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A decade ago, I didn’t want anything to do with Samsung phones. Now they’ve become the only ones I want to own—and while this may be surprising, there’s a single Samsung app that’s a big part of the reason why.

Apple’s AirPods are so ubiquitous, they’ve become the Kleenex of Bluetooth earbuds. But whether you own an iPhone or an Android, AirPods are hardly the only compelling option. As long as you stay clear of the cheapest budget options you see in checkout lines, Bluetooth earbuds, in general, are all pretty awesome.

Got an old smartwatch collecting dust in a drawer? Wondering if there's anything practical you can do with it besides gathering dust? Well, here are five genuinely useful ways to repurpose it into something that still earns its place in your daily routine.

Updated on Monday, Jan. 5 at 1:15 p.m. ET — Unfortunately, the Lego CES keynote press conference on Jan. 5 will not be livestreamed. However, Mashable reporter Matt Binder is in attendance, and you can follow the Mashable CES live blog for the latest updates in brick building technology.

You can read our original story below...

Lego is all set to show off its wares at CES this year.

The internationally beloved Danish toy company is holding its very first CES press conference in Las Vegas next week. While CES is a tech show that's largely focused on things like computer chips, electric vehicles, and AI, it's hard to guess what, exactly, Lego will announce. Lego's press conference is set for 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 5. While there isn't a confirmed livestream link yet, we will update this piece as soon as we have one. If one does not become available, we will report the news out of the press conference as best as we can.

SEE ALSO: CES 2026: The biggest tech trends to watch out for

As for what Lego is going to show off, it's hard to say. The company has its fingers in lots of pies, including some tech-y ones. There's a big new Lego Batman video game coming out soon, as well as a collaboration with F1 to produce a Lego car. I would expect the unexpected here, at any rate.

If nothing else, it should be more fun than the cavalcade of apps that use AI to manage your stock portfolio that get shown off at CES every year.

My iPhone 15 Pro has 256GB of internal storage. The last time I'd checked, I was using about half of that capacity. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that my storage was suddenly almost completely full. The culprit was not what I was expecting.

When you buy a tech product, it usually comes in its own box. Many normal people will throw these boxes away, realizing that they're highly unlikely to ever need them again. Some of us, however, find it harder to say goodbye.

I’ve used just about every “read-it-later” app out there, and none of them stuck. To my surprise, what finally worked wasn’t a read-it-later app at all. It was Obsidian.

If you're a music fan who's never tried a high-quality pair of headphones, you just don't know what you're missing. Audiophile headphones built for Hi-Fi playback can completely transform the way you listen to and appreciate music. Here's what I learned when I first delved into the world of audiophile headphones.

Spotify is the most popular music streaming service of all time, so it's a surprise to no one that it changed the music industry forever, mostly not for the better. It's altered how artists release music and how we listen to it. Yet despite everything wrong with Spotify, I still can’t seem to quit.

For weeks, my Wi-Fi felt unreliable in ways I couldn’t reconcile. My house uses an eero mesh network, coverage is strong everywhere inside my home and even out at the fringes of the property, and speed tests at the router consistently looked fine. Yet my Windows work laptop would randomly crawl. Meetings had video issues, and large downloads would slow to a halt. Walking closer to a node didn’t help. Rebooting the router didn’t fix it. Toggling Wi-Fi off and on barely made a difference. Everything seemed to be pointing to "bad Wi-Fi," but there was no clear smoking gun.

This was a quieter week in the technology space, with CES 2026 just around the corner and everyone celebrating the holidays, but there were still new developments for Pebble smartwatches, Plex servers, Linux, and PC hardware. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

American sports cars have always turned heads with their rumbling V8s, bold looks, and a driving experience that’s anything but tame. They’ve built a reputation for raw power, freedom, and straight-line speed—without the sky-high prices of European sports cars.

If I had to cancel every subscription I have except for one, I would keep Apple Music. It gives me access to almost all the music I could ever want and integrates perfectly into the Apple ecosystem. It's not perfect, however, and some of the settings make it worse than it needs to be. If you're an Apple Music subscriber, there are a few settings you might want to change.

Looking to buy more tools this year? Ryobi has an excellent selection of power tools, and its constant stream of new products is one of many reasons it's so popular. And while Ryobi has released over 75 new items in the last year, here are a few new tools coming in 2026 that are actually worth waiting for.

Recently I decided to try using Xfce as my main desktop environment on my primary tower PC. I typically stick with KDE Plasma on most devices, and after weeks with Xfce, I just feel more affirmed in my preference for KDE for daily driving.

Now and again, I discover a service that’s so straightforward, I can hardly believe it works at all. The SSH-powered hosting service, pico.sh, is a perfect example.

Astronomers have confirmed for the first time with direct evidence that a lone, starless world is actually drifting through the Milky Way. 

Though scientists have documented a dozen of these so-called "rogue planets" in the past decade, this one isn't merely an educated guess based on a handful of clues. By catching the same brief cosmic alignment from Earth and space, researchers were able to directly measure the celestial object’s mass. 

In doing so, they found this orphan is within the same weight class as Saturn, strengthening the case that the galaxy teems with castaway exoplanets — born within solar systems but chucked out later into the abyss, said Subo Dong, a professor of astronomy at Peking University in Beijing.  

The finding, published in the journal Science, suggests at least some so-called "rogue planets" form like regular planets before their violent expulsion.  

"For the first time, we have a direct measurement of a rogue planet candidate’s mass and not just a rough statistical estimate," said Dong, who led the study, in a statement. "We know for sure it's a planet."

SEE ALSO: NASA's Hubble sees a stunning planet-forming disk. It's a real doozy.

Researchers determined the planet's mass by observing a fleeting event from both Earth and space, overcoming a long-standing obstacle in the study of wandering planets.

These rogues are difficult to detect because they give off little light and do not orbit stars. Astronomers have only ever spotted them through gravitational microlensing, which occurs when an object passes in front of a distant star and briefly magnifies the star’s light through gravity. The detectable flicker can last from hours to days, then disappears.

Scientists were able to measure the distance and mass of the rogue planet using the principles of parallax, which gives humans depth perception. Credit: Yu Jingchuan illustration

"Without a host star, common detection techniques, such as the transit method — finding an exoplanet (a planet outside of the solar system) by observing slight dimming of a star’s light as a planet passes in front of it — cannot be used," wrote Gavin A. L. Coleman, a Queen Mary University of London researcher, in a related commentary. "Currently, the only technique available to discover rogue planets is gravitational microlensing." 

But until now, microlensing observations could not clearly determine the distance to these planets, making it difficult to independently calculate their masses. That ambiguity left scientists relying on speculative estimates, raising questions about whether the sources were indeed planets or small failed stars called brown dwarfs. Some experts have even considered whether the objects are something else entirely unknown.

The new result comes from a microlensing event in May 2024. Ground-based observatories detected a short, two-day brightening of a star toward the bulging center of the galaxy. By chance, the European Space Agency's Gaia star-surveying spacecraft — about 1 million miles from Earth — also watched the event.

The two vantage points made it possible to measure microlens parallax, an effect similar to human depth perception. People can sense depth because a scene looks slightly different from each of their eyes, based on the space between the pair.

"We are able to use the same principle to extract the distance information of this rogue planet candidate, finding the mass and distance separately," Dong said. "The difference is that the spacing between the eyes of we humans is a few centimeters."

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The timing of the event was seen about two hours apart by the ground-based telescopes and Gaia. That delay revealed the object’s distance and, combined with other measurements, its mass.

The object is about 22 percent of Jupiter’s mass and lies roughly 9,800 light-years away. No host star appeared in the data, further indicating that the planet is either free-floating or on one super vast orbit rendering its distant star undetectable.

The planet’s relatively low mass is key because objects several times heavier than Jupiter — brown dwarfs — can form in isolation, like small stars. But an object akin to Saturn is far more likely to have formed in a planet-forming disk around a star, then later turned loose. That ouster likely happened through cosmic collisions, close encounters with other worlds, or the capricious gravitational influence of an unstable star. 

The study gives credence to the idea that planet ejection is a common occurrence in planet formation. Future missions, including NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, are expected to dramatically increase the known rogue planets and help clarify how often worlds are sent astray. If they're abundant, perhaps developing solar systems are routinely losing one or two worlds in the process.

"So far," Dong said, "we only have a glimpse into this emerging population of rogue worlds and what light they can shed on the formation of the bodies in the planetary systems of the universe."

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It's the Full Moon tonight, and the fourth consecutive supermoon. Full Moons all have their own names, and January's is traditionally known as the 'Wolf Moon'.

What is today’s moon phase?

As of Saturday, Jan. 3, the moon phase is Full Moon. According to The Sky Live, 100% of the moon will be lit up tonight.

When is the next full moon?

The next full moon will be on Feb. 1.

What are moon phases?

According to NASA, the Moon takes roughly 29.5 days to complete a full cycle. This cycle is known as the lunar cycle. Throughout this period, the Moon moves through a series of phases as it orbits the Earth. While the same side of the Moon always faces our planet, the amount of sunlight illuminating its surface changes over time. This is why the Moon appears fully lit, partially illuminated, or not visible at all at different stages of the cycle. The lunar cycle is divided into eight main phases:

New Moon - The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter - Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.

Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon - The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous - The moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)

Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

Today's Connections: Sports Edition will be easier if you know sports movies.

As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.

Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.

If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable What is Connections: Sports Edition?

The NYT's latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication's sports coverage. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.

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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.

If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.

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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.

SEE ALSO: Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL. Here's a hint for today's Connections: Sports Edition categories

Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:

• Yellow: Protective gear components

• Green: Diamond hurling

• Blue: Pugilistic players

• Purple: Same second word

Here are today's Connections: Sports Edition categories

Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:

• Yellow: Parts of a football helmet

• Green: Baseball pitches

• Blue: Oscar nominees for playing a boxer

• Purple: ____ Storm

Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.

Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.

Drumroll, please!

The solution to today's Connections: Sports Edition #467 is...

What is the answer to Connections: Sports Edition today?

• Parts of a football helmet - CHIN STRAP, FACE MASK, PADDING, SHELL

• Baseball pitches - CHANGEUP, CUTTER, SLIDER, SPLITTER

• Oscar nominees for playing a boxer - DE NIRO, STALLONE, SWANK, WASHINGTON

• ____ storm - COURT, HANNAH, RED, SEATTLE

Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.