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When Android was fresh and new, it was desperate for someone to take home screens seriously. That person was Federico Carnales, and his app was LauncherPro. It quickly became the darling child of the Android world, but it disappeared just as fast.

Smart bulbs were the first smart home devices I ever bought, and it didn't take long before they started causing complaints in my home. While smart bulbs can be very useful, allowing you to control your lights remotely or with automations, they have some glaring issues that can cause a lot of frustration. Thankfully, a cheap NFC tag was enough to solve the most annoying problems.

Amy Poehler is that fun, easygoing friend who's somehow good at everything she does. With the launch of the Good Hang podcast, the 54-year-old Parks and Recreation star has quickly amassed a devoted audience that continues to climb.

After releasing the first episode in March of 2025, Good Hang has racked up 709,000 subscribers on YouTube, 2 million on Instagram, and 757,300 on TikTok. Plus, it won the inaugural award for Best Podcast at the Golden Globes.

The format of each 60(ish)-minute episode is pretty straightforward: Poehler has a sit-down chat in a question-and-answer style that's at once engaging and delightful. But the power of its success lies with Poehler herself. She is so enjoyable to watch (or listen to, depending on where you get your podcasts) and clearly loves learning about what lights people up.

In its first 52 weeks on the internet, the podcast has featured a parade of convivial, high-profile guests, including Michelle Obama, Ryan Coogler, and Gwyneth Paltrow, plus a steady stable of Poehler’s former co-stars and collaborators.

The Saturday Night Live alum is effervescent in her role as host, giggling with friends about past projects, exploring the power of female friendships, and celebrating other creators and entertainers across a wide range of genres.

For anyone who's missed having a weekly dose of this comedy queen, Good Hang hits all the right spots.

Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage to discover the internet's most exciting voices or see more of this year’s Mashable 101.

It's not often you get two of the most accomplished NFL players of all time in the same family, but that's the Kelce brothers for you. Travis Kelce, 36, is a Tight End for the Kansas City Chiefs, while his older brother Jason Kelce, 38, was a Center for the Philadelphia Eagles from 2008 until 2024. Jason is widely regarded as one of the best centers in NFL history, while Travis is considered one of the most accomplished tight ends.

Just in case they weren't busy enough, they co-host a weekly sports podcast, New Heights, which has 3.6 million followers on Instagram (@newheightshow) and 3.16 million subscribers on YouTube. In 2024, the podcast signed a deal with Amazon for over $100 million. The name is a nod to the brothers' upbringing in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and the show pulls in big-name guests such as Jon Hamm, Ryan Gosling, and a certain person named Taylor Swift.

Travis and Taylor are betrothed to be wed and announced their engagement in an internet-breaking post with the caption, "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married." When Taylor made her New Heights debut in August 2025, the podcast achieved record-breaking viewership. The episode gained almost 20 million views in five days on YouTube, prompting a 3,000 percent surge in new Spotify listeners, and a 618 percent rise in female listenership to the podcast.

Travis has 7.7 million followers on Instagram (@killatrav) and 3 million followers on TikTok (@traviskelce), while Jason has 3.2 million followers on Instagram (@jason.kelce) and 626,200 followers on TikTok (@jasonkelce).

Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage to discover the internet's most exciting voices or see more of this year’s Mashable 101.

If you've ever been in a minor fender bender and wished you had footage to back you up, you'll understand why dashcams have gone from niche accessory to near-essential kit. The VIOFO A329S 3CH takes that logic further than most—it doesn't just cover the front, it covers the front, the cabin, and the rear simultaneously—all in 4K, 2K, and 2K.

The advertising industry presents several major awards, such as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the CLIO Awards. Now, a new awards show honors the best AI-generated ads.

The Generated Awards took place on May 27 in New York City, where the Generated Group presented 9 awards to AI video creators and brands. Many of the nominated ads were "spec ads," unofficial creations by AI hobbyists and creators. However, ads from Google and the Gorilla Glue Company were also considered.

For instance, "Pac-Man Reimagined," winner of the "Best Visual Effects" award, is not actually an advertisement from Bandai Namco Entertainment, which owns Pac-Man.

Still, the event shows just how quickly the advertising agency is adapting to new AI technology. Last year at Google I/O, the company dropped the AI video model Veo 3 like a bomb, and ever since, we've had to question every viral video we've seen. Since then, we've seen rapid advancements in text-to-video models. AI video creators often use multiple video models, including Seeddance 2.0, Kling 3.0, and Luma Ray2, as well as tools to improve the resolution to 4K.

Google has explicitly pitched Veo as a tool for quickly creating advertisements at scale, and multiple ad agencies now specialize in creating low-cost AI ads. Coca-Cola's most recent holiday campaign was centered on a controversial AI video, and Jeep has several AI-generated commercials on the air now.

As I've said before, whether you like it or not, I think artificial intelligence in advertising is a train that can't be stopped.

Over email, I asked Tanya Porquez, the Generated Group CEO, if AI-generated ads should have mandatory disclosure requirements. She said, "I don’t think there should be a required disclosure unless there is a legal requirement."

"We’re going to have a crawl-walk-run situation where 'made with AI' disclosures are present to build public trust. There is a transparency issue where people want to know that they’re not being manipulated by AI tools. For example, in New York they’ve passed legislation to require disclosure of AI-created people, something we welcome. I can understand why they’re asking for it now at this early state."

The Generated Ads: See the winning ads

To see what advertising could look like in the near future, I've gathered all the award winners into this piece. You can watch them for yourself to see if you can tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

Some of the videos are more obvious than others, and feature the tell-tale glossy sheen that's a hallmark of many AI videos. However, as with AI-generated images, the tells are becoming harder and harder to spot.

Though this should be obvious, please note that all of these videos contain AI-generated content.

Best storytelling: "Perfection by Mistake" by Michal Kuzminski Best Direction: "Meet the New Chief Tough Officer at The Gorilla Glue Company" by The Gorilla Glue Company Best Audio Experience: "Instant Grind, Nescafe" by Blackbrightstudio View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Curious Refuge (@curiousrefuge)

Fictional Ad of the Year: "Puppramin" by PJ Accetturo Spec Ad of the Year: "Vans" by Çağlasın Yılmaz and Bilgehan Yoldas Commercial of the Year: "The Watch" by Runway Creative and J. Felipe Orozco

Replacing a polished, multi-billion dollar service like Spotify or Apple Music with self-hosted software seems daunting, but it actually isn't.

At the Summer Games Fest in Los Angeles, Capcom teased the release of the much-anticipated remake of Resident Evil: Code Veronica, a game that was originally released on the Sega Dreamcast in the year 2000, before many of the franchise's modern fans were even born.  

In classic Capcom fashion, the trailer hints at far more than it reveals, opening with a high-angle night shot of Paris before descending into first-person POV as a woman (Claire Redfield, we assume, the heroine of the original game and of the beloved Resident Evil 2) enters a quaint French hotel where it's heavily hinted that her brother Chris has been staying. We get a brief glimpse of the disheveled hotel room (look closely, and you can see the iconic Resident Evil lighter on the coffee table) before an unknown person knocks on the door and the music turns ominous. 

SEE ALSO: 'Alien: Isolation 2' trailer hints at the terror to come

Our first-person character opens the door only to be accosted by an unseen stranger, and suddenly both the music and the visuals switch up, giving us glimpses of factories, dead insects, gold-encrusted pistols, and a scary-looking island being approached by helicopters before the camera takes us back to Paris in a third-person perspective, showing us Claire Redfield with a knife to her neck. 

When the title screen emerges, we're given another important clue: the new game is going to be called Resident Evil: Veronica rather than Code Veronica, which indicates that Capcom will probably treat this title more like a reimagining rather than a straight remake, which is more or less how they treated the next-gen remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4.

The last thing we see, after a shot of some menacing zombies, is the year 2027, which suggests the game has been in development for some time and that fans still have a wait ahead of them. But given the fan reaction across social media, Capcom might have another hit on its hands.

Most homelabs begin with dashboards because dashboards help manage mess and make things look clear. Most people use things like Grafana panel, Portainer, a Proxmox summary tab, and an uptime monitor to make a bunch of services look like infrastructure until you realize that the system only helps when you are already looking at it. That is where Gotify started to make sense. A dashboard waits for me to check it, but a good alert tells me when something needs a look.

You might think that an all-SSD NAS is a waste of money—and you'd be right. However, I still find a use for one in my homelab. Here's how I use my all-SSD NAS when I have several other storage systems already in my homelab.

The most exciting part of building a smart home is adding new gadgets. Whether it's a cool new sensor, smart plug, camera, or light bulb, it's easy to keep expanding your setup over time—especially now that even inexpensive devices are Matter-compatible.

If your Linux system is running low on storage, you don't need to spend hours going through files and deleting what you don't need. There's an easier way to do it. Let me show you what I do when I need to declutter and clear up space.

Are you in the mood for a rom-com this weekend? Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein star in Office Romance, a new movie now streaming on Netflix.

Bluetooth is one of those convenient features we all use so much that we often take for granted. In recent years, Bluetooth quality, range, and reliability have greatly improved, but we still deal with frustrating disconnections at times. We've all been there, forgetting a device and trying to re-pair it, but there's one setting that should eliminate most of those problems.

Supports are a necessary but often frustrating part of 3D printing. These structures serve as a base for overhanging elements, so that your model doesn’t warp or sag in unexpected ways.

Building an Excel dashboard usually means spending an entire afternoon on layout design. So, I pitted ChatGPT against Gemini to see which tool automates the grunt work best—and only one came close to what I hoped for.

From swarms of lovebugs along the Gulf Coast to dust storms on the Southern Plains and pollen blanketing nearly the entire country, keeping your car clean this time of year is a real challenge. And that’s not even counting the daily barrage of rain, mud, and road grime.

Who’s up for a weekend full of thrilling, pulse-pounding entertainment on Amazon Prime Video? These types of shows thrive on tension, unexpected twists, and complex characters to pull audiences into worlds where danger lurks around every corner and nothing is ever quite what it seems, and that's where we're heading.

Buying an ESP32 development board can be a little confusing for a newcomer. These dev kits are available from a variety of different manufacturers at slightly different prices, and some even come embedded in other devices.

Hulu tends to fly under the radar next to its flashier rivals like Netflix and Prime Video (it also pumps out fewer titles each month), but tucked inside that Disney+ bundle is one of the best catalogs in streaming, including stunning FX shows like Alien: Earth and The Bear, a bottomless true-crime well, comedies, thrillers, and more.