Blogroll

That USB port on the back of your router looks like an easy way to share storage at home, maybe even set up a full-blown NAS. It does work, for what it's worth. But the router has a different main job, and using it as a file server comes with costs most people don’t expect until their network slows down. Here's why that's a bad idea.

If you're an adult, you're probably not going to spend your night getting candy from strangers, but that doesn't mean Halloween can't be magical for you as well. Whether you're going to a costume party or taking your own kids trick-or-treating, there are plenty of good reasons to dress up tonight, and plenty of great costume ideas floating around social media.

SEE ALSO: Halloween 2026 deals: Score free food from Chipotle, Dunkin', Krispy Kreme, Burger King, and more

Here are some of our favorite costumes, either because they're creative or funny or just incredibly well executed:

A throwback to one of the greatest children's shows of all time This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Total Drama Island fit we didn't know we needed This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Godfather of Soul himself This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. So cute you could eat them This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. And the streamers went all out This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. An homage to Willem Defoe This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Silver Surfer rides tonight This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

An alarming new survey from media and tech non-profit Common Sense Media has found that children begin interacting with AI chatbots at an alarmingly early age — with nearly half of 9-12-year-olds having bypassed the 13+ age restriction common to most LLMs. 

The survey is titled The 2026 Common Sense Media Census: Tech and Media Use by Tweens and Teens. In the paper, the organization conducted interviews with more than 1,200 American children aged 9 to 17, asking questions about AI use as well as television, gaming, and social media habits. More importantly, the interviews asked these young children how they feel about their own media consumption habits.

SEE ALSO: Lawsuit says ChatGPT persuaded person to stop taking epilepsy meds, leading to her death

Standout findings include the sharp rise in smartphone ownership, with more than half of 11-year-olds already owning a smartphone and near-universal smartphone access by age 17, as well as the incredible amount of time spent on screens: eight hours per day for teenagers and five hours per day for tweens. 

Because social scientists were caught unprepared by the massive impact social media has had on teen mental health, there's a strong push for more studies into the effects of AI interaction on teenagers, especially in the areas of school preparedness and mental health. 

A second study, titled "Exploring Artificial Intelligence [AI]: Understanding Relationships between AI Use and Mental Health Among Middle and High School Students," was commissioned by the JEF Foundation, a mental health advocacy group. They interviewed more than 5,000 American middle and high school students from 21 different schools between Oct. 2025 and April 2026, which resulted in the following four findings, taken verbatim from their report:

• Students use AI for a wide range of cognitive and emotional support, including turning to AI when they’re struggling emotionally.

• Certain uses of AI are associated with worse mental health and well-being outcomes, and greater lifetime history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

• Students who use AI while emotionally struggling have worse mental health and well-being outcomes, and greater history of suicidal thoughts and attempts.

• Patterns of AI use differ across demographics, with important implications for mental health disparities.

JED Foundation psychologist Kayla Anderson summarized the findings to NPR: "When young people are using AI, when they're in emotional distress, they're more likely to report poor mental health and well-being outcomes," but she was also quick to stress that the study did not establish causality. In other words, they don't know if AI is making teen mental health worse, or if teens with worse mental health are gravitating to AI chatbots for help. 

Thankfully, there are already a slew of new studies set to conclude soon investigating whether causality can be established. If so, expect lawmakers to come down hard on AI companies to impose more stringent age restrictions and accept greater liability for poor mental health outcomes among teenagers.

Documentaries are a great weekend watch, giving you a glimpse into some of the biggest events in history. You get to sit back on your couch and watch something for an hour and a half, and you don't even have to feel guilty about it because you're learning something, or at least that's what I tell myself.

In the good old days, you could buy software outright and then use it forever without needing to pay anything more. These days, you're far more likely to have to pay a monthly subscription to keep using your software. However, the era of software subscriptions may be coming to an end, as AI-assisted developers are releasing free replacements for entire software suites.

While Ryobi tools at Home Depot are exclusive to the retailer, Ryobi is owned by TTI, which also owns Milwaukee and Ridgid tools. Home Depot is the only retail company authorized to sell Ryobi-branded products. You won’t find them at Lowe’s, Harbor Freight, Menards, or other big retail chains.

In a vacuum, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro is still one of the beefiest and most capable streaming boxes around. Its Tegra X1+ chip coupled with 3GB of RAM is powerful enough for any video file, you get support for most major HDR and audio formats, and the streamer also offers extra goodies such as excellent AI upscaling, gigabit LAN, and two USB 3.0 ports.

It's amazing what you can find when it comes to used computers. The current strange pricing of computer hardware notwithstanding, for the most part computers devalue rapidly. So a machine from ten years ago will have lost nearly all of its value.

One of the best things about Home Assistant is how customizable it is. Instead of installing a huge piece of software that supports every smart home device known to man, you can install specific integrations for the devices you own. There are also powerful plugins, including what were previously called add-ons but are now known as apps, that make Home Assistant even more powerful.

My keyboard doesn’t have a Delete key. It doesn’t have F1 through F12, Home, End, or even a tilde, and I type thousands of words on it every day without missing any of them. That’s because my keyboard has layers: hold one thumb key and the entire keyboard turns into something else entirely. Once I started building my workflow around layers, a normal keyboard started to feel like it was missing something.

After the success of HBO's horror TV show It: Welcome to Derry, released one year ago this month, it was no surprise that the network would renew the show for a second season, but nobody predicted that it would launch with a surprise special episode, released right on time for Halloween.

"A Story of Derry" is a 30-minute bonus episode that simultaneously points fans to the season ahead and takes them back in time to the very origins of the entity that would become Pennywise the Clown. 

SEE ALSO: 'IT: Welcome to Derry's chaotic ending, explained

Two YouTube/TikTok shorts were used to announce the special episode, the first more of a tease than the second, but both give us insight into the likely timeline of the series: sometime in the distant past, before the American founding. 

The episode itself follows three children venturing alone into the Western Wood, where they encounter not only a malevolent, terrifying spirit but also something cosmic and beautiful, a counterweight to the horror and violence of Pennywise.

Fans of the series will love this mini-episode, but they will also surely be disappointed because the second season of It: Welcome to Derry isn't in production yet and therefore has no release window, let alone a release date. In a recent interview with the New York Post, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane promised that the new season would exceed the terror and suspense of the last, and indicated that they're actively writing it now, so a late-2027 or early-2028 release date is still a possibility.

In the meantime, horror fans should definitely check out "A Story of Derry," not only for its own merits but for the additional backstory it brings to the Pennywise lore. 

In case you didn't know, the popular Plex self-hosting media service also supports music. You can take your CD collection, rip them as high-quality lossless files, and then play that music back through the Plex client.

Some of Excel's most useful functions are also its simplest. SORT is a good example: with a single argument, you can alphabetize a list, and with a couple more, you can sort an entire dataset. Better still, the results update automatically when the data in your source range changes, so you don't have to repeat the process every time a number or name changes.

According to reporting from Tom's Hardware, Anthropic's Claude AI has quietly started restricting the kinds of work it will do, including modding, decompiling, or reverse-engineering video game code. And though there has as yet been no official announcement about why, the reason is still pretty obvious.  

The video game community has been in the news a lot lately, first because of the GTA6 leaks that went mega-viral and spurred Take-Two Interactive into getting subpoenas against both Microsoft and Discord in the hopes of finding the responsible parties, and next because the hacking and modding community discovered how much easier AI makes their job.

SEE ALSO: Claude's new smart reports tell bosses when workers are 'off-topic'

First, game decompilers went into overdrive, playing around with the source code of multiple different video games to, for example, put Nintendo's Mario inside the dark gothic world of Elden Ring, or import Spider-Man into the Batman: Arkham City game, seamlessly blending the mechanics of one character into the world of another. Next came the ports: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made playable in a browser, without the original developers or copyright owners having any say in the matter. 

These initial modifications and ports were already giving gaming companies nightmares, teasing a future without system gatekeeping, but things really got out of hand with the PlayStation 5 jailbreak, which resulted in everything from backward compatibility with older-gen PlayStation games to cross-platform play, with users figuring out how to run Xbox-exclusive titles like Halo 2 and acclaimed Nintendo titles like Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a jailbroken PS5.

Given the potential number of lawsuits these jailbreaks could cause, and the astronomically high nature of the monetary damages, it's no surprise that AI companies are scrambling to shut down or severely restrict these pathways, but it's also deeply ironic. As Tom's Hardware reporter Bruno Ferreira notes, this sudden concern for copyright "highlights the irony of frontier AI companies that copied the world's information and art for their training sets and are now concerned with copyright infringement." 

There's also the ugly truth that, if one company makes a gesture toward respecting copyright law or basic ethics, the bad actors can find another LLM that won't (or hasn't yet) taken the same precautions, creating a kind of AI arms race driven by perverse incentives: the least ethical AI might be poised to become the most popular.

Ever wonder why some products are so well represented on 3D printing model repositories? Popularity plays a part, but many get a helping hand from high above with official models and CAD references. Some of these are gimmicks, while others have fostered a vibrant community of model designers.

TL;DR: The Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Day (Espeon) and Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Night (Umbreon) are available to preorder now on Walmart.

Opens in a new window Credit: The Pokemon Company Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Day (Espeon) $495 at Walmart
  Shop Now at Walmart Opens in a new window Credit: The Pokémon Company Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Night (Umbreon) $509.99 at Walmart
  Shop Now at Walmart

Next week is going to be absolutely huge for Pokémon TCG collectors. We've had a wave of announcements in recent weeks, so it's hardly been quiet lately, but the Day and Night Ultra-Premium Collections and the Delta Reign Expansion are set to release on Nov. 6. Now that's big news.

With the launch day fast approaching, preorder offers are getting competitive. Amazon listings went live weeks ago but have since vanished. That has left Walmart offering the best rate on the Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Day (Espeon) and Pokémon TCG 30th Celebration Ultra-Premium Collection Night (Umbreon).

Both high-end boxes are currently available to preorder at Walmart for way under market price. That's a rare deal that will sell quickly.

TCGplayer's market price for the Day Box is currently $531.48, compared to Walmart's $495. The market price for the Night Box is $567.59, compared with Walmart's $509.99.

Both Ultra-Premium Collections come packed with 29 30th Celebration booster packs, one Classic Collection booster pack, custom metal coins, deck boxes, card sleeves, and damage-counter dice. Of course, a lot of the hype comes from the exclusive promo cards.

The Day collection includes the exclusive Espeon ex promo card with a Daytime Pikachu ex promo card and an Espeon playmat. The Night box includes the exclusive Umbreon ex promo card with a Futuristic-rarity Pikachu ex promo card and an Umbreon playmat.

It's not easy finding real value for money in the trading card market, so scoring preorders for way under market value is pretty special. And that goes double for a collection like this.

Amazon Fire Tablets restrict you to the Amazon Appstore, but they run Fire OS, a custom version of Android. That means you can install Google's Play Store to gain access to millions of Android apps and games, including Google apps like Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, and more.

I‘ve always been a fan of home theater and TV technology. Over the decades, I’ve tried many of the “next big things” the industry has offered: projectors, rear-projection TVs, a 43” tube TV that felt huge at the time, and for a short while a curved TV. Looking back, it’s been a fun ride, but many so-called “game changers” never lived up to the hype.

Several years ago, I was really into playing the bass. The playing styles of Les Claypool, Geddy Lee, Arthur Barrow, and Victor Wooten inspired the heck out of me. So I bought a few basses and a couple of amps. One amp in particular, a Blackstar 3W practice amp, ended up being one of my most used amplifiers (with both bass and guitar). Last year, the input jack stopped working entirely, and I thought the device was completely dead. I turned out to be wrong about that, so I repurposed it into something new.

All the popular power tool brands make a ton of excellent tools, but when it comes to accessories and other gear, Ryobi is at the top. The company has a loyal following of DIYers and offers over 350 products that all work with its 18V ONE+ battery system. Ryobi makes a bunch of weird tools, and the company recently announced a brand-new combo they're calling a "Storm Preparation Kit" that you'll surely love.