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I used to see the double dash (--) in Excel spreadsheets and wonder what it did. It's an essential shortcut to force Excel to treat TRUE and FALSE as the numbers 1 and 0, meaning you can easily sum or count the results of a logical test across a range. Now I know, and I want to share this powerful trick with you.

Smartphones used to have a stronger sense of personality. In the early days, it wasn't just the hardware that left an impression—the default wallpaper was a defining feature you'd see at the launch event and every ad that followed. Here are some of the most iconic smartphone wallpapers of all time, in no particular order.

On balance, USB-C has been pretty great. I would be the last person to suggest that we should go back to the bad old days of USB-A (insofar as we've actually left it) or, even worse, micro-USB.

SAVE $40: As of Dec. 6th, the Ninja Crispi air fryer and portable cooking system is $139, which is $40 off its list price of $179. 

Opens in a new window Credit: Ninja Ninja | Air Fryer | Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Cooking System | 4QT & 6 Cup Glass Containers $139 at Amazon
$179 Save $40   Get Deal

Black Friday has come and gone, and with it, most of the wallet-saving deals have retreated into the ether. That is almost all of those deals, but one: Ninja has its Black Friday deal on the Ninja Crispi air fryer. The Ninja Crispi is $40 off this weekend, for who knows how much longer. This air fryer features two glass bottoms in 4-quart and 6-cup capacities. This portable cooking system is an air fryer, in addition to baking, reheating, and something Ninja refers to as "Max Crisp," which is likely closely related to broiling.

The two different sizes offer unique capabilities for cooking different quantities of food at various speeds. For example, the 6-cup glass-bottom bowl can reheat some fries or veggies (who says potatoes aren't vegetables) in as little as 7 minutes, while the 4-quart glass-bottom bowl can bake a whole chicken and vegetables.

If the combination of a glass bottom and extreme heat gives you pause, don't worry, Ninja is already way ahead of you. The borosilicate glass (which the famously heat-resistant Pyrex brand's glass is made of) is thermal shock-resistant, and both glass bottoms come with heat-protected feet that allow the device to sit atop any material countertop you want (except plastic). The glass bottoms are also dishwasher safe.

No one wants to be spied on. A VPN is one piece of the cyber security puzzle to help protect your personal information—and you should install it on all of your devices.

This is a PSA: Please stop abusing your SSD. Mistreating it is easier to do than it might seem. We all do it to some extent, but if you do it too much, it'll eventually backfire.

Do you often feel uncomfortable with symptoms like nausea, dizziness, or headaches when you're traveling in your car or other moving vehicles? There are some tricks you can use to look at your phone without feeling sick.

Hey man, I don't know what message you're trying to send by plastering extremely realistic-looking billionaire faces onto robot dogs — that's between you and your higher power, or lack thereof — but no thanks. I'm good, actually, thanks for offering.

I actually do not need to witness Elon Musk's smirking visage attached to a robot that then defecates AI-generated Polaroids to the audience. I've got errands to run.

Look at these damn things.

The exhibit at Art Basel Miami Beach is called “Regular Animals.” Created by digital designer and artist Mike Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple, it features robot dog versions of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, according to Storyful.

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— The Wall Street Journal (@wsj.com) December 5, 2025 at 11:22 AM

“Regular Animals”, an art installation by Beeple 🤮 at Art Basel in Miami, features billionaire-faced robodogs that take photos of spectators & then “defecate” the so called “artistic impressions”, some of which link to NFTs. Printed “Excrement Samples” sell for $100k. Creepy af innit?

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— trish (@omerta22.posts.art) December 4, 2025 at 2:13 PM

The art installation I'm referring to is called Regular Animals, located in Miami during Art Basel. It's a creation by Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, the artist who sold his NFT art for $69 million during the 2021 NFT boom.

The penned-up billionaire dogs include Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as well as art-world figures like Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Beeple himself. It's unnerving and weird to see the hyper-realistic faces wandering around on the picture-pooping dogs. Some folks might be tempted to draw some meaning from the installation. Not me, I've got laundry to do. No thanks.

When you secure excellent components for your PC, you expect things to run smoothly. Smooth frames, fast loading times, the works. So when you've shelled out for an awesome GPU and still have game stuttering, it can be immensely frustrating, but the problem might be something less obvious.

SAVE $189: As of Dec. 6th, this Pre-Lit Dunhill Fir artificial Christmas tree is 66% percent off, coming in at $99. This is down from the National Tree Company’s list price of $289.99 on Amazon. 

Opens in a new window Credit: National Tree Company Store National Tree Company 7 ft Pre-Lit Dunhill Fir Full Artificial Christmas Tree $99.99 at Amazon
$289.99 Save $190   Get Deal

It's Dec. 6th, which means that Thanksgiving has come and gone, Black Friday and Cyber Monday spun in like the Tasmanian Devil and spun back out, and now we're more than one-fifth of the way through 25 days of Christmas. It's that time of the holiday season when many windows are filling up with the lights of beautifully decorated trees and/or menorahs. If you don't have a tree quite yet or if you've been on the fence, this weekend, the National Tree Company has a deal you might be interested in. The NTC has its Pre-Lit DunHill Fir artificial Christmas tree on sale for 66% off. 

This particular Pre-Lit artificial tree measures 7.5 ft in height with a 55-inch diameter at its base. When it comes to being "Pre-Lit", that means that the tree is wrapped with lights before packaging, offering you a stress-free setup. The tree comes replete with 700 white light bulbs for sparkling holiday-season ambiance, on full-bodied branches designed to look as real as possible. The tree also features attached drop-down branches, allowing you to set it up quickly once you take it out of the box. 

The instructions indicate that one should spend about 45-60 minutes fluffing and pulling apart the branches so they look extra real. 

If you buy something, you should own it. Amazon is, by far, the biggest name in the eBook market, but the company puts tight DRM restrictions on these eBooks so you can't take them outside the Kindle ecosystem.

NotebookLM may just be an assistant to many people, but this is just the most basic functionality. You can take advantage of its system to do whatever you want, and that means it can be a way to have fun.

If you're like me, you use Discord for communication all day long. Those hours of use mean Discord has the opportunity to soak up lots of data about you and your use of the app. A few settings keep the collection at bay.

Google's Pixel watches are rolling out an improved always-on display.

Tech site 9to5Google spotted that with Wear OS 6, the Pixel Watch has added always-on capabilities for media controls (such as controlling your music) as well as the timer app. Previously, these sorts of tools would blur after a certain amount of time. Now, they remain on the screen, with the display having been slightly changed from its previous iteration.

That could mark a major improvement for people who use their watch to, say, time a workout or track what they're cooking. Mashable named the Google Pixel Watch 4 the best Android smartwatch of 2025 — so it's an improvement on an already good product. Tech Editor Timothy Beck Werth wrote it was "elegant enough to wear to the office, but comfortable and smart enough to monitor workouts." Senior reporter Christianna Silva, meanwhile, wrote in their review that the "Pixel Watch 4 is a true runners' watch, and it's gorgeous too."

SEE ALSO: Review: The new Pixel Watch 4 is a true runners' watch, and it's gorgeous too

So now, if you're a serious runner doing sprints on a track, you won't need to fiddle with the display to check your times. That's a small change that could have a big impact.

A truly smart home isn’t one that you control with your voice or phone, but one that is fully automated. Presence detection is key to creating an environment that anticipates your next move, whether that’s turning on a light in a cupboard or understanding exactly who is in which room.

I've always had a soft spot for Bentley. There’s something about the leather, the wood, the deep carpets, and that quiet swagger the brand carries that just gets me. It turns even a quick grocery run into something that feels a notch above normal life.

I'm a big sports fan, and I'm always watching something on YouTube TV, whether that's the NFL, NCAAF, or NHL games. Although the interface isn't the best for finding a particular game, there's a live sports delay, and streaming can often buffer, it's still a good overall experience. However, this one setting makes things even better.

Although I've dabbled with the likes of Motorola and Samsung, a large part of my Android journey has been built around Google hardware, from the early Nexus phones onwards. We've now had 10 generations of Pixel phones, and these are the ones that really stand out for me.

Buying gifts for the special woman in your life can be tricky. What do you buy a person who has everything? What should you gift to someone who's picky about their products? Our advice is to curate a gift according to her interests and personality.

A gift for the lady in your life should be just that: A gift for her. Part of our bigger series on the Best Gifts For Everyone, we’ve put together this comprehensive list to guide you on your important mission. And if it happens to be a teen girl you're shopping for, then we have a list for that, too.

So whether she's a techie, runner, or pet owner, these are the best gifts for her.

Octopath Traveler 0 had every excuse to be half-assed. It could have been smaller, leaner, and less compelling than its predecessors, just by virtue of where it came from. It is a minor miracle that it’s none of those things.

The latest throwback-style turn-based RPG from Square Enix, in case you don’t know, is a $50 console and PC adaptation of a free-to-play mobile game from 2020. The developers took a bunch of existing characters, enemies, storylines, mechanics, and music, and reconstituted them into an entirely different and wholly welcome new format. Given that mobile games are inherently fleeting, as they rely on storefronts, servers, and payment processes that will cease to exist someday, I think this is kind of incredible.

It also helps that the end result is just a real, real good RPG. Octopath Traveler 0 takes a foundation that could’ve produced something awkward and rickety and turns it into a game that keeps expanding and becoming more compelling the more time you invest into it. It might not feel as premium as the other console games in the series, but that doesn’t stop Octopath Traveler 0 from being one of the best RPGs of 2025, and a worthy addition to what is quickly becoming a very good series.

SEE ALSO: 'Metroid Prime 4: Beyond' is the 'Metroid' you want 90 percent of the time Humble beginnings Making your own dude is cool. Credit: Square Enix/Steam

Octopath Traveler 0 is different from the first two console entries in the series in a number of ways, largely owing to the fact that it’s reformed from components of Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, a free-to-play phone spin-off. That means the very design fabric that made those first two games stand out is gone here.

Specifically, you no longer choose from one of eight pre-designed characters and spend the rest of your journey recruiting the other seven. That format produced games that felt more like short story collections than grand adventures, as each character had their own distinct arcs that largely didn’t involve the other characters. In Octopath 0, you instead create your own character, choose a starting class, and set off into the same prologue that every other player will see.

Soon enough, your humble hometown gets burnt down by some nefarious evildoers, and it’s up to you and a handful of other survivors to rebuild and seek revenge. There are several bespoke story arcs that rarely touch each other here, as in previous Octopath games, but they’re centered around heroes rather than villains. You can do them in whatever order you want, but you’ll have to do them all eventually.

Your party starts out small and gets much, much bigger later. Credit: Square Enix/Steam

Perhaps the biggest change, which comes directly from the mobile game, is that there are multiple dozens of playable party members in Octopath 0, as opposed to just eight in each of the previous two games. You don’t have to pay money to participate in slot machine pulls to unlock them anymore, as they’re now doled out at a reasonable pace over the course of the story, and many of them are optional to recruit. 

Structurally, Octopath 0 is substantially more appealing to me than Champions of the Continent could ever hope to be. I don’t like free-to-play gacha games, but I like narrative RPGs. I think it is an act of near-genius to adapt a mobile game to a console game in the way the developers have here. While Octopath 0 feels different from its brethren, it rarely feels lesser than those other games. There are fewer combat animations for each character, to be sure, and it’s noticeable to fans of the other games that much of the music is reused. But Octopath 0 does not cut corners. This is, for all intents and purposes, a big, new, fully-featured RPG built using the bones of a mobile game. In a world where new games take forever to get made and budgets are ballooning, I can’t help but applaud this novel approach to filling the gap between 2023’s Octopath Traveler II and whatever comes next.

Octopath Traveler 0 takes a while to get going You'll do plenty of this, at least for a while. Credit: Square Enix/Steam

As a non-full-priced game with such a strange origin story, it would be reasonable to expect a game with less going on than its higher-budget counterparts in the same series. That expectation could not be farther off the mark, though.

I’ll just state it bluntly: This game took me about 80 hours to finish. It’s a massive investment, and it’s an investment that requires a degree of patience. Many of the early first 20 hours or so are spent setting the table for what comes later. You will spend a lot of that time recruiting a full party and starting the process of rebuilding your hometown, which is done in a fairly substantial town-building minigame. There are essential, game-changing battle mechanics that are hidden behind building certain structures that don’t unlock until you hit that 20-hour mark, approximately. 

Do not misunderstand me; I am not saying Octopath Traveler 0 takes 20 hours to get good. I am saying, however, that it saves its best for later. Like I said, it’s an investment, and I think it’s a rewarding one to make.

But once it starts rolling, it becomes unstoppable Fights with a full party are thrilling. Credit: Square Enix/Steam

That reward takes a few different forms. One of them is excellent turn-based combat, which is some of the most fun in any game released this year.

Unlike previous Octopath games, in which you had four party members on screen at once, Octopath 0 lets you work with eight homies on the field at any given time. They’re arranged into a front row and back row. Those in the front can attack and take damage, while those in the back are guarded from hits and slowly recover resources with each passing turn. You can instantly switch between one character and another character who is in the same horizontal slot as them on the formation screen, and figuring out who plays second fiddle to whom is a huge part of build-crafting in this game.

This works exceptionally well with the main battle conceit of every Octopath game, which is the Boost system. At the start of each turn, every character earns one Boost Point, and they can hold up to five at a time. You can use as many as three in one turn to power up whatever you’re about to do, whether it’s a big attack or a healing spell. In previous games, you had to be a little stingy with Boost Points, but not here. Having a whole backup crew gradually building up points means you’re incentivized to use more of them more often, and the combat is balanced accordingly. It’s an exciting and different challenge from something like Octopath II.

Building up your hometown is plugged into your progression, as well. As I said earlier, you have to build certain structures and house them with certain recruitable NPCs to unlock many key features of the battle system. Building requires resources, but collecting them is generally painless as long as you’re observant and make sure to pick things up on the road. Perhaps a bit annoyingly, there are also important quality-of-life features like fast travel that are locked behind building and upgrading structures.

I do have one complaint about town-building, which is that you can essentially “finish” your town (that is, build every essential gameplay structure) halfway through the main story, at which point there’s no longer much need to think about it. I would have preferred more hooks for the endgame, but I suppose there’s also something to like about just focusing on exploring and fighting as the game winds towards its conclusion.

The story gets better later This dude is the best character in the game. Credit: Square Enix/Steam

Speaking of which, the other main vector of satisfaction if you choose to invest your time in Octopath Traveler 0 is the narrative. This game is all about how greed is bad, and each villain represents a different kind of greed. Some want fame, some want wealth, some want power, but they all want, and that is where they end up harming those around them.

At first, it feels very heavy-handed and predictable. Stick with the story long enough, however, and you’ll find that the early predictability gives way to later twists that actually have weight to them. Octopath Traveler 0 is an exceptionally earnest game, never trying to trick or outsmart the player. It just wants you to care about this world and these people, and I think it does a fine job of extracting those feelings from the player by the time it’s done.

Part of that is a lengthy finale chapter, which amounts to maybe a quarter of the game by itself. This is where every other previously-disconnected storyline comes together, and all the characters you’ve met up to that point start interacting with each other for the first time. The game’s biggest narrative swings all happen in the finale, including a villain reveal for the ages. This is easily the best antagonist of any Octopath game, but to say any more would ruin the fun for you.

Just sit with it for a while

Before we’re done here, I’d be remiss not to mention that Square Enix’s “HD-2D” art style that started with the first Octopath game is still great here. I really dig the intentionally low-fidelity look of the sprites and 3D assets, combined with modern lighting and depth-of-field effects. It doesn’t really look like an old game, but it looks awesome, nonetheless. Yasunori Nishiki’s music is also a standout element of Octopath 0, as he has become one of the finest RPG composers working right now. One of the boss fight themes is such a smoking hot banger that I’ve been listening to it for a week straight in my free time.

Unfortunately, performance in the Nintendo Switch 2 version (which is what I played) isn’t great. It targets and comes close to hitting 60 frames per second most of the time, but there's a noticeable stutter that seems most prevalent during the first few seconds after entering a new area. Not unplayable by any means, but certainly a little disappointing.

Still, Octopath Traveler 0 is a remarkably long and generally worth-the-effort experience, especially for anyone who vibes with the other games in the series. This is the kind of game that you’d yearn for as a teenager on summer break with nothing else to do. You can sink into it for dozens of hours, and it just keeps getting better the more you play it, thanks to excellent combat and a story that finds its best self in its later stages.

I understand not everyone has time for that kind of thing in their adult lives, but if you can create a window in your life for Octopath Traveler 0, your patience will largely be rewarded.

Octobpath Traveler 0 is available for Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5 for $49.99.

OCTOPATH TRAVELER 0 (Nintendo Switch 2) $49.99 at Amazon
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