What’s one of the best ways to upgrade your home for not much money at all? Add a few smart plugs to your outlets! They’ll make it easy to cut power to devices right from your phone, plus you can use them for home automations and for keeping an eye on energy consumption. Right now, this 2-pack of Tapo smart plugs is only $16 on Amazon (20% off). View this Amazon deal These super-cute smart plugs provide detailed energy tracking through Tapo’s app, complete with statistics and charts to help you monitor and optimize your power consumption. The app is intuitive to use and can do things like estimate energy bills, report exactly how much energy a certain plug is consuming, schedule and automate usage, and more. This type of plug is useful throughout the year, but I find them particularly great during travel seasons. I’m always iffy about leaving devices plugged in at home while I’m away for extended periods, but plugging them into my Tapo smart plug means I can remotely cut power to those devices right from my phone. It’s also great for things like Christmas lights, which don’t need to be on while I’m out and about. Tapo’s smart plugs are compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home, and can also be integrated with Samsung’s SmartThings network. This means you can use voice commands to manage them, turning them on and off, etc. Very convenient once you get used to it. Smarten up your home for cheap while you can! This 2-pack of Tapo smart plugs is only $16 right now, meaning you can score as many as you want at just $8 a piece. Make your home outlets smarter with these Tapo smart plugsBuy now at Amazon Read...

Microsoft has released a preview update for Windows 11 Insiders that adds AI features and easier formatting options to Notepad. The otherwise stripped-down text editor has also been given a new welcome screen that describes the app as “the essential text editor, enhanced.” Among the new features are AI-based tools that can generate and improve text. The results are displayed step-by-step as the text is created, in a way that resembles how well-known AI chatbots work. To use the features, you’ll need to log in with a Microsoft account. The update also includes expanded support for Markdown. Users can now work with bold, italics, tables, strikethrough text, and nested bullet lists, among other formatting features. Microsoft emphasizes that these AI features are entirely optional and can be turned off in Notepad’s settings. This Windows 11 preview update also brings some improvements to Paint, including features like AI-generated coloring book pages and a smarter Fill tool. Read...

All you need to know about the A-League Men round 14 match on Saturday afternoon at Go Media Stadium. Read...

Wallabies players are hoping coach Joe Schmidt will stay involved in their 2027 Rugby World Cup campaign after handing over to Les Kiss in July, and say it would feel “weird” if Schmidt coached against them at the tournament with the All Blacks. Read...

Upper Hutt has had a bit of resurgence in popularity in the last few years. Read...

Global food prices have been declining for four months, but what about in New Zealand? Read...

More than 200 patients turned up at Wellington Hospital’s Emergency Department on Tuesday. Read...

Stuff reporter Tony Wall retraces the events of a tragic morning at the base of The Mount. Read...

Do you know what your gaming setup needs? A monitor upgrade! Luckily for you, LG’s 32-inch 1440p gaming monitor is on sale for just $200 on Amazon, a 33% discount off its $300 MSRP and aaaaalmost its best price of all time (it was a tad bit lower on Black Friday, but that’s it). In short, this is absolutely worth jumping on, and you’ll see why below. View this Amazon deal The LG UltraGear 32GS60QC-B was built to make your gaming life more beautiful and more immersive. With its massive 32-inch panel and a gorgeous 2560×1440 resolution, this monitor promises great visuals with vibrant colors and tons of crisp details. The 180Hz refresh rate is great for all but the most hardcore of gamers, and the 1ms response time is quick enough for all but the most competitive of gamers. The 1000R curvature on this screen is neither dramatic nor gentle, right in that sweet spot area that wraps around your vision to make things more immersive and ease eye strain, but not so much that it’s disorienting. The 32GS60QC-B also supports AMD FreeSync technology, which minimizes screen tearing and stuttering for a fluid visual experience by syncing the images to your GPU. As far as connectivity goes, this monitor features a DisplayPort and two HDMI, making it easy to connect to multiple devices at once should you have different machines for gaming and work, for instance. All things considered, this is an excellent monitor whether you’re gaming, working, browsing the web, or just watching Netflix and YouTube, and all of these features are darn good for this discounted price. Get the LG UltraGear 32GS60QC-B for only $200 while you can! Or if you want to keep looking, check out our roundup of the best gaming monitors. Get $100 off LG`s 32-inch 1440p 180Hz gaming monitorBuy now at Amazon Read...

Just when Intel seemed to be on the cusp of success, the company reported supply issues that will limit the number of available PC chips that PC makers will be able to buy. Moreover, Intel said that it’s prioritizing the higher-margin data center chips with what it can manufacture, leaving supplies of upcoming chips like the Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) apparently constrained. Intel also said that its next-generation processor, Nova Lake, would arrive at the end of 2026. “So it’s just literally hand to mouth what we can get out of the fab and what we can get the customers, is how we’re managing it,” David Zinsner, Intel’s chief financial officer, said during a call with analysts reporting Intel’s Q4 earnings for 2025. A transcript was recorded by Investing.com. “Obviously, we’re shifting as much as we can over to data center to meet the high demand, but we can’t completely vacate the client market,” Zinsner added. “So we’re trying to support both as best we can and obviously work our way out of this supply issue. I do believe that the first quarter is the trough. We will improve supply in the second quarter.” The problem right now is two-fold, Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan explained: though Intel is now shipping Panther Lake chips using its 18A technology, the company’s yields—the number of “good” wafers, capable of making finished chips—is meeting internal expectations but not enough to meet demand. The company ate up most of its in-house supply of chips during the fourth quarter and is down to about 40 percent of “peak levels,” executives said. Intel said that its supply would continue to increase during the course of the year. Intel’s processor supply crunch comes at a time when the PC industry is facing acute shortages of memory and flash storage, all of which are having a negative impact on PC sales and prices. First benchmark impressions of Intel’s Panther Lake were terrific, but if customers can’t get them, then no one wins. Tan implied that Intel’s own allocation strategy could be brutally practical, favoring larger customers over small. “Some of the bigger players and the OEMs and the bigger player in the hyperscale [business], they have more access into the memory allocations,” Tan said. “And then secondly, I think some of the smaller ones, they are really challenging to scramble to get the memory. So I think that will be very important for us, Dave and I, how to allocate and also our sales grid and how to allocate to the right customer. We don’t want to have a CPU we send to them but they are missing the memory. They cannot complete the products. So we try to do it correctly.” Intel executives said that the company has “very active” engagement with customers on its foundry business, specifically on the Intel 14A manufacturing process. Finally, Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said that Intel would consolidate its data center and AI programs under a single leader, and “simplified” the company’s enterprise roadmap on the 16-channel Diamond Rapids part. Intel also said that it continues to work closely with Nvidia to build a custom Xeon fully integrated with its NVLink technology, as per Nvidia’s $5 billion investment last year, but there was no news of any RTX GPU chiplets for Intel PC processors. Intel reported a loss of $600 million on revenue of $13.7 billion, down 4 percent from a year ago. Intel’s Client and Computing Group reported a 7 percent drop in revenue to $8.2 billion. Intel projected lower sequential revenue, between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion. Read...