Firebase has launched Firebase Studio, a new cloud-based development environment designed to streamline the creation of AI applications for all user levels. Read...

TechHive Editors Choice At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Extremely affordable Long list of features includes energy monitoring Matter support Cons App can be slightly confusing First-time setup results in a ton of emails Our Verdict The price is the primary attraction of Linkind’s full-color, tunable-white smart bulbs, which include energy monitoring and Matter support. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Linkind Matter Smart RGBTW A19 Smart Bulb Retailer Price $22.19 ($5.55 / Count) View Deal $29.99 ($7.50 / Count) View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Let’s be frank: Linkind’s smart bulbs won’t blow you away with their unprecedented feature set, amazing color quality, or even their support for Matter. What will impress is their biggest selling point: Their price tag, which at the time of this review was an amazing value at a less than $20 for a pack of four. While you’ll occasionally see other brands on sale at around that point or even a few cents less, that’s about as cheap as it gets for a full-color, tunable-white Wi-Fi bulb right now. The bulb hardware itself offers zero surprises, presented as a standard A19 bulb with a large white heat sink beneath an Edison-style globe. The bulb features RGBTW LEDs—red, green, blue, and tunable white—with a white color temperatures ranging from an exceptionally warm 1800 Kelvin to a very cool 6500K. The bulb draws a maximum of 9 watts while putting out 800 lumens, equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent bulb. Linkind’s light quality looks fine, the bulb dims smoothly, and the cost per bulb is amazingly low. Need other form factors? The bulbs are available in additional shapes and sizes, including BR30 floodlights and slightly taller A21 Edison bulbs, as well as light strips. Tunable and dimmable white-only bulbs are also an option if you don’t need color and want to save even more cash. Linkind’s A19 smart bulbs deliver higher quality light than you might expect for the bargain-basement price.Christopher Null/Foundry Installation and setup Configuration is done through an app called AiDot (the name of Linkind’s parent company), and smart lighting users will find this to be a fairly familiar tool, albeit one with a slightly quirky interface. Bulbs are added by scanning a QR code printed both on the manual and the bulb itself, with the former being much more convenient if you’ve already socketed the bulb. Note that this QR code is labeled as a Matter code, but it works for both Matter connections and in AiDot’s own ecosystem. I had only one slight hiccup during initial configuration, as the app could not locate the bulb; but this turned out to be because I did not have the appropriate Bluetooth permissions turned on in iOS. A close reading of the error message received during the setup process will alert you to this. Oddly, it’s something I’ve never encountered previously. You’ll find all the color-tuning settings you’d expect in the AiDot app. Christopher Null/Foundry With Bluetooth permissions properly enabled, I was able to quickly onboard the bulb to the AiDot app, bridge it to my 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network (5GHz networks are not supported), and begin managing it normally, though you’ll need to deal with a minor barrage of email messages to set up your account. The AiDot app has the usual features, though the layout again can be a little unintuitive. You’ll find white light settings confusingly under the “Color” menu item, for example. A full color wheel lets you choose your ideal shade, or you can move over to the “Presets” menu to choose from dozens of dynamic color-shifting modes. As with most color-shifting systems, some of these are more interesting than others, so you’ll need to experiment to find the ones that look the best in your environment. As well, a “DIY” mode lets you choose your own colors and effects if you want to get deep into tinkering. The Linkind bulb includes a final mode—“Music”—which uses your phone’s microphone to shift color and brightness in tune with ambient sound. Again, this is highly tunable based on how bright or kinetic you want the color changes to be. A bevy of dynamic color modes are preloaded, though some are more intuitive than others. Matter support makes it easy to incorporate these bulbs into any smart home ecosystem.Christopher Null/Foundry Full support for automations is built into the app, and not just schedules (including effects that gradually dim or brighten). For example, you can set the light to change color if rain is in the forecast or be triggered based on your location via a geofencing feature. The AiDot app also has a final feature that tracks energy usage, including running time and power consumption in kWh by day and by week. Bar graphs let you monitor power use at a glance. With all these features in the AiDot app, it might seem superfluous to connect the bulb to another ecosystem, but the bulb’s Matter support meant I had no trouble onboarding the bulb to iOS Home via Matter through a quick QR code scan with my phone, though as with many Matter devices, you’ll lose access to some of the features available in the AiDot app if you choose to bypass it. Further reading: This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lighting Should you buy Linkind Matter Smart RGBTW A19 Smart Bulbs? Linkind’s light quality looks fine, the bulb is quick to respond, it dims smoothly, and of course it costs very little per bulb. As brand names go, Linkind is as anonymous as the next—I’m not even sure how to pronounce it—but it’s hard to argue with the results. Read...

A funny thing that happened to me recently was that I accidentally dunked the end of a USB cable in my coffee cup when I was moving it over my desk. “My coffee’s going to give me a little extra energy boost today,” I thought as I pulled it out and examined the connector for drips of delicious, amber-colored goodness. But as funny as it was, it raised an interesting question for me, that being: Could I simply use my USB cable right away as I had intended to do, or was my cable now roached? I wasn’t sure, so I investigated. Here’s what I found out… Wet USB cables: The lowdown While most USB cables are water resistant, it’s important to note that this is the kind of water resistance you can expect from a knockoff 1980s analog wristwatch, meaning you can splash them a little bit without there being much of a problem, but you generally don’t want to submerge them in water — they’re simply not made for that. The most vulnerable part of a USB cable is the connector, since it’s open to the environment and not bound by plastic or rubber. Regardless of where your cable gets wet, you should shut down the device you’re using quickly and then unplug it if it’s plugged in. You also shouldn’t use the cable right away but wait an hour or more until it dries out first. This ensures that you’re not transferring the corrosive water (or coffee as it may be) to your USB port or allowing the liquid to damage the cable itself. You can also help dry out your cable with a few carefully applied techniques. How to dry your cables If your cable gets wet, you can use a cloth to dry it off, running a closed hand down its length. If the connector gets water inside it, give it a little shake to get any droplets out first. Then use the end of a tissue or a microfiber cloth to carefully poke inside and soak up any remaining droplets that remain there. I used the above techniques on my USB cable connector and found it worked perfectly once I plugged it in again. Want a quick solution? Try this… A hairdryer can speed up the process of drying out a connector if it has water inside it, but there are a few steps you’ll want to take to protect your cable from being melted by the hairdryer’s powerful heat. First, you should always switch the hairdryer to the lowest heat setting. You’re also going to want to keep your cable at a safe distance from the hairdryer’s nozzle, to ensure you get a constant flow of hot air that won’t start to burn the cable or connector — a distance of 14 inches should do the trick. A wet USB cable can be dried and used again.  Pexels: Liza Summer Drying with a hairdryer should get your cable dry enough to reuse in just 15 minutes rather than several hours, but just be sure to check that it’s completely dry before plugging it in. So, in summary, while most cables do have some level of water resistance and will survive being splashed or momentarily dunked in water (or other beverage), you should still apply caution before using one again and dry it out completely to keep your devices safe from harm. Read...

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Simon Upton says no new carbon forests should be registered with vast tracts of land already converted. Read...

If you don’t keep Teams updated on your computer, Microsoft will block your access to the communication app, Neowin reports. When Microsoft releases a new version of the Teams app, you have 90 days to install the update or you’ll start seeing a “blocking page” that requires you to install the update before you can resume using the app. Teams will start sending you recurring update reminders at the 30-day mark. If you don’t want to update, you can switch to the web app. Microsoft explains that the reason for the block is to ensure that all users stay safe with the latest security updates and compliance measures. The company first made this announcement back in November 2024, with a message posted to the Microsoft 365 Message Center: “Keeping Microsoft Teams up to date is critical to ensure your devices are secure and compliant. By default, and as designed, Teams updates automatically which successfully updates most clients in the world without additional overhead for customers. Microsoft Teams is governed by the Modern Lifecycle Policy which requires that the Teams desktop client be kept up to date. […] As documented, when a client falls out of date, the user will see: Recurring in-app alerts, if the app is between 30d-90d out of date. A blocking page in Teams, if the app is greater than 90 days out of date. At this point, the app will show options to update, to contact their IT administrator, or continue to Teams on the web. As an example, if the Teams app is hypothetically on a version released on January 1 and the next update is fully available on January 15, an in-app alert would be shown on February 14th (30 days after the January 15th update).” A more recent message gave specific dates for when you’ll start seeing the blocking page in Teams. If you’re on the Windows desktop app, you’ll start seeing it on April 11, 2025. For Teams in a VDI environment, the start date is May 6, 2025. For the macOS app, it’ll start on May 15, 2025. Read...

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Peter Scott says his regional council colleagues are “wasting money” by allowing staff to continue planning work in the face of legislative change. Read...

Do you primarily use Windows 11 but want to have a quick look at a Linux distribution like Linux Mint? Well, booting from a live DVD or USB stick is a convenient solution. The advantage of this is that nothing needs to be installed, and your Windows configuration remains unchanged. When you remove the DVD or USB stick, your PC will restart normally into its installed operating system. Live system: Start Linux Mint from a USB stick or DVD to try it out without making any changes to your PC. IDG If you want to have the full Linux Mint experience, then a virtual computer is the way to go. A virtual computer behaves more or less like a real PC, allowing you to exchange data with the host system (usually your Windows computer) or other devices in the network. However, since virtual Windows or Linux guests are isolated from the host and network by default, it’s primarily suitable for software tests and surfing potentially dangerous websites. One major advantage is the ability to freeze the system and restore it to a previous backup with a single click. Another option is the parallel installation of two or more operating systems on a hard drive or SSD, otherwise known as multibooting. Installation: If Linux Mint is installed in parallel with Windows, select the desired system when booting. IDG Once you’ve booted up the PC, select the operating system in the boot manager. This lets you use Windows 11 and Linux Mint at the same time, allowing you to access stored data whether it’s on your local drive or a network share. For an in-depth look at how virtualization works, check out our guide here. Advantages and disadvantages of virtual PCs Virtualization technology has been a part of everyday life in company networks and data centers since the 2000s. It allows the number of dedicated computers to be reduced and the existing hardware to be optimally utilized. Many other virtual servers can run independently of each other on a host server, which ultimately saves energy and administration costs. For home users, desktop virtualization solutions offer a sophisticated way of testing different operating systems, using Linux under Windows or even Windows under Linux without a large PC base. The biggest advantage of virtualization is that you always have a clean guest system, no matter what you do with it. Ideally, your host system remains completely untouched in the event of accidents and infections in the virtual machine. You can also make changes to the settings within the virtual machine to your heart’s content. With one click, you can return to the original state. On a real PC, a major crash can result in costly repair work. That said, virtualization has its limits. Virtual PC: Whether live system or installation – Linux Mint runs isolated in a Virtualbox environment. IDG While virtualization environments can translate the commands of the guest operating system to CPUs and memory with little loss of speed, this is not so easy with other hardware components. The graphics performance is not sufficient for complex games, as the memory is usually limited to 128 MB in the virtualization software, even if much more is available. Advantages and disadvantages of multiboot With a multiboot setup–whether with a live system or a permanently installed operating system–you can take advantage of your PC’s resources. The processor, RAM, and graphics memory are available without restriction. The same goes for other hardware components such as the printer, webcam, and scanner. A multi-boot system can be used in combination with Windows 11 and Linux Mint, for example, if the installation of Windows 11 fails due to the lack of hardware requirements. It also allows you to divide different tasks, effectively keeping work and personal use separate on the same machine. However, the disadvantage here is the double administration effort. Read...