables someone with minimal hardware, like, say, a $200 SHIELD, to play games that are otherwise limited to a $1000 gaming PC. It doesn’t need local media or massive 50GB downloads, and a relatively small monthly charge can give you access to hundreds of games, a la the Netflix setup. Regarding pure hardware, the only real downer is that you need a solid broadband connection: most of these services recommend 25 Mbps, but I’ve found that they tend to stutter on anything less than 50.

With those pieces in place, the experience is pretty amazing. You can play games at maximum graphical settings with almost perfect sync, including the fastest multiplayer shooters or fighters. And it’s only going to get better and more available: Microsoft is heavily rumored to be developing a streaming-only version of the next Xbox console, the service of which would undoubtedly be available on Windows, too. Even Nintendo is dipping a toe in: the company is currently streaming some older titles to SHIELD owners in China. Predictably, Amazon is looking to get in on this action as well.

Here’s where the “but” comes in.

Streaming video services are fighting tooth and nail to get original, exclusive content: Netflix’s has its high-profile Marvel series, conventional shows like Orange is the New Black, and even full theatrical movies like Bird Box. Hulu has exclusives like The Handmaid’s Tale and continuations like The Mindy Project. Amazon Prime video is home to shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Man in the High Castle.

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A handful of digital services will be terminated this year, and you’ve probably bought digital copies of games or movies from them. You’ve purchased this digital property, but there’s a chance that you won’t be able to keep it.

The number of times that users have been unable to access digital content that they have paid for is unprecedented. We aren’t discussing something theoretical, either; this is something that’s happened in the past and will continue happening in the future.

It’s fair to assume that a ton of digital services will shut down in 2019; that’s just the way things work. But the big three that we know about are the Wii Shop Channel, the Ultraviolet movie streaming service, and the Google+ social network. At some point or other, these were pretty popular services, and their termination may cut you off from the digital property for which you’ve paid.

The Wii Shop Channel was a service that sold digital copies of video games, and most people used it to purchase classic Nintendo games. The service was discontinued this past month (January 2019), and the only way to save your purchases was to download them on your Wii console—you couldn’t transfer those purchases to newer Nintendo consoles.

Ultraviolet is a video service that lets you purchase movies. Some DVD’s come with codes that you can use to redeem a digital copy of the movie on Ultraviolet. This is mostly a movie streaming service, but you can use it to download movies if you put in a little bit of work. Sadly, Ultraviolet is shutting down on July 31, 2019. If you want to save your Ultraviolet purchases, the company suggests transferring licenses to a competitor’s service, like Movies Anywhere. These competitors are probably just trying to poach the remaining Ultraviolet users, but if it weren’t for them, you’d lose all of your Ultraviolet purchases.

Google+ is shutting down on April 2, 2019, and Google is going to clear all of the data from the Google+ servers. But you have the opportunity to save your data (a form of digital property) before Google kills the service. This isn’t really property that you’ve purchased, but it’s valuable for personal and public archives, and the loss of this data will probably come as a source of mild frustration for archivists in the future.

Looking at this list, you’ll notice an annoying trend. These services, which are either failing or being discontinued, aren’t really doing anything to preserve your digital property. They put that responsibility on the customer.

It’s kind of understandable for Ultraviolet and Google+. Ultraviolet can’t afford to offer a solution, and Google+ was a flop from the get-go. But why is Nintendo operating like this? You’re not going to boot up your old Wii to play a download of Super Mario Bros 3, so why can’t you just transfer that purchase to one of the other four digital platforms that sell Super Mario Bros 3?

For that, you can blame DRM.

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1. Ray Bradbury
2. William Gibson
3. Arthur C. Clarke
4. Douglas Adams

Think you know the answer?

Mojave’s screenshot tool is leagues better than the older version, but it still saves all of your screenshots straight to your Desktop by default. You can change that pretty easily, though. Let’s take a look at how.

You can change the default location from the screenshot tool, so open it up by hitting Command+Shift+5.

In the screenshot tool, click the “Options” button.

At the top of the Options menu, under the Save To section, you’ll see the following built-in options:

• Desktop: The default option, which will save all your screenshots to a separate stack.
• Clipboard: Use this option to paste the shot into a different app. It’s probably the cleanest option if you don’t like cluttering up your disk with extra files.
• Messages: This option opens a new message with the screenshot attached so that you can send it to one of your contacts.
• Mail: This option creates a new email in the Mail app with the screenshot attached. If you’d like to send screenshots through a web client like Gmail, it’s best to use the Clipboard option and paste it in manually.
• Preview: This opens the screenshot in Preview, where you can edit it before saving to disk or copying to the clipboard.

At the bottom of those options, you can click the “Other Location” command to select a different folder where you want macOS to save your screenshots.

Whatever setting you choose, your Mac will remember this setting and use it for all screenshots in the future. You can also use the same menu to set a timer on the screenshot and set a few other options.

Mojave’s screenshot tool is fairly powerful, so if you need a refresher on what all the buttons do, we have a guide on that as well.

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If you have an older car, then the lack of Bluetooth can be kind of frustrating. But you can still make hands-free calls and stream music with a Bluetooth speakerphone.

RELATED: 9 Products To Help Make Your Dumb Car Smart

Bluetooth speakerphones are small devices with long battery life. They clip to your sun visor, and they’re a lot cheaper than a brand new stereo system. While these speakerphones may not be useful to people with newer cars, they can greatly improve the safety and experience of an older vehicle that doesn’t have Bluetooth. (If you’re interested in adding Bluetooth playback to your old car, we’d recommend checking out our guide to updating your old car with inexpensive tech.)

These speakerphones are best for hands-free calling. If you’re in a pinch and your stereo is broken, then you can use one of these to play music. Just be warned, it won’t sound as good as your average set of car speakers.

There’s a lot of confusing products in the world of Bluetooth speakerphones. Some of them are poorly designed, and others are very out of date. That’s why we’ve taken the time to find the best Bluetooth speakerphones, from budget to premium.

If you’re looking for an affordable, low-profile Bluetooth speakerphone, then you should consider the Avantree CK11. This speakerphone has a loud 2-watt speaker, a mute button, and a volume knob that easy to adjust without taking your eyes off the road. It has 22 hours of in-call battery life, so you don’t need to recharge it often. Plus, Google Assistant is built into the Avantree. A simple button press allows you to make voice commands, like “call Mom.”

This is a great product for people that want to add Bluetooth to their car without breaking the bank. It’s loud, it has a great battery life, and you can make outgoing calls without touching your phone. The Avantree does lack the higher sound quality found on some of the more expensive models featured here, however, so keep reading if your key concern is audio fidelity.

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WhatsApp made a name for itself as a secure messaging platform with its use of end-to-end encryption. Despite being owned by Facebook, it just released an update that furthers that pursuit of security, bringing support for Touch ID and Face ID, too.

Security is something that we should all be keen to increase, and while loose lips sink ships, poor instant messaging security can be even worse. If you don’t want your WhatsApp messages to fall into the wrong hands, here’s how to make sure your messages are as secure as possible.

WhatsApp has two main sources of security when it comes to keeping your messages away from anyone who may want to snoop, with the aforementioned end-to-end encryption now joined by biometric security as a way of locking those messages up.

All new WhatsApp chats are automatically set up with end-to-end encryption as standard, but you can also confirm that a chat is encrypted, should you want to be 100% certain. With encryption enabled, neither WhatsApp nor third-parties can read your messages, so it’s worth making sure it’s working if you’re at all concerned about your privacy.

To check a chat, open WhatsApp and select the chat in question. Next, tap the chat name at the top of the screen.

The next screen is where all of the options relating to the chat are found. Scroll down and look for the line titled “Encryption.” Here, you’ll see confirmation that the chat is encrypted. You can tap the line to see more information.

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Last year, it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg had an option to “unsend” messages that were sent on Facebook Messenger. Once that info came out, everyone who uses Messenger wanted in on the functionality too—and now Facebook is delivering.

So, to be clear, the current “delete” option on Facebook Messenger only removes the message for you—the recipient can still see it. That also means it’s still on Facebook’s Messenger servers. The Unsend feature, by contrast, will allow users to completely remove the message as if it never happened.

Of course, there’s a catch: it’s limited to a small, 10-minute window. That means you won’t be able to run back through old messages and unsend anything you want, which is both a bummer and a logical move. Still, if you say something and immediately regret it, you’ll be able to unsend it starting today. Here’s how.

It’s a pretty straightforward option: just long-press on the message. You’ll get the normal reaction emoji just above message, as well as some options down below: Copy, Remove, and Forward. This replaces the Copy, Forward, Delete options that have historically been present here.

Tapping the Remove option will then offer two options: “Remove for Everyone” and “Remove for You.” Pretty self-explanatory here, but if you tap the “Remove for Everyone” option it will unsend the message. The latter option will function in the same way the current Delete option works.

While it hasn’t been confirmed yet, this should work the same way in Messenger on the web: hover over a message, click the ellipsis menu button, then choose the Remove option. We’ll confirm this once the feature is available for us to use.

And that’s all there is to that. This functionality will start rolling out today to everyone.

As part of Microsoft’s push towards cloud and mobile apps, it has invested in several cloud-only additions to the old Office apps with which you’re familiar. One of these is Sway, a friendlier alternative to PowerPoint.

If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, you most likely associate PowerPoint with shiny-suited salespeople and managers with no public speaking skills. That’s not entirely fair, because you can produce brilliant presentations in PowerPoint. But, life isn’t fair, and PowerPoint is a big, heavy, corporate tool with a matching reputation.

Enter Sway, which is Microsoft’s attempt to provide a lightweight, cloud-only, story-telling application that is easier to use than PowerPoint and provides more narrative devices than simply slide after slide of bullet points.

Anybody can use Sway if they sign up for a free Microsoft account. People with an Office 365 can also use Sway. There are some differences between the free version and the Office 365 version, but these are mainly on the admin side and let you do things like password protect a Sway (oh yeah, Sway documents are called “Sways”) or remove the footer. There are also some differences in how much content you can fit into a single Sway, but the free version still provides more than enough for the average user.

Let’s take a look at why you might want to use Sway.

If there’s one thing more intimidating than staring at a blank Word document wondering what to write, it’s staring at a blank PowerPoint presentation wondering what to add. Presentations are by their nature intended for others to view, and plenty of people are terrified of public speaking to start with, so a blank PowerPoint can be enough to make you give up then and there.

This fear has always been one of the biggest problems with PowerPoint. Thankfully Microsoft has recognized this, and they’ve gone to great lengths to prevent this fear with Sway. Most people are not specialists in design and layout, so Microsoft has provided a bunch of templates (18 at the time of writing) for common presentations to help get you past the creator’s block and started designing.

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We’ve reached a point where new data breaches are announced on what seems like a weekly basis. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the breaches and your password situation, but a new Chrome extension from Google is here to help.

The extension, simply called Password Checkup, monitors your login credentials (usernames and passwords) and then lets you know if they’ve been part of a data breach. Simple enough.

Of course, allowing an extension to read all your username and password information can raise privacy concerns. Google understands this, so it promises to keep all your information private and anonymous:

Password Checkup was built with privacy in mind. It never reports any identifying information about your accounts, passwords, or device. We do report anonymous information about the number of lookups that surface an unsafe credential, whether an alert leads to a password change, and the domain involved for improving site coverage. You can learn more about how Password Checkup works at https://support.google.com/accounts?p=password-checkup.

Once installed, you just need to let it do its thing. It will run in Chrome and let you know if something is wrong. You can also give it a click just to make sure everything is okay if you want, but a simple glance should let you know everything you need to know.

Install Password Checkup from the Chrome Web Store

Makeblock

Nintendo Labo has somehow made cardboard-based tech toys something we take seriously, and it turns out Nintendo isn’t the only manufacturer keen to embrace the concept. Makeblock has joined in on the fun with their Neuron Explorer Kit.

The Makeblock Neuron Explorer Kit is rather impressive looking, arriving in a large and smart looking box. So it should, given its price tag of a somewhat eye-watering $200. It’s basically the deluxe/premium edition of the $120 priced Makeblock Neuron Inventor Kit which offers few sensors, and no cardboard templates.

For $200, you get twelve of Makeblock’s Neuron electronic blocks (kind of like intelligent Lego and referred to by Makeblock as simply “e-blocks”), some related accessories like a LED strip, temperature probe, and some connectors, along with cardboard templates for the four projects you can construct.

It’s all bundled in a way that’s similar to other premium products. Understandably so given it’s an Apple Store exclusive.

Everything is labeled clearly and you can pull out separate components to evaluate everything. Granted, there’s still that sense that you’ve spent $200 on a fancy arts and crafts project but at least it’s going to wow your kids on the first impression. At least it did when I took it for a whirl with my 10-year-old cousin.

There’s a lot to take in when you start pulling pieces out of the Explorer Kit. As an adult getting things prepped to show off to a young relative, I felt a little overwhelmed and I didn’t blame them when they looked baffled.

Thankfully, each block is lined up for you to see easily and they’re labeled too. You have a Smart Power block, Funny Touch, Ranging Sensor, Light Sensor, Knob, Temperature Sensor, LED Panel, LED Strip Driver, Dual DC Motor Driver, Buzzer, and two DC Motors. Fortunately, you don’t need all of these parts for every project.

There are also plenty of options as to how you want to start interacting. You can download the Swift Playgrounds app for your iPad, the mBlock 5 desktop software for your PC or Mac, or you can opt for the Neuron app on your iPhone.

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Managing your smart home can be difficult, especially if you live with other people. But things would be easier if you had a smart home hub, like Amazon’s Echo Show.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about smart hubs, and it’s clear that the best smart hubs are capable of doing unique things. They can expand the way we think about smart tech, and we want them in every room of our house. The Echo Show is one of those products. It’s a fine smart hub, but it’s also a wireless speaker, a countertop TV, a recipe book, a video chatting device, and so much more.

The Echo Show is essentially a premium version of the Echo Dot. It’s a smart home hub with a big 10″ screen and a big ol’ speaker. But the Show has many standout features that make it a very unique device. The Show is integrated with Amazon Alexa, and it uses eight different microphones to make sure that Alexa always hears your commands. It has an HD camera and super responsive touch screen that anybody can appreciate.

Right now, the Amazon Echo Show bundle is on sale for $180. This bundle, which includes a 2nd generation Amazon Echo and a Philips Hue smart bulb, usually retails for $245. Just keep in mind that the Echo Show is on backorder right now, so it may take a while to get to you.