The solution comes from Anthropic, which developed and released an open specification called Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that allows AI models to connect with outside data sources and services without requiring unique integrations for each service.

"Think of MCP as a USB-C port for AI applications," wrote Anthropic in MCP's documentation. The analogy is imperfect, but it represents the idea that, similar to how USB-C unified various cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable level of success), MCP aims to standardize how AI models connect to the infoscape around them.

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Most seeds are grown in seed trays or blocks, but at some point, these seedlings will outgrow their cell or block and require more soil for their roots to grow. In some cases, the weather aligns and you can transplant your seedlings from the tray directly to the garden. But in most cases, your seedlings will need more time inside, protected, before the weather is warm enough, and that means you’ll need to take your seedlings out of the tray and give them a larger container where they can chill out and grow some more before going into the ground. This process is called "up-potting," and while the process itself is simple, there is actually a lot that can go wrong at this point in the growing process. Here’s how to give your seedlings the best chance at survival. 

How to know when it's time to up-pot

These are cotyledons, not "true leaves" Credit: Amanda Blum

When you buy plants at the nursery, they’re priced based on the size of the pot you buy them in—a quart-sized pot versus a gallon, for instance. But if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the size of the plant in a 4-inch pot is frequently not all that different from a plant in a quart-sized pot. That’s because the plant has been up-potted, a process that is happening constantly to plants as they grow in size. One easy clue that it’s time to up-pot is that the roots are growing out holes in the seed tray. In seed trays, plants can easily become rootbound (the roots run out of room, so they start growing in circles, tangling in on themselves), so it’s important to up-pot before that happens—if you wait too long, it can stunt plants, which is the opposite of what you want. 

These starts have true leaves. Credit: Amanda Blum

You can also up-pot too early, before the seedling is strong enough to survive the shock of transplanting. When vegetable and flower seeds grow, they form one or two leaves very early—these are called "cotyledons" and they are part of the seed itself. Later, the seedling will grow a second set, called the “true leaves”, because these are the first leaves that function the way leaves do. The cotyledons provide some photosynthesis, while true leaves provide actual food for the plant. These sets of leaves look quite different, and as soon as you know about cotyledons, you’ll have an easier time recognizing them in your seedlings. You can’t transplant until true leaves are established and grown in, and I’d wait even later. 

These tomatoes are ready for up-potting. Credit: Amanda Blum

In addition to paying attention to the roots, I look at the seedlings themselves above the soil. When each seedling is running out of room to stretch, the plants are touching one another, or the seedling looks too tall for the cell or block, that’s my sign to up-pot. 

Choose the right soil for up-potting

Credit: Amanda Blum

When you grow seedlings, you use a seedling mix—this has very little nutrients in it and is quite fine, which is all designed to help the seed grow. Now that your seeds are seedlings, they need nutrition and therefore, they’ll need a different soil mixture. When up-potting, use a potting soil, which will have nutrients in it like compost, but also ingredients to retain moisture like vermiculite. 

How to choose the right kind of pot

In most cases, you’re moving from a seed cell or block that is 0.75 inches to 2 inches in size, and so a 4-inch pot is usually appropriate. You’ll notice this at your nursery, too. In some cases, tomatoes will be up-potted to quart-sized containers, and yours might eventually need that, but it’s unlikely. 

If you're not sitting on a collection of these disposable pots, others in your gardening group are. Credit: Amanda Blum

A good way to save money would be to save these 3.5- or 4-inch pots from previous nursery visits, or solicit any gardening group online for them. Some nurseries may have old ones they’ll give away, too. Keep in mind that these are meant to be disposable and as such, with a good hot-water cleaning, will often break or deform. For a sturdier option, you can purchase a set of reusable, molded plastic pots, which is what I use. These stand up to cleaning and sterilizing year after year, so you rarely need to replace them and can even go through a cold or warm wash in the dishwasher. 

I spent many nights making these newspaper pots. Credit: Amanda Blum

However, for lots of gardeners, April is when they start making newspaper pots. Made the right way, a newspaper pot is sturdy, will decompose, and costs you nothing except time. I learned to make them from Meg Cowden of Seed to Fork. There are other variations of the paper pot out there, too, but a folded pot like this is the only one that seems to be strong enough to hold up for as long as you’ll need it. I only stopped making paper pots because it is time consuming and because I got one too many papercuts. 

Corn I up-potted in paper pots. Credit: Amanda Blum

In case you were considering seed bags, I should mention that I tried them and found that they didn't work very well. Some years ago, I thought I’d found a great, inexpensive solution for up-potting, and they could be planted outside, in the bag! But I found these to be hard to plant into, they fell over easily, and were never the right size. I'd steer clear and go with one of the other solutions I described above.

Transplanting can shock the plants, so be gentle

Many plants do not cope well with their roots being jostled around, like poppies, cucamelons and luffa; in those cases, you should grow the seedlings as close to planting time as possible to ensure you only have to transplant them once (directly into your garden) or direct sow them instead. Even for plants that don’t mind being transplanted, like tomatoes, the process is still a shock, so you want to be gentle. A lot can go wrong here, and usually it's human-based error. Remember, you’ll be touching a lot of plants, so if one seedling has a virus or disease or fungus, you’re now using the same hands that touched that disease on all your other seedlings. Wash your hands often and don’t transplant seedlings that look diseased. Toss them (not into the compost) and wash your hands. 

Usually, people grow more than one seed in a seed cell or block in case one seed doesn’t germinate. But for beginner gardeners, it’s so hard to let go of one of those seedlings if both seeds germinate, so they’ll try to separate the seedlings and plant each into a new pot. My advice is not to do that. Part of gardening is steeling yourself to culling seedlings, and you should have done so before you get to the up-potting process. If there are still multiple seedlings in a cell at this point, cut one to the soil line and let the stronger one survive. This way, you’re not breaking apart the soil around the roots and trying to separate them. 

Carefully labeled, up-potted tomatoes that have been buried deeply. Credit: Amanda Blum

Remove the seedling from the tray as carefully as you can, with the soil intact. I do not water on mornings I'm planning to up-pot because the drier soil makes this process easier. You can push up from the bottom of the tray to pop out a cell of a seed tray, but this is where soil blocks shine: because there is no tray, they are much easier to move. You simply pick up the block and move it. 

When it's time to up-pot, put 2 inches of soil into each pot and then carefully place the seedling into the center of the pot. With your hand, pour additional soil around the seedling block. Pat the soil down and give the seedling a sip of water, about a quarter of a cup. From there, the pot can go on a tray to go back under the lights. Keeping the pots on trays allows you to bottom water moving forward, if you want, but will catch water if you water from above, too. 

Remember that as you up-pot, you’re obliterating any labeling you had for your seed trays, so have a plan to label the pots as you up-pot, or you won’t know what’s in any of them. 

You can fix leggy starts when up-potting

Some plants, namely tomatoes, can form roots all along their stem. For this reason, when you move tomato seedlings or transplant them into the garden, bury the stem deeply. Up-potting is an opportunity to do so, and this can solve a problem with leggy starts. Eggplants, peppers, tomatillos, ground cherries, pumpkins, squash, melons, and potatoes can all be buried deep in the soil along the stem.

When you do this, you still want at least the two uppermost leaves to appear above the soil line.  You should remove any stems or leaves below this point and then bury the stem the appropriate depth and proceed as above. 

How to water your up-potted plants

At this point in the seedling process, you'll feel great. Your plants are established, they look like real plants, and you’re waiting for the ground to warm enough to transplant them. Beware, though, because this is when they are most vulnerable, in my opinion. They are still inside with limited airflow and in close proximity to one another. Virus and fungus can spread quickly, and light is limited with all that new growth. 

Be careful to water just enough, but not too much. For that reason, I like to bottom water, which means you’ll place an inch or so of water in the trays the pots sit on, and allow the plants to take in the water they need, but not more. I discourage watering from above, because you don’t want the leaves wet, which leads to conditions that are more likely to spread disease. 

The plants also need some food now, so regardless of how you water, be sure you’re adding some fertilizer to the water. I like Fox Farm Vegetable fertilizer for this purpose. Follow the directions on the bottle and you should be good to go.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app's "Library" button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the "right" way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

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OpenAI is working to make that promise happen. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled a new "Responses API" designed to help software developers create AI agents that can perform tasks independently using the company's AI models. The Responses API will eventually replace the current Assistants API, which OpenAI plans to retire in the first half of 2026.

With the new offering, users can develop custom AI agents that scan company files with a file search utility that rapidly checks company databases (with OpenAI promising not to train its models on these files) and navigates websites—similar to functions available through OpenAI's Operator agent, whose underlying Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model developers can also access to enable automation of tasks like data entry and other operations.

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Gemini Code Assist was first released late last year as an enterprise tool, and the new version has almost all the same features. While you can use the standard Gemini or another AI model like ChatGPT to work on coding questions, Gemini Code Assist was designed to fully integrate with the tools developers are already using. Thus, you can tap the power of a large language model (LLM) without jumping between windows. With Gemini Code Assist connected to your development environment, the model will remain aware of your code and ready to swoop in with suggestions. The model can also address specific challenges per your requests, and you can chat with the model about your code, provided it's a public domain language.

At launch, Gemini Code Assist pricing started at $45 per month per user. Now, it costs nothing for individual developers, and the limits on the free tier are generous. Google says the product offers 180,000 code completions per month, which it claims is enough that even prolific professional developers won't run out. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which offers similar features with a limit of just 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot chat messages per month. Google did the math to point out Gemini Code Assist offers 90 times the completions of Copilot.

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We'll never stop asking Microsoft to put out a consumer version of Windows that acts more like the Enterprise versions it gives to businesses, with no extra unasked-for apps and less pushiness about Microsoft's other products and services. But given that most of us are saddled with the current consumer-facing versions of Windows—Home and Pro, which treat their users basically the same way despite the difference in cost and branding—we're updating our guide to cleaning up a "clean install" to account for Windows 11 24H2 and any other changes Microsoft has made in the last year.

As before, this is not a guide about creating an extremely stripped-down, telemetry-free version of Windows; we stick to the things that Microsoft officially supports turning off and removing. There are plenty of experimental hacks that take it a few steps farther—NTDev's Tiny11 project is one—but removing built-in Windows components can cause unexpected compatibility and security problems, and Tiny11 has historically had issues with basic table-stakes stuff like "installing security updates."

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Bambu Lab, the company behind my favorite 3D printers, has given itself one hell of a week. Now, I’ve got answers to some of my burning questions, answers which you might also hopefully appreciate. But first, some backstory.

Since last Thursday, some creators have pledged not to buy Bambu printers anymore, even removed some of their 3D models from its online repository, after the company revealed it would add a new proprietary authentication mechanism that could keep you from using third-party tools to remote control your printer.

While you’d still be able to stick a file on an SD card and physically put it into your printer or use Bambu’s proprietary cloud, the old way of printing remotely from a third-party slicer would be no more — unless you downloaded a new proprietary Windows and Mac “Bambu Connect” desktop app to be the middleman between your slicer and Bambu’s hardware.

While Bambu was clear early on that this would be an optional update, one you could simply choose not to install, the company also positioned it as a necessary one to secure printers against remote hacks....

Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid AI when you open up your phone or laptop — as soon as I started this article in Google Docs, I was immediately offered some AI assistance to write it (which I didn’t take). And with the rollout of Apple Intelligence, that now applies to iPhones, iPads, and Macs, too.

But if you aren’t seeing much value in the Apple Intelligence features that have launched so far, you’re not alone: around three-quarters of iPhone owners can’t see what all the fuss is about, according to a recent survey. It’s also worth bearing in mind that these AI add-ons take up 7GB of local storage (and counting) on every device you want to use them on.

The good news is that Apple Intelligence is both opt-in and reasonably easy to disable, which isn’t something every company does with their AI tools (looking at you, Google and Microsoft). So if you find features like Writing Tools and mangled notification summaries superfluous to your needs, you can turn them off.

Assuming you’ve already turned it on, here’s how to turn off specific features of Apple Intelligence. And if you really don’t like it, here’s how to turn it off completely.

(The steps listed below were...

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Schools across the US and Canada are warning parents that a data breach may have leaked information for students and employees. The K-12 operations platform PowerSchool, which supports over 60 million students and has over 18,000 customers worldwide, suffered a breach that could’ve exposed names and addresses of students and educators and, in some cases, more sensitive information like Social Security numbers, medical information, and grades.

As initially reported by Bleeping Computer, threat actors got into PowerSchool’s support platform using compromised credentials. PowerSchool told Bleeping Computer that only a “subset” of schools are affected but has not provided a count of affected school districts or people. Additionally, the outlet says that in a note provided to its customers, PowerSchool claimed it paid a ransom request and “...has received reasonable assurances from the threat actor that the data has been deleted and that no additional copies exist.”

PowerSchool’s website and social media channels have no mention of the data breach or directions for people who may have been affected.

In an email to The Verge, PowerSchool spokesperson Beth Keebler wrote that the company became aware of “a potential cybersecurity incident” on December 28th and has “taken all appropriate steps to prevent the data involved from further unauthorized access or misuse.” Keebler also wrote:

The incident is contained and we do not anticipate the data being shared or made public. PowerSchool is not experiencing, nor expects to experience, any operational disruption and continues to provide services as normal to our customers.

So it was with some trepidation that I recently fired up the "remastered" Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game which won me over years ago with its PS4 version due to the simple fact that it was ONE OF THE BEST VIDEO GAMES OF ALL TIME and featured ONE OF THE BEST PROTAGONISTS OF ALL TIME in one of the BEST STORIES OF ALL TIME. (Yes, I like superlatives, which are some of the BEST WORDS OF ALL TIME. But the game world really was terrific.) Even my kids were won over, playing through the game and its sequel multiple times.

The game tells the story of a future Earth long after catastrophe—in the form of an autonomous robotic swarm—has ruined the planet. But it's not mere dystopia, though one does come across many wrecked and overgrown spaces from that earlier age. Horizon instead focuses on how humans, having lost most of their past knowledge, rebuilt a world in tribal fashion, a world populated by animal-inspired machines. The game's story operates ambitiously in two timelines and features massive killer robots, cults, and mad Sun Kings, all set against the gorgeous background of the American West.

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If I told you that Valve could make a play to dethrone the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox in your living room this next year while simultaneously challenging the Meta Quest as the gamer’s VR headset of choice, would you believe me? Because Valve may have a lot of SteamOS hardware on the way.

If there’s fire where we currently see smoke, Valve is currently preparing a wireless VR headset codename Deckard, a pair of trackable wands codename Roy, a Steam Controller 2 gamepad codename Ibex, and a codename Fremont living room console too. (That last one now looks likelier than it did yesterday.) And Valve has also now seemingly revealed plans for partners to create third-party SteamOS hardware too.

It won’t be easy to take on Sony, Microsoft, or Meta. Those companies have a lot to lose, and they’re deeply entrenched. But the Steam Deck has revealed a massive weakness in each of their businesses that may take them years to correct — the desire to play a huge library of games anytime, anywhere.

And while they figure that out, Valve may be building an entire new ecosystem of SteamOS hardware, one that could finally let PC and peripheral makers tap into the huge and growing...

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Anthropic has released a new open-source tool to connect AI assistants directly to the information they need to inform their responses or carry out tasks. The new Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a universal connection to all sorts of data sources, which Anthropic says will improve performance.

Earlier this month, OpenAI started testing a new “Work with Apps” feature that lets the Mac version of ChatGPT directly connect to certain coding apps. Anthropic’s tool, on the other hand, aims to work across all AI systems and data sources.

As noted by Alex Albert, Anthropic’s head of Claude relations, developers currently have to create custom code for each dataset they want their AI model to draw from. With Anthropic’s MCP, Albert says...

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Enter the Fellow Aiden ($365). For the first time, an automatic brewer promising pour-over quality actually delivered. The machine can accurately and precisely maintain water temperature, even offering a bloom cycle to appropriately begin the extraction process. The Aiden has both guided brewing and minutely customizable options for achieving your ideal cup whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been a coffee snob for decades. It’s this abundance of control that sets Fellow’s machine apart, and why it actually gives you coffee that may have you ditching your pour-over dripper for good.

Design

Fellow is well known for its design prowess when it comes to coffee gear like grinders, kettles and drinkware. The company usually takes a more mechanical looking approach, with an aesthetic that resembles lab equipment instead of coffee devices. For the Aiden though, the company went for a more minimal design, giving it a plainer cube structure that’s a lot more modern than many automatic drip machines on the market. It won’t appeal to everyone, but I do think it’s unique.

A removable water tank sits on the left, complete with volume markings for your desired quantity of coffee. You don’t have to take the tank off to fill it, but if you’re working from a faucet the fact that you can makes things easier. Inside the brewing chamber, there’s a spray head adjustment which allows you to reconfigure the Aiden for single-cup use. The machine also comes with a second brew basket for this purpose that can deposit coffee straight into your favorite cup.

Billy Steele for Engadget

Down below, a double wall carafe provides enough heat retention to keep your coffee warm for a few hours. The lid doesn’t close off the container entirely, but if you consume all of your morning joe in under three hours, you’ll be fine. I would’ve liked to see a second lid that would seal things to keep them at just-brewed temps, but Fellow did design the carafe so that it pours easily without a mess. I can’t say the same for the 2020 model Moccamaster the Aiden replaced in my kitchen.

Instead of the typical on/off switch, the Aiden has a one-button, knob-based interface where you make all of your selections. A small, circular display sits at the top left of the front panel, and turning the knob navigates the plethora of menu options. Once you find what you’re looking for, simply press the dial to make a selection. (Reviewer’s note: The display on my review unit was damaged before it arrived, but since the machine still performed as intended, I didn’t feel the need to return it just for that reason.)

Pour-over performance

There are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of automatic or semi-automatic drip coffee makers that promise the quality you’d get in a manually brewed pour-over. Sadly, almost none of them actually deliver. I’ve used a Moccamaster for four years, and while there’s a lot to like about the machine, the straight-line arrangement of the shower head doesn’t give you the even water distribution you’d want for quality pour-over simulation. Other machines don’t get hot enough, and many don’t allow you to adjust the bloom cycle, water ratios or brew temperature.

On the Aiden, Fellow addressed all of my gripes with machines I’ve used in the past. First, the dual shower heads’ spouts are spaced out so that coffee grounds are evenly saturated throughout the bloom and brewing cycles. The two easily switchable modes mean you can make a full 10-cup carafe or as little as one cup with the same quality. You will have to keep two types of filters on hand for the two baskets, but those are much easier to store than a second, single-cup pod machine. This alone would be a big innovation for drip brewers, but the company didn’t stop there.

An infinitely customizable brewing system

Billy Steele for Engadget

Fellow also accounted for customization, another area where coffee nerds want room to experiment. The Aiden allows you to adjust brew temperature, coffee-to-water ratio and pulse behavior as much as you’d like. You can dial in the number of pulses of water, the time between them and even set each one to be a different temperature. For the bloom cycle, Fellow unlocks duration, temperature and the bloom ratio (amount of water in the initial pour).

Instead of having to live with the one setting a company programmed into its machine, you’re in complete control of all of the parameters here. The degree with which you can dial in the brew cycle to your every whim is the biggest reason why the Aiden will be so attractive to serious coffee lovers. What’s more, another important piece of the machine’s customization abilities are brew profiles, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

If you’re not familiar with the term, the best way to think about brew profiles is like recipes. The Aiden offers three out of the box — light roast, medium roast and dark roast — so you don’t need to immediately start tweaking and saving things. But if your favorite coffee roaster is like mine (Hi, Vignette Coffee Roasters), it will offer brewing guidance for things like water ratios. Of course, those companies may not always nail your preferred flavor or strength, but they provide a good starting point since they’re aware of the nuances. And with the Aiden, you’re able to actually employ that advice for each single origin or custom blend you use.

Eventually, Fellow will allow roasters and coffee shops to create and share profiles so you can brew like they do in a cafe. If you subscribe to Fellow Drops, a coffee lineup curated by the company, your Aiden will be able to automatically download the profiles for the beans that are headed your way.

Don’t fret if you aren’t at that level of coffee snobbery just yet. The Aiden provides guided brewing based on those three roast profiles and your desired number of cups for quick and easy use. These aren’t just helpful for beginners, but also for the times when more advanced users want a pot of joe without much thought. I found them helpful on the weekends when I wasn’t sure when I’d be getting out of bed and didn’t want to wake up to a cold pot of coffee. During the week though, the scheduling tool is a big advantage that much of the competition lacks.

I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the Aiden’s heating system, since this tech is what enables to-the-degree temperature control throughout the brew cycle. Any moderate or advanced coffee lover knows that water temperature is a key aspect of brewing great coffee. Lots of automatic drip machines simply don’t get hot enough to extract all of the flavor from the grounds, leaving you with a more muted flavor profile. Inside the Aiden though, Fellow designed a heating setup with single-degree precision that even lets you adjust temperatures while the machine is brewing without stalling the process. The way this machine heats water offers consistency and control that many coffee makers can’t match.

There’s also an Aiden app, but it doesn’t do much right now. You can connect the machine to the software for firmware updates, to set the time and to name the brewer. Eventually, Fellow plans to enable the shareable profiles I mentioned earlier, in addition to scheduling and remote control from your phone. However, those items have been listed as “coming soon” since the Aiden’s launch in September. I’ve asked Fellow for the current status and I’ll update this review if I hear back.

The competition

Billy Steele for Enagadget

Before I tested the Aiden, I used a Moccamaster KBT that I purchased in 2020. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to upgrade my coffee setup at home, where I’d been brewing manual pour-overs via Chemex for years. I wanted something I could turn on and have it make coffee comparable to what I’d been doing, and that’s what I got.

Moccamaster coffee machines have a reputation for being well-built and reliable, and I found that to be true. My KBT worked well daily, providing coffee that was more akin to pour-over quality than a much cheaper auto-drip brewer. The KBT still comes with an insulated carafe, although the 2020 model didn’t have a pour spout like the updated version does. This made pouring difficult and often messy. And while the machine brews at temperatures between 196 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit, the straight-line design of the shower head doesn’t provide the best saturation during the brewing cycle.

With all of that said, I still think Moccamaster machines are the best alternative to the Aiden. They’re slightly cheaper, starting at $329, and will serve you well for years. Plus, there are options for glass carafes with heating elements if you prefer that to an insulated one. For many of the models though, you’ll have to live without an automatic drip stop when you remove the carafe during brewing. There’s a manual slider on the brew basket for most of the options, but an auto option is only available on machines like the KBGV Select. The 40-ounce Moccamaster models also brew about nine ounces less than the Aiden at max capacity (1.25 L/44 oz vs. 1.5 L/52.9 oz), so that’s something else to consider. It’s almost another full cup of coffee per pot.

Wrap-up

It’s clear Fellow recognized all of the shortcomings of so-called pour-over simulators on the market when designing the Aiden. The company finally delivers on the promise of the smoothness and flavor of manually brewed coffee in an automatic drip machine. The Aiden gets hot enough, offers adequate saturation and segments the brew cycle just like you would for a pour-over or Chemex. Plus, there’s a host of customization options, which allow you to dial in your process based on the beans you’re using. And that means I can actually get rid of a lot of the clutter I needed for a single-cup pick-me-up.

Half-Life 2 is getting a major update in celebration of the classic title’s 20th anniversary. In addition to Steam Workshop support directly within the game, Valve has fixed bugs and restored some content, added new graphics settings, updated gamepad controls, and a whole lot more. You’ll also be able to get the game for free on Steam through November 18th at 1PM ET. After that, it will cost $9.99.

Valve is also now including the Episode One and Episode Two expansions with the base game. They’ll be accessible from the Half-Life 2 menu, and Valve says that “you will automatically advance to the next expansion after completing each one.” You’ll also be able to access the Steam Workshop within the Extras menu, which means you’ll no longer...

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In a demo with TechCrunch, an OpenAI employee opened the ChatGPT app and an Xcode environment containing a simple project modeling the solar system - although it was missing the Earth. The employee selected an Xcode tab within ChatGPT, which tells the AI chatbot to look at the app, and prompted the chatbot to "add the missing planets." The chatbot was able to complete the task, writing a line of code to represent the Earth that matched the rest of the project's format.

Apple’s new Mac Mini looks like someone hit the Mac Studio with a shrink ray, and I love it. But there is at least one, uh, hot-button issue: you have to reach underneath it to power it on. If that bothers you (and you’re not into flipping it upside down so it looks like it’s wearing a little hat), you can automate when it starts up and shuts down by creating a power schedule. I’ll tell you how.

There are plenty of reasons you might want to do this. I did it on my MacBook Air because I don’t use it that often, and I got tired of opening its lid only to find a dead laptop. Someone else might want their computer to wake up in the middle of the night to perform scheduled backups. Others might need to shut down their Mac for business...

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Purchasing Sony's first-ever "mid-generation" console upgrade in 2016 didn't give original PS4 owners access to any new games, a fact that contributed to us calling the PS4 Pro "a questionable value proposition" when it launched. Still, many graphics-conscious console gamers were looking for an excuse to use the extra pixels and HDR colors on their new 4K TVs, and spending hundreds of dollars on a stopgap console years before the PS5 served that purpose well enough.

Fast-forward to today and the PS5 Pro faces an even weaker value proposition. The PS5, after all, has proven more than capable of creating excellent-looking games that take full advantage of the 4K TVs that are now practically standard in American homes. With 8K TVs still an extremely small market niche, there isn't anything akin to what Sony's Mike Somerset called "the most significant picture-quality increase probably since black and white went to color" when talking about 4K TV in 2016.

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OpenAI began rolling out canvas to ChatGPT Plus and Team users globally on Thursday, while Enterprise and Education users will gain access next week. The company also plans to make canvas available to all free ChatGPT users once it exits the beta stage.

Like Artifacts, Canvas is sort of a scratch pad, a way to visually separate portions of the active working context (the user prompt) to keep them from getting lost in the chat backlog. From our experience, Artifacts can ease the process of working on projects with Claude that require editing and revisions, and Canvas functions in a very similar way.

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Enlarge / Sorry about all the black space in the lower-right corner. Nerdfetch does not make good use of the space it's given—unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Almost nobody truly needed Neofetch, but the people who did use it? They really liked it.

Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on that system. You knew most of this data, but if you're taking a screenshot of your system, it looked cool and conveyed a lot of data in a small space. "The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system," wrote Neofetch's creator, Dylan Araps, on its Github repository. "Neofetch shows the information other people want to see."

Neofetch did that, providing cool screenshots and proof-of-life images across nearly 150 OS versions until late April. The last update to the tool was made three years before that, and Araps' Github profile now contains a rather succinct coda: "Have taken up farming." Araps joins "going to a commune in Vermont" and "I now make furniture out of wood" in the pantheon of programmers who do not just leave the field, but flee into another realm entirely.

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Anker has come up with a clever design for a new 65W charger that’s thin enough to squeeze between larger power adapters on a power strip, potentially making an over-crowded outlet useable again.

Thin chargers aren’t a new idea, but they typically feature a set of folding prongs on the flat side of the adapter, allowing them to plug into outlets behind furniture and sit flush against the wall. Anker’s approach is to instead position a pair of folding prongs on the end of its new charger, taking advantage of the thin design in a different way.

Anker recently announced new...

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Enlarge (credit: Robert J. Sawyer)

WordStar's most recent claim to fame might be that it's the word processing application on which George R.R. Martin is still not finishing A Song of Ice and Fire.

But many writers loved and still love WordStar, a word processor notably good for actual writing. As computers moved on from DOS to Windows, and word programs grew to encompass features that strayed far from organizing words on a page, WordStar hung back, whether in DOS emulation or in the hearts of its die-hard fans.

One of those fans is Robert J. Sawyer, an award-winning science fiction author still using the program last updated in 1992. Deciding that the app is now "abandonware," Sawyer recently put together as complete a version of WordStar 7 as might exist. He bundled together over 1,000 pages of scanned manuals that came with WordStar, related utilities, his own README guidance, ready-to-run versions of DOSBox-X and VDosPlus, and WordStar 7 Rev. D and posted them on his website as the "Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive."

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Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.

After Apple rejected the app in June, the developer said it wasn’t going to keep trying because the app was “a subpar experience.” Today, UTM thanked the AltStore team for helping it and credited another developer “whose QEMU TCTI implementation was pivotal for this JIT-less build.”

As with other emulators on the App Store, you can’t do much...

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Anthropic is releasing a new feature for its AI chatbot Claude that will let anyone create an email assistant, a bot to purchase shoes, or other personalized solutions. It’s called “tool use” (or the nerdier “function calling”), and it hooks up to any external API of your choosing.

While I’m not a huge fan of the term “AI agents,” that’s essentially the game plan here. For instance, the tool can analyze data to create personalized product recommendations based on a user’s purchase history or provide quick responses to customer inquiries, such as tracking order status or offering real-time technical support. To spin up an assistant, all it needs is access to an API and someone who knows how to code.

Also, this tool can work with images,...

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Enlarge / Raspberry Pi Connect looks like a good reason to make a Pi account, at least if you're not running your own DynDNS, VPN, and other remote-access schemes. (credit: Raspberry Pi)

One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you're running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and "real" computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you're new to single-board computers or just eager to get started.

Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course).

From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It's a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there. The Pi's docs site has a lot more on the particulars.

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The mysterious AI chatbot, “gpt2-chatbot,” returned to the major large language model benchmarking site, LMSYS Org, on Monday night roughly a week after it abruptly disappeared. But now, there are two: “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” and “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot.” These models exhibited the same GPT-4 level capabilities,…

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