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If you want information about saving energy during a massively unpleasant heatwave, the United States Department of Energy doesn't seem willing to help.

The Verge and others reported that the Department of Energy conducted a broad, sweeping purge of roughly 6,000 pages on its website related to energy conservation this week. While no one in the federal government has provided definitive confirmation of why this happened, the deletions came shortly after New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani shared an advisory on social media urging New Yorkers to set their indoor air conditioners to 78 degrees in the middle of a heatwave.

Conservative accounts immediately pounced on Mamdani's post, accusing the mayor of spreading the horrors of communism by asking people to keep their homes at a moderate temperature during a weekend in which New York City reached triple-digit temperatures. However, many quickly pointed out that the Department of Energy's official stance mirrored Mamdani's guidance. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, had also shared identical guidance in the past during heatwaves.

Within 24 hours or so of Mamdani's announcement, eagle-eyed internet users noticed that the Department of Energy had deleted its own web pages espousing the same advice.

Again, no one knows for certain why these web pages were deleted at the precise time they were. But the timing is suspect, and given the Trump administration's previous actions, it's not unreasonable to assume it was done out of pettiness.

Samsung wants to make its own software, but it’s also required to ship Google apps if it wants access to the Play Store. This means Galaxy devices come with an overabundance of icons, some of which run in the background regardless of whether you ever open them. Here’s what’s safe to purge.

Android has come a long way since its early days, and whether you're a long-time user or recently switched from iOS, tons of excellent features are hiding in the shadows. I'm constantly showing friends and family several lesser-known Android features, and here are a few of my favorites.

It’s always worrying when your phone feels warmer than it should, but there are levels of severity. Slight warmth after a particularly long streaming session is usually fine, but scalding and a burning odor are the most concerning. If this happens to you, it’s a sign that shouldn’t be ignored.

When I first switched from Plex to Jellyfin, I was immediately taken with how easy it was to set up and how reliable it seemed in use. And yet it took a while before I discovered all of Jellyfin's capabilities. What seems like a fairly stripped-back app actually hides many powerful features that can enhance your user experience.

Homelabbers love to tinker with their equipment, and nowhere is that more evident than when you discuss storage or network speeds. After you've been self-hosting for a while, it basically happens automatically. You start thinking, "What if I upgraded my network to 10 gigabit?" Should I install fiber?

I didn't think much of clipboard managers until I installed Ditto on a whim. Months later, it's the tool I'd least want to lose, quietly saving me from re-typing and re-copying dozens of times a day.

Your DNS provider affects every internet-connected device in your home, which is why one of the most common networking tips is to switch to a faster provider like Cloudflare or Google Public DNS. While that's often an improvement over your ISP's default DNS, using the same DNS for every device is rarely the best approach.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, your choice of Android phones usually boils down to a Samsung Galaxy versus its Google Pixel equivalent. And that's sometimes a difficult choice: do you go with Google's "pure" official devices, or Samsung's heavily customized and sometimes beefier hardware?

A new fleet of autonomous taxis has arrived in one of America's worst traffic cities.

Specifically, Tesla's Robotaxi service is now active in Miami, according to a post from the company on X. The same post included a map of a relatively small portion of West Miami, where you can currently hail a Robotaxi. Presumably, more of the city will be included in the service at some point, but for now, the robot cars are limited to those areas.

This follows a limited rollout in Houston and Dallas back in April. Tesla's Robotaxi service has been slowly expanding across the United States, and if precedent holds, the cabs will be available in a larger portion of Miami in the near-ish future, as Austin went from limited to full availability last month. Other cities that could get Robotaxi service this year include Orlando, Tampa, and Phoenix, though, as Electrek pointed out back in April, the company has not been especially good about meeting plans on time.

It should also be noted that these Robotaxis do not come with safety monitors. This is certainly one way to get around in Miami without worrying as much about the city's notoriously awful traffic problems, but keep in mind the risks involved.

Samsung smartwatches like the Galaxy Watch 8 are incredible fitness trackers and productivity tools. However, the NFC (Near Field Communication) feature on the Galaxy Watch is largely out of bounds for smart home use, and that's a shame.

Most programming languages and compilers are designed to be practical. Maybe reality falls short—perhaps performance is worse than it should be, syntax becomes confusing or esoteric, or compiler optimizations wind up breaking code, but they're designed to be useful.

Midjourney is attempting to turn the tables on the Hollywood studios suing it for copyright infringement, asking a federal judge to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery to disclose their internal use of artificial intelligence, according to a Variety report published this week.

The discovery dispute is the latest chapter in a copyright battle that began in June 2025, when Disney and Comcast's Universal filed suit, accusing Midjourney of enabling large-scale infringement of copyrighted characters. That original complaint described Midjourney as a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" that generated unauthorized recreations of characters, including Darth Vader and Elsa, as previously reported by this outlet.

Warner Bros. Discovery joined the fight three months later, in September 2025, accusing Midjourney of "brazen theft" involving characters such as Superman, Batman, and Bugs Bunny, and seeking $150,000 per infringed work.

More than a year into the litigation, Midjourney has countered with a "fair use" defense, arguing the studios engage in comparable AI practices internally. Per Variety, the company's attorney, Bobby Ghajar, wrote that if the studios are "doing the very thing they seek to punish," that evidence is central to Midjourney's fair-use and "unclean hands" arguments. The company is seeking access to the studios' AI business plans, training datasets, model weights, and board presentations on AI.

A magistrate judge ruled against Midjourney's broader discovery request in mid-June 2026, limiting the studios' disclosure obligations to consumer-facing AI tools rather than internal systems. Midjourney has since asked Judge John Kronstadt to overturn that ruling.

The studios' attorney, David Singer, has dismissed the effort as a "fishing expedition" meant to deflect from Midjourney's own conduct, according to Variety's reporting.

I've owned my Kindle 4 for more than a decade, and it's served me well over the years. When Amazon announced that it was ending support for this model, I finally bit the bullet and jailbroke it. I installed the KOReader app not really knowing what to expect, but it can support way more formats than the default Amazon software.

Microsoft is most famous for Windows and Microsoft Office, but in their 50-year history, they've tried dozens of unusual experiments. Some of them flopped completely, while others informed and inspired later technological innovations.

Does it ever feel to you like there's so much going on in the world it's hard to keep up? A lot of events mean a lot of news, and I was tired of wasting time reading news I didn't really care about instead of news that I did. I decided to set up my own daily newsletter that I could read on my Kindle, full of things I was genuinely interested in.

Android Auto has been one of the biggest quality-of-life upgrades for drivers over the past decade. It's made navigation, music, calls, and messages far easier and safer to access on the road.

Last year, I bought a small Cudy TR3000 travel router with the kind of confidence people have before a project quietly disappears into a drawer. The idea was simple enough. I wanted a router I could carry around, plug in anywhere, and reach the devices on its local network from outside. Then I did what many of us do with small useful-looking gadgets. I put it aside, told myself I would set it up soon, and let it sit around for months.

I used to work in broadcasting. One of my first jobs in television was running cables from a production truck all over football fields, baseball stadiums, and makeshift studios. We worked with coax cables frequently during that time, mostly using the N-style connector for truck-to-field links and BNC connectors for indoor, lower-powered work.

Windows is packed with features that rarely get the spotlight. While most users stick to the basics, there are plenty of useful tools and settings buried deep in the operating system that can make everyday tasks a little easier. I decided to explore the deepest layers and found some worth sharing.