Devices

‘Kim, which battery brand is safest?’ Here’s the answer for your phone, your iPad and your laptop, with links and the 10-second label check that matters more than the brand.

A listener wants one power bank she can trust for her phone, iPad and laptop, because she’s scared of a fire on her nightstand or on a plane. Fair fear in a year when there have been more than 50 overheating incidents on flights, friend. Three picks, and the label trick that beats any brand name.

Your weather app runs on satellites, supercomputers and a retired science teacher who walked to his rain gauge at 7 a.m. every day for 50 years

The forecast on your phone has a secret ingredient: 8,700 volunteers with a thermometer. Meet the Frenches, a family in Gouverneur, N.Y. Ray monitored the stats for 50 years before his son took over. The 11-year-old granddaughter is next.

Your tech may be reporting to Beijing. Here’s how to find out where your gadgets were made and how to wall them off in five minutes.

Two Chinese companies make nearly half the world’s cellular modules, the chips inside doorbells, thermostats and fridges. Your smart gadgets, friend, may be chatting with Beijing. Five minutes on your router shuts the conversation down.

They took your kid’s phone this month. Next thing, your boss wants yours. Here’s what he can and can’t legally do.

New Jersey students handed over their phones on Sept. 1 under a new all-day ban. The same company making those locking pouches for schools sells a version for your workplace, and employers are buying. Know the line before the memo lands.

She hadn’t seen her childhood block in 70 years. Then she put on a headset in a California retirement home.

Sue Livingstone, 84, stood on her old street in Queens again. Ginny, 81, swam with dolphins. Bob, 83, hiked Glacier on his birthday with his wife of 61 years beside him. And the part nobody expected: Afterward, they all went to lunch. Together, friend.

Six things TV installers and calibrators know that nobody says at the register, including why your price match gets denied and why your TV is dimming itself.

The picture mode the store set is wrong on purpose. Your TV is dimming itself. And that model number was written to make sure Best Buy never has to match Costco’s price. Six insider fixes, friend, and they’re all free.

On September 11, the phones didn’t break. They filled up. Here’s what still worked.

Twenty-five years ago, millions of Americans picked up the phone at the same moment, and most of them couldn’t get through. The network wasn’t destroyed. It was busy. That continues to happen in hurricanes and blackouts, and there are four things you can set up tonight that make you reachable when everyone else isn’t.

Same towers, half the bill: A couple paying $200 a month asked me what the catch is. Here are all three.

After 20 years of marriage, Dave and his wife agree on one thing: $200 a month for two phones feels wrong. The same signal sells for half. There’s a catch, friend. Three, actually. All smaller than the one they’re living with.

Your ring and watch are guessing. Calorie counts miss by up to 93%, and sleep stages are a bluff. Here’s how to wear one without letting it lie to you.

Stanford tested seven fitness trackers against lab gear. Heart rate passed. Calories missed by up to 93%, friend. Your ring is guessing at sleep stages and blood oxygen. Here’s how to stop it from fooling you.

🍉 One in a melon

A new AI model called Atlas can take footage from just a few regular cameras and turn it into a full 3D scene you can spin around and view from any angle. One demo used nothing but phones on tripods filming a watermelon drop, and honestly, the results look like something out of a big budget movie. I get this 5-star-rated newsletter.

Apple’s biggest launch in years lands September 9. Buy nothing with an Apple logo until then.

Apple’s biggest launch in years lands Sept. 9: the iPhone 18 Pro, the first foldable, new Watches and AirPods. Buy anything Apple before then, friend, and you’re paying the impatience tax. Full wait list below.

🦷 Say cheese for $499

Nine out of 10 people don’t floss regularly, so Dyson responded in the most Dyson way possible: engineering around human laziness and charging a fortune for it.

More than half of America watches TV with subtitles on. It’s not your hearing. Here’s the free 2-minute fix and the gadgets that finish the job.

Turn it up, now it’s blasting, turn it down, have to rewind, “what did she SAY?” A survey found over half of Americans keep subtitles on, mostly because the audio is muddled. The real culprits: razor-thin TVs with speakers firing at the wall, theater sound mixes crammed into your living room and streaming compression.

Researchers tested 17,000 apps for secret eavesdropping. What they found instead should change your settings tonight.

It’s America’s most-argued tech question. You mention dog food once, and the ad shows up an hour later. Scientists tested 17,000 apps and found zero secret recordings. But one media firm bragged about “Active Listening” tech, Apple paid $95 million over Siri misfires, and 2,230 companies are quietly feeding Facebook your shopping habits. The way ads REALLY find you is creepier than a hot mic. Plus the 5-minute settings fix.

The best meteor shower of 2026 peaks tonight, and this year, the sky cooperates. Here’s how to watch and how to catch one with your phone.

Tonight, Earth plows through a comet’s dust trail: the Perseid meteor shower, up to 100 shooting stars an hour, visible from every state. This year’s peak lands on a new moon, the darkest viewing in years. When to look, where to look and the phone camera settings that can catch a falling star.

Your smart TV is taking snapshots of everything you watch, then selling the data

Your smart TV has a setting called ACR that’s spying on everything you watch. It’s on by default, and every brand buries it somewhere different in settings. Turn it off and nothing changes except the ads get dumber.

The always-on gadgets quietly draining your power bill, and the $10 fix

Every blinking clock and standby light is on your electric bill. A $10 gadget stops it and doubles as a burglar deterrent while you travel.

The internet isn’t in a cloud. It’s 600 cables on the ocean floor, and a single one is about as thick as a garden hose.

An estimated $10 trillion crosses these cables every day, and roughly 60 ships on the entire planet keep them running. Ship anchors do more damage than sharks ever have, and Starlink’s whole fleet still can’t match one cable’s capacity.

Your parents’ phone problems aren’t about the phone. They’re about having no one to ask.

A 20-minute setup stops half the panicked calls. A carrier with a real human who answers stops the rest, for your folks and for you.

Your carrier deletes voicemails automatically. Save the ones that matter tonight.

Your carrier isn’t a filing cabinet. AT&T keeps basic voicemail 14 days, T-Mobile says deleted messages “cannot be retrieved” and Verizon won’t take the blame even for ones you saved. Here’s how to turn a loved one’s message into a file you own forever, in a minute or so.