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Netflix is no stranger to dealing with online movie thieves, but now it's dealing with the fallout from physical theft. Writer and producer Simon Afram and his production company Op-Fortitude are suing Netflix for $105 million in damages after a master copy of the upcoming Nicolas Cage WWII movie Fortitude was stolen from the streaming giant's Los Angeles office.

The Ford Escape Hybrid has never enjoyed the same recognition as rivals like the Toyota RAV4 Hybrid and Honda CR-V Hybrid. Yet with up to 42 mpg in city driving, it has quietly remained one of the most efficient compact SUVs on sale.

The arrival of August means that HBO Max has announced its lineup of new shows and movies coming to the platform. Subscribers have a hearty selection of new content to choose from, but first, the month kicks off with a new original docuseries from the director of Tiger King that’s both shadowy and gripping.

Finding a genuinely fun performance car has become harder than ever. Sports cars have become increasingly expensive, while many affordable performance models force you to sacrifice comfort, practicality, or everyday usability in exchange for speed.

Google and Samsung are both trying to address battery drain issues on their Android phones, and not always successfully. The two have released July 2026 software updates that have alternately fixed and created battery problems.

AI companies have spent years pulling training material from the internet. Now, as more of the web fills with AI-generated writing, some are looking for text in a place largely untouched by chatbots: used-book shelves.

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Until July 28, ISBNdb, a company that operates an online book database, advertised its ability to source as many as 1 million physical books per order for AI developers. The since-deleted page offered books “tailored to your LLM training needs,” according to 404 Media, including older, specialized, rare, and out-of-print titles gathered from used bookstores and other catalogs.

The company also promised confidentiality. Its marketing materials advertised a “strict NDA on every engagement” and said clients’ identities, strategies, and acquisition targets would not be disclosed. That secrecy attracted attention because converting physical books into AI training data can involve destructive scanning: cutting off their bindings, feeding the loose pages through industrial scanners, and discarding or recycling the originals.

By July 28, ISBNdb had removed the sourcing page and its promise of an NDA. The company said the service had been part of “exploring demand” and that it had “chosen to pivot away from that direction," in a news update.

Still, ISBNdb’s brief sales pitch offered a glimpse into a book-buying operation that one major AI developer has already carried out on a much larger scale. Federal court records show that Anthropic purchased and scanned millions of physical books, while used-book sellers in the United States and Europe have recently reported unusual bulk orders for obscure and out-of-print titles.

The reports have opened several practical questions: Why have older books become so valuable to AI developers, how widespread is destructive scanning, and what happens to the originals once their pages become training data?

Why AI companies are hunting for old books

Older books offer something that has become surprisingly difficult to guarantee online: writing produced entirely by humans.

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Large language models are trained on enormous quantities of text collected from websites, articles, books, code repositories, and other digital sources. Since generative AI tools became widely available, however, the internet has filled with machine-written summaries, product listings, social posts, and articles.

That creates a problem for developers assembling new training datasets. If a model is trained too heavily on material produced by earlier models, it can begin reinforcing their mistakes while losing some of the variety and less common information contained in the original human data. Researchers call the process “model collapse.”

A physical book printed before the current AI boom offers a relatively clean alternative. Unlike a webpage that may have been quietly generated or rewritten by a chatbot, an older book provides a more dependable record of human writing. Books are also edited, structured, and often contain specialized information that cannot easily be found elsewhere online.

ISBNdb leaned heavily on those qualities in its sales pitch.

“Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate,” the company wrote. “Dense, edited, authoritative.”

ISBNdb also emphasized that many potentially useful titles had never been fully digitized. Its marketing effectively presented the pre-chatbot bookshelf as a reserve of human-created training material that had yet to be mixed with AI output.

That demand did not appear out of nowhere. It follows a much longer effort to turn printed books into searchable digital information.

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People have been converting books into digital files for decades. Project Gutenberg began creating electronic versions of public-domain works in 1971 and now offers more than 75,000 free ebooks.

The industrial-scale version arrived with Google Books in 2004. Working with libraries and publishers, Google scanned books and made their contents searchable online. By 2019, the company said it had assembled a collection of more than 40 million books in over 400 languages.

Those scans also helped form HathiTrust, a digital repository created by research libraries in 2008 to preserve their collections and make as much of the material publicly accessible as copyright law allowed.

The project prompted an earlier version of today’s copyright fight. Authors sued Google for scanning copyrighted books without permission, but a federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that the project qualified as fair use. The court found that creating a searchable index and displaying limited snippets gave the books a new purpose without providing readers with a replacement for the originals.

Other digitization programs have emphasized preservation and access. The Internet Archive, for example, says it has digitized more than 25 million books since 2006 using nondestructive scanning designed to keep the bound volumes intact.

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But converting a book into data does not necessarily make it publicly accessible. That distinction concerned Charlie D. Becker, a second-generation bookseller whose family runs Becker’s Books in Houston. His store recently received a single order for 70 obscure titles, including a 1995 guide to metropolitan Denver and manuals explaining how to use WordPerfect in 1991.

After investigating, Becker suspected the buyer was using an algorithm to find underpriced books and relist them on Amazon, rather than acquiring them for AI training. Most of the titles were either unavailable on Amazon or listed there for as much as 20 times his store’s price, and the shipments appeared to be going to Fulfillment by Amazon preparation companies.

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Still, Becker said an obscure book can be especially easy to lose because few people consider it worth preserving. Books that fail to sell through Amazon’s fulfillment system may eventually be liquidated, while some titles have little more than scattered listings across private databases to prove they existed.

“Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything,” Becker wrote in a longer account of the orders. “It didn’t.”

Anthropic has already scanned millions of books

The buyers behind the recent bookstore orders remain unclear. The destructive scanning process, however, is no longer hypothetical.

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In 2024, Anthropic hired Tom Turvey, a former Google executive who had worked on partnerships for the Google Books project. According to a June 2025 federal court ruling, Turvey was tasked with helping the company obtain “all the books in the world” for an internal research library.

Turvey initially contacted publishers about licensing their books, but those conversations did not continue. His team then approached major book distributors and retailers about purchasing print copies in bulk.

Anthropic ultimately spent millions of dollars acquiring millions of physical books, many of them used. Service providers removed the books from their bindings, cut their pages to the appropriate size, and fed them through scanners. The searchable PDF files went into Anthropic’s internal library. The paper originals were discarded.

Engineers could then select groups of those books for inclusion in datasets used to train the large language models behind Claude.

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That process became central to a legal battle over how Anthropic obtained its training material. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the company’s use of books to train Claude was transformative and qualified as fair use under the specific circumstances of the case.

Alsup also found that converting legally purchased print books into digital files could qualify as fair use because Anthropic destroyed each physical copy and replaced it with one internal digital copy. In other words, the company did not keep both versions.

The ruling did not give AI companies blanket permission to copy any book they could find. Alsup drew a sharp distinction between the print books Anthropic had legally purchased and the more than 7 million pirated books the company had downloaded and stored in a permanent digital library. Purchasing physical copies of some titles later did not erase the original piracy, he found.

That distinction eventually became expensive. On July 20, a federal judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors and publishers, resolving claims involving approximately 482,000 pirated books. Eligible rights holders are expected to receive about $3,000 per title, according to Reuters.

For some authors, the payment does not resolve the larger disagreement. Charles Graeber, one of the case’s original plaintiffs, told NPR that he was proud authors had secured a substantial settlement, but said the case had cost him more than two years of time, travel, and professional opportunities.

Fellow plaintiff Andrea Bartz questioned a system that allows companies to train commercial models on legally purchased books without negotiating separate licenses with the people who wrote them.

“The algorithm is being used to essentially try to put us out of a job,” she told NPR.

Anthropic has maintained that training AI models on books is protected by fair use. The court’s ruling nevertheless helps explain why physical books may be especially attractive to developers: A lawfully purchased copy gives the company a much stronger legal position than a file downloaded from a pirate library.

Destroying the original may be a legally useful distinction. For many readers, it is also the most unsettling part of the story.

Who is buying all these books?

Anthropic’s operation is documented in court records. The source of the more recent bookstore orders is harder to pin down.

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One bookseller specializing in uncommon and low-circulation titles told 404 Media that his weekly sales jumped from roughly 20 books during a good week to several hundred after the orders began arriving in April.

The requested titles did not appear to share a subject, author, genre, or language. They did, however, all have International Standard Book Numbers, or ISBNs, leading the seller to suspect that they had been selected through a book database.

The surge was financially helpful and allowed him to clear inventory that might otherwise have remained unsold. He was less enthusiastic about where the books might be going.

“I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped,” he said.

Booksellers in Europe have reported similarly broad requests. An antiquarian bookseller in the Netherlands received a list of approximately 3,000 English-language books organized by ISBN, ranging from an academic study of Irish folklore to a technical book about laser shock peening.

There is no public confirmation that every unusual bulk order came from an AI company or that every book purchased through these orders was destroyed. There is also no evidence that developers are intentionally hunting for the final surviving copies of rare titles.

The uncertainty itself is part of the concern. A company purchasing from a massive ISBN list could sweep up uncommon or out-of-print editions without first checking how many physical copies remain.

Why the story struck a nerve

Once the reports reached social media, they were accompanied by an unsettling visual: a cutting blade moving inch by inch through a book’s spine. Comparisons to Fahrenheit 451 and the Library of Alexandria followed quickly.

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Book destruction carries a particular weight because it has historically represented more than the loss of paper. The 1933 Nazi book burnings targeted works deemed “un-German,” including books by Jewish, pacifist, and left-wing writers. The act became an enduring symbol of censorship and the suppression of ideas, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

That symbolism is central to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel about a society where books are outlawed and burned. Bradbury said his warning extended beyond government censorship to television reducing knowledge to digestible fragments and eroding interest in reading. Users have also invoked the Library of Alexandria, another enduring symbol of lost knowledge, although historians believe it declined gradually through political upheaval, reduced support, neglect, and repeated damage rather than disappearing in one catastrophic fire.

Elon Musk joined the conversation on July 27. He wrote on X that he had asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve rare books in a library and scan them “the hard way,” without removing their spines.

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As the discussion spread, users resurfaced a 2011 Cracked article about libraries, universities, and retailers destroying unwanted books years before the current AI boom.

That history has informed a less alarmed response. Some users argued that the books shown in warehouses appeared to be ordinary, unwanted inventory rather than irreplaceable artifacts. If a book would otherwise be recycled without being read again, they asked, could scanning it first preserve something that would have been lost?

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AI adds a complication. The text may survive, but inside a private company’s research library rather than a public archive. A forgotten manual or travel guide may have little resale value, yet still contain exactly what an AI developer wants: edited human writing created before the flood of chatbot output.

That has led authors and publishers to argue that they should have more control over how their work is used, especially when it is helping companies build commercial products. AI developers, meanwhile, continue to argue that training a model is a transformative use of the material rather than a replacement for the original books.

ISBNdb has removed its sourcing page, but the demand behind it remains. The web’s AI problem has sent developers back to the bookshelf. The next chapter will depend on whether they can extract what they need without leaving those shelves any emptier.

I've used Gemini to answer Excel questions for a while, but I wanted to see whether it could handle a real workflow. When I asked it to automate a tedious reporting task, I ended up with a reusable VBA tool that could run in any XLSX workbook—but only after testing, refining, and improving the result.

AI assistants have been pitched as a solution to overflowing inboxes, messy calendars, and trips that still need booking. But what happens when the task being outsourced is remembering your anniversary?

The startup Orchid introduced its personal assistant with a now-viral cinematic video, posted to X July 28, following a woman whose partner has forgotten their anniversary. After she tells Orchid what happened, the assistant contacts him, books a dinner reservation, arranges a flower delivery, and keeps her updated on his progress.

"Introducing Orchid, the first assistant that actually gets you," the company wrote alongside the video. "It remembers what you forget. Down to the flower."

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By the end, Orchid has transformed the mistake into what looks like a thoughtful anniversary celebration. Viewers were less charmed.

The video received more than 20 million views within its first several days, but it also attracted hundreds of replies from people disturbed by the future it seemed to present.

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The reservation and flower delivery were hardly the most controversial parts. AI tools already help users search for restaurants, make plans, and select gifts; apparently, romance is now just another workflow waiting to be automated.

So, what does Orchid actually do?

Orchid describes itself as a personal assistant that users communicate with through text messages. The company says it can manage email, schedule meetings, prepare users for calls, plan trips, source gifts, handle invoices, and remember personal details.

Users can also ask Orchid to create recurring "habits," including delivering a morning news briefing, checking the weather, tracking meals, sending medication reminders, and automatically checking them into flights.

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The product's primary audience appears to be professional. According to Orchid's FAQ, it was designed for "founders, investors, lawyers, agents, and agency owners" whose time would be better spent on "real work" than administrative tasks. The company's only published case study focuses on helping an executive prepare for client calls.

But the video shows the assistant doing more than organizing someone's calendar. Orchid appears to connect to the users' iMessage accounts in order to communicate separately with both members of the couple, passing information between them and reporting one person's actions to the other.

Orchid co-founder Nizar Abi Zaher told Gizmodo that "Orchid allows multiple people to communicate with the same agent and share context." For now, he said, that feature is "just group chats and also coordinating meetings." In the advertisement, however, the couple appears to be communicating with Orchid through two private conversations.

Although Orchid's homepage promises "a hundred tools, one assistant," its FAQ says the product presently works with Gmail and Google Calendar. Integrations with Outlook, Slack, Notion, and Linear are still on the way.

The company also says the AI acts "only within the limits that you set." Email responses remain in drafts until the user sends them, while calendar holds require approval. It also says it does not sell users' data or use it to train AI models.

A shared assistant raises additional questions. The ad doesn't explain which information each partner has agreed to share, whether either person can access the other's messages, or how Orchid determines what it can report back. At least, not yet. Mashable has reached out to Orchid for a comment.

Social media isn't sold on Orchid's vision

The possibility of using AI to shape a relationship is not especially new. In a 2025 survey of over 5,000 U.S. singles, 26 percent said they were using AI to enhance their dating lives, a 333 percent increase from the previous year. Nearly half of Gen Z singles had used it for tasks such as filtering matches, writing messages, and evaluating their dating habits.

AI has also made its way into established relationships. A 2026 survey of 1,000 married U.S. adults found that 44 percent had used an AI tool for relationship advice, rising to nearly 65 percent among millennials. That growing use has not necessarily made people comfortable with AI's expanding role — about half of U.S. adults believe AI will worsen people's ability to form meaningful relationships.

That discomfort may help explain why Orchid's ad went over so poorly online: "an AI for perpetuating your dead-end relationship that both parties secretly hate," one X user wrote. Another described Orchid as an "assistant for people who want to subcontract all the basic acts of care that make up a relationship." Some users described the concept as "lame," and an advertisement for "adult babies uninterested in the world they live in." One viewer offered a more concise thought: "Tech people need to stop."

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Some people suspect the company understood exactly how the scenario would be received. "I think they knew what they were doing and hoped the ragebait worked," one user wrote. "Unfortunately it did."

The company has said it intentionally built the advertisement around a story instead of creating a traditional product demonstration. "We wanted to build a story around a real situation," the Orchid team explained in a behind-the-scenes video.

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At least one member of Orchid's team appeared to be taking notes. "If you have feedback on Orchid or ideas on what would make you actually use it, my DMs are open!" Lucas Valbuena, an intern at the startup, posted on X as the backlash spread. Meanwhile, other Orchid employees, AI companies, and engineers publicly rallied behind the company.

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The ad also made its way to r/ExecutiveAssistants, where the person who started the discussion said their "heart kind of broke" after learning about Orchid. Along with worrying about the loss of human connection, they asked whether AI could eventually replace people in their field.

The assistants who responded were mostly skeptical that Orchid could replace them. One predicted that products like it would become tools executive assistants use, leaving humans to catch hallucinations and supply the context AI misses.

"Execs are way too lazy to work these out themselves," the commenter added. Another dismissed Orchid as "marketing fluff aimed at the people who could never really afford us," arguing that a reminder app cannot reproduce the emotional intelligence experienced assistants bring to the job.

That skepticism helps explain why Orchid's ad bothered so many. An assistant can book a table and order flowers, but those gestures usually matter because a partner remembered the occasion and chose to make them in the first place. In the video, Orchid does that work while the human receives the credit.

Orchid promises to remember an anniversary "down to the flower." The backlash suggests people still care who remembers it in the first place.

Few vehicles have managed to buck the trend in 2026, with rising prices and shifting buyer preferences making growth increasingly difficult across the industry. Yet one rugged SUV has done exactly that, posting one of the most impressive sales surges of any mainstream model this year.

Here at Mashable, we're constantly testing the best laptops based on an exhaustive in-house methodology that combines real-world use with performance benchmarking. In the past two years alone, we've tried over 80 different models across a range of price points.

To determine which of them fit the bill for college students, specifically, I researched the top 10 public universities' hardware recommendations for the upcoming fall 2026 semester. These include processor types, operating system support, RAM and storage minimums, and other spec requirements for different majors. I honed my guidance based on the common threads I noticed.

I also gave special preference to laptops that are long-lasting and portable enough to be toted around campus, and those that are competitively priced for the current market. Laptops aren't cheap right now, but a solid splurge can last you well past graduation. (Take advantage of student discounts whenever possible.)

Based on this analysis, I eventually settled on six top picks that make the best laptops for college students. Whether you're a humanities student, a STEM major, or still undeclared, I'm confident that at least one of my options will be your ideal machine. You can read more about these picks and my research below.

What to look for in a college laptop, based on my research A Windows laptop with a mid-tier Intel Core or AMD Ryzen 7 processor is suitable for most college students. Credit: Haley Henschel / Mashable

Six of this year's 10 top-ranking public universities tell their incoming students to purchase Windows 11 laptops or MacBooks that are less than two years old. I wouldn't go any older than that for the sake of future-proofing.

Most of those schools tell their students to purchase laptops with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage at minimum. (Liberal arts majors might be able to get away with 256GB of storage, but you'll probably have to supplement that with an external hard drive.) More RAM and storage is better if your budget allows; more is mandatory if you're an engineering, design, or computer science major. Students in those fields are generally advised to get a laptop with at least 24GB to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

SEE ALSO: Laptop specs explained: A jargon-free guide to what's inside your computer

You can approach your processor options in a similar way. For Windows laptops, most schools suggest a mid-range CPU like an Intel Core/AMD Ryzen 5 at minimum, and a mid- to high-end Intel Core/AMD Ryzen 7 or 9 chip for more demanding workloads. Several schools recommend tacking on a dedicated GPU for such coursework, too (i.e, Nvidia GeForce RTX/Radeon RX graphics). On the Apple side, the MacBook Air and Pro with the base M5 chip are go-to recs for most students.

Two schools tell their students not to buy ARM-based Windows laptops (with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors) because they can't run certain software natively, and because they don't support older peripherals like university printers and scanners. One software example is AutoCAD, a popular 2D and 3D design app that engineering and design students rely on heavily. I love a lot of ARM laptops because they're fast and long-lasting, and I will say that their compatibility is improving every year. Still, I've opted to keep them off my list of 2026 picks out of an abundance of caution; stick with Intel and AMD CPUs for now.

Be sure to budget for an extended warranty with accidental damage protection, as suggested by over half of the top 10 public universities. For reference, AppleCare+ for Mac costs $67.99 to $139.99 a year for students, depending on the MacBook model.

What type of laptop should college students buy? Credit: Joe Maldonado / Mashable

This is a question that only your college can answer for sure, as laptop type recommendations can vary by major. For example, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Davis approve MacBooks for their general student populations, but their engineering departments tell certain tracks to avoid them. Likewise, UCLA's Anderson School of Management hardware requirement page says, "Mac computers are acceptable to use as primary computers for study at Anderson. However, please note that some elective course software is only available for Windows. Students are responsible for ensuring compatibility and configuring their Macs accordingly."

I can say for sure that you probably shouldn't buy a Chromebook. Three schools in my research pool discouraged them for some or all majors, and one school — the University of Florida — only recommended them "as supplemental devices." I included a Chromebook in a previous version of this guide as a secondary option for note-taking, but price increases amid the ongoing RAM shortage have made many of them just as expensive as Apple's budget MacBook Neo (if not more so), which is a much nicer and more powerful computer, relatively speaking.

Do you need your own laptop for college?

Yes, you should have your own laptop at college. Most universities let students temporarily borrow laptops through their libraries and/or tech desks. However, these loaners are available on a first-come, first-served basis and wiped upon return (i.e., you can't save anything on them long-term).

I wouldn't rely too heavily on your school's computer lab, either, because you can't take bring those desktops to class or your dorm. Ultimately, owning your own laptop is way more convenient and ensures you'll have the exact specs needed for your major's coursework.

Recent updates to this guide

• July 30, 2026: I updated this guide with the results of the Dell 14S' battery life test. It was able to loop a video for 34 hours and 29 minutes before dying — very impressive!

• July 25, 2026: My preferred configuration of the Acer Swift X 14 is back in stock, so I added it to this guide in place of the Acer Swift X 14 AI. They're both smart buys, but the non-AI version is more powerful and lasts much longer.

• July 18, 2026: I overhauled this guide to the best laptops for college students ahead of the start of the 2026 school year. I added fresh picks from Apple, Acer, and Dell based on all-new testing and research.

WPA3 is one of those router settings that most people will tell you to use. You might have done it and assumed your job was done, but that's not always true. Unfortunately.

Every time you type a website into your browser, your ISP gets a free ticket to watch it. A few Windows 11 privacy settings get talked about a lot, but this one rarely does, even though it's been sitting inside your PC this whole time. It's not a third-party app, and you don't need to install anything new. You only need to know where to look, and honestly, most people never do.

Investors are thinking twice about the stocks that have most benefited from the AI boom.

The 20 most valuable chip stocks have lost $1.3 trillion over the past week after a big sell-off, according to analysis by CNBC.

According to the outlet's data, Nvidia led in losses after investors liquidated $238 billion since the market closed on Friday. There's perhaps no bigger sign that investors are getting cold feet when it comes to artificial intelligence, as Nvidia has benefited more than any other company from the AI boom. 

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Other companies in the memory space have also taken a big hit. SK Hynix lost $176 billion. Samsung is down $173 billion. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. lost $119 billion. Micron shed $113 billion. And AMD is down $110 billion.

Tech companies have seen demand in memory and storage skyrocket as AI companies buy out supply to power their insatiable compute needs. Due to this, RAM and SSD storage supply has dwindled for everyday consumers. Consumer tech companies like Apple have been forced to institute price hikes on their products as a result.

Despite this, however, investors are seemingly starting to question their AI-related investments.

“This decline appears to be driven largely by sentiment rather than fundamentals,” Morningstar's Chief Equity Strategist Michael Field told CNBC. “Simply put, it’s loss of confidence,” he added. “We continue to see upside in many AI names, but these are growth stocks, and, as such, much of their value comes from cash flows expected far out into the future, which requires a lot of faith from investors.”

Investor concern surrounding AI technology seems rooted in the fact that while these companies make billions of dollars, they're spending way more than they make. According to recent reporting from the Financial Times and Ed Zitron, AI giant OpenAI had a net loss of $38.5 billion last year. Just this week, OpenAI announced that it will spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030. Finally, Google recently experienced its first-ever negative cash flow quarter, thanks to spending on AI infrastructure.

Of course, investor sentiment on AI can turn around quickly.

I've had Roku devices in my house for years, going all the way back to when it was just a little box sitting next to the TV. At this point, I've got several Roku TVs and a few sticks spread across different rooms, and for the most part, I've always used them the same way. Open an app, pick something to watch, and move on. It works, so I never really thought much about what else was there.

If you own an old Samsung Galaxy phone you aren't using anymore and need a secondary PC, consider converting it into a mini PC instead of buying one. The only prerequisite is support for Samsung DeX. While you might think that a desktop experience on an Android phone would be dragged down by all kinds of limitations and annoyances, I can attest that it's much better than I expected.

Most people think of the built-in Windows Snipping Tool as the little thing that pops up when you press the "Print Screen" button, but the truth is that this app can do far more than take screenshots.

The luxury sedan segment has long been dominated by familiar names. Buyers shopping for a flagship model have traditionally gravitated toward the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, BMW 7 Series, Audi A8, or Lexus LS, expecting class-leading comfort, cutting-edge technology, and impeccable craftsmanship.

My trash day reminder is one of my favorite automations. Using an integration that pulls the information from an official website, Home Assistant always knows which trash collection is due. Even using spoken reminders, however, we still sometimes forget to put the trash out on the right day, so I decided to build something that would be harder to ignore.

Android is in a strange place right now. New phones have never been better, yet it's harder than ever to justify buying the latest one. You're better off keeping your current device until it's no longer up to the job. And when you do need to replace it, buy an older model instead.

Netflix is arguably the most popular streaming service in the world. However, it's not the only streamer that boasts great movies. HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, and Prime Video all have vast libraries with terrific movies in various genres. If you know where to look, you'll find plenty of certified classics.