Windows PCs are incredibly powerful and flexible, and that’s true even before you install any apps. As it turns out, Windows itself is chock-full of useful features that few people actually know about. If you’re a college student who wants to take your college laptop to the next level, here are several obscure Windows features that’ll help you whether you’re taking notes, researching projects, or otherwise. Related: The best laptops for college students Live captions Chris Hoffman / IDG Windows 11 has a feature called Live Captions that listens to audio and automatically generates readable captions on the fly. It works when you’re watching a video, but it also works with audio captured by your microphone. So, whether you’re sitting in class during a lecture or watching a recorded video, Live Captions can use speech-to-text technology to transcribe what you hear into readable text. To get started, just search for “live captions” in the Start menu and launch the Live Captions app. This app is available on all Windows 11 PCs and requires an internet connection to work. If you have a Copilot+ PC, the Live captions feature can actually work offline and also supports live translation between different languages. Clipboard history Joel Lee / IDG Whenever you copy and paste, you might think you’ve overwritten the previous thing you copied — but that’s not true. Windows 11’s Clipboard History feature keeps track of all the text and images you copy. Normally, when you paste, you just paste the last thing you copied. But you can choose from previously copied items by using the Windows key + V shortcut (rather than the usual Ctrl + V shortcut). You’ll be prompted to enable the Clipboard History feature if you haven’t already done so. Clipboard History even allows you to “pin” items so that they’re always available and conveniently accessible for easy pasting in the future. It’s one of the many useful productivity features on Windows. Handwriting to text input Ashkan Forouzani / Unsplash Some Windows laptops ship with support for capacitive pens. These pen-enabled PCs are a great choice for college students because they make it way easier to write handwritten notes, mathematical equations, diagrams, and more in excellent note-taking apps like OneNote. But with Windows 11, pen input works in any app thanks to handwriting recognition. You can write directly on any text field with your pen and Windows will instantly convert it to text. Dictation Chris Hoffman / IDG Windows 11 has built-in support for dictation, which means you can speak your thoughts aloud and they’ll be transcribed on the fly as text. In other words, you can type using your voice — just like on a phone. To open the Windows 11 dictation tool, use the Windows key + H shortcut. If you’re using a PC with a touch screen, you can also tap the microphone button on the touch keyboard to launch it. Related: I used Windows Dictation to write this article with my voice Web apps as desktop apps Joel Lee / IDG These days, many apps are actually just websites that run in the browser. Hate having to keep dozens of tabs open with all of the webpages and web apps you use? Well, there’s a better way. Windows 11 lets you turn webpages and web apps into Windows “apps” with their own taskbar icons and windows. They feel almost identical to usual desktop apps, and it’s a particularly convenient trick for single-page web apps you keep open 24/7 (e.g., Gmail, Spotify, Slack). To do this in Google Chrome, navigate to any website and click the three-dot menu > Save and Share > Install page as app. In Microsoft Edge, navigate to a website and click three-dot menu > Apps > Install this site as an app. (Mozilla Firefox doesn’t offer this feature.) Sticky notes Microsoft Microsoft OneNote is a great note-taking application, but it might be a little too complex for your needs. If all you want to do is jot down quick notes here and there, try the Sticky Notes app instead. Windows 11 has a built-in Sticky Notes app that you can launch by searching for “sticky notes” in the Start menu. This app can keep notes pinned to the desktop or kept in a simpler list format, and the notes can be synced between your PC and other devices. When syncing Sticky Notes with your phone, your notes are accessible via OneNote Mobile, Microsoft Launcher for Android, and Outlook for Windows. Emoji menu Chris Hoffman / IDG Windows has a convenient built-in quick insertion tool for emojis. To access it, you can use either the Windows key + Period or Windows key + Semicolon keyboard shortcuts. You can browse all the emojis included with Windows and insert them into any application or document. You can also start typing right after pressing the keyboard shortcut to search for a particular emoji. Text editing shortcuts 76 / Unsplash The Ctrl key provides so many essential keyboard shortcut tricks for editing text. My favorite part, though, is that it makes many keyboard actions apply to entire words instead of individual characters. Here’s what that means: Normally, when you press Backspace, you delete the a single character of text. But if you use the Ctrl + Backspace keyboard shortcut, you delete the entire previous word. This works with lots of shortcuts, including the Delete key. Another example is text selection. You can hold Shift and press the left or right arrows to select individual characters. But if you use the Ctrl + Shift + left or right arrow keyboard shortcut, you can select entire words at a time. And if you use Ctrl + Shift + Home or End, you can select entire lines of text with a single keystroke. Dynamic locking Joel Lee / IDG Whether you’re on a laptop or PC, you should be locking it whenever you aren’t using it, especially when you’re on campus. You’re probably already doing it with a keystroke (Windows key + L) or with a setting that automatically locks whenever your system goes to sleep. But there’s a better way in Windows 11: use the Dynamic Lock feature, which detects when your phone moves away from your computer and automatically locks when it does. You can set this up in Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options > Dynamic lock. Presence-based locking Ernest Ojeh / Unsplash Newer laptops with Presence Sensors don’t even need to involve your phone. They can detect when you move away from your computer, then automatically lock when you do — and they can automatically unlock when you sit back down. If you’ve set up Windows Hello with facial recognition, they can even sign you back in automatically. Further reading: The best webcams for Windows Hello Focus timers Joel Lee / IDG Have you heard of the Pomodoro technique? It’s a method that helps you stay focused and get more done in less time. The key is to work in half-hour bursts with short breaks in between — and most people use timers to know when to switch between work and breaks. Windows 11 has a built-in Pomodoro timer. You can access it by opening the Clock app in the Start menu, then activating its Focus sessions feature. You can configure your focus session, during which all notifications and app alerts will be stifled. You can also link your Spotify account so the right music plays while you’re focusing. Do Not Disturb mode Joel Lee / IDG Windows has a Do Not Disturb feature that quiets down noisy notifications while you’re trying to focus. While Do Not Disturb has long been a popular feature on smartphones, Windows PCs didn’t actually have this sort of thing for many years. To enable Do Not Disturb mode on Windows 11, press Windows key + N to open the Notification Center, then click the bell icon with Z’s at the top-right corner. On Windows 10, you’ll need to activate a setting called Focus Assist to temporarily disable notifications. Sync with your phone Microsoft Windows makes it easy to access or control your phone right from your PC, but the process is different depending on whether you have an iPhone or Android phone (and each one’s functionality is different). If you have an iPhone, install the iCloud for Windows app. After you set it up, you’ll be able to link iCloud Photos to the Photos app and browse from within Windows. You’ll also get to integrate with iCloud’s other features, including Drive, Passwords, Contacts, Calendar, and Bookmarks. If you have an Android phone, open the Phone Link app from the Start menu. After you set it up, you’ll be able to text from your PC, manage your phone’s notifications, browse photos in your camera roll, and even copy-paste photos to your PC. Screenshots and screen recording Chris Hoffman / IDG Modern Windows PCs have powerful built-in screenshot tools. On Windows 11, it’s called the Snipping Tool, which is as easy to launch as pressing the Windows key + Shift + S keyboard shortcut (or the Print Screen key if you have that on your keyboard). Once the Snipping Tool is opened, you’ll see an overlay bar at the top of your screen. Use it to select the type of screenshot you want: Rectangle, Window, Full screen, or Freeform. Then, click or drag to select what you want to capture and you’ll get a notification. (You can click the notification to edit the screenshot before saving it.) Related: How to take smarter screenshots in Windows 11 The Snipping Tool also includes the ability to record video of your screen. Switch to the video camera icon in the overlay bar at the top of the screen, then draw a rectangle over the area you want to capture. Past versions of files Chris Hoffman / IDG Windows offers multiple ways to retrieve an older version of a file. If the file is synced to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage, you can locate it in File Explorer, right-click it, and select OneDrive > Version history. For files that are only stored on your PC and not synced to a cloud storage service, you can set up the File History feature to regularly back up selected files and folders to an external drive. Then, you can restore previous versions of the file from there. Lost laptop tracking Chris Hoffman / IDG If you’re at college and using a laptop, you should always have a contingency plan in case your laptop is lost or stolen. One option is to use the built-in laptop tracking feature of Windows, which also lets you lock your laptop remotely. It won’t be as useful as similar features available on smartphones because your laptop probably doesn’t have a cellular connection. The tracking requires your laptop to be connected to Wi-Fi, and your laptop can’t be in sleep mode. Even so, it’s still useful even if it isn’t perfect. If you lose your laptop on campus, it’ll probably stay connected to Wi-Fi and be traceable. But the key is making sure the feature is active before you lose your laptop. Turn it on now by going to Settings > Privacy & security > Find my device and activate the Find my device option. Then, use Microsoft’s account devices page to track down your laptop. Further reading: Laptop security guide for college students Advanced calculators Chris Hoffman / IDG The built-in Calculator app on Windows is more powerful than it looks. Open the app’s menu and you’ll find different calculator modes, including a scientific calculator, a graphing calculator, and tools for converting currencies and units of measurement. Quick video trimming Joel Lee / IDG Windows comes with Microsoft’s Clipchamp video editor, but there’s actually another useful video tool buried within the operating system. With this feature, you can quickly trim video files and clip sections to save as their own smaller video files. You can do this by right-clicking on a video file in File Explorer, then selecting Open with > Photos. When the Photos app opens up with the video loaded, click the blue Trim button on the toolbar and select the part of the video you want to save. Further reading: How to use the free Clipchamp video editor Quick photo editing Joel Lee / IDG You’d be surprised by how capable the built-in Photos app can be. It’s not just a photo viewer — it’s also a good photo editor when you’re in a pinch or just need some simple crops and edits. After opening an image in Photos, click the blue Edit button in the toolbar to access the image editing tools. You’ll see options for cropping the image, marking it up, adjusting lighting, applying filters, and even using AI effects to erase elements and remove the background. Laptop battery drain statistics Joel Lee / IDG Everyone always wants more laptop battery life. If you find your laptop dying much faster than you think it should, you’ll want to look into which apps are the biggest battery drains — and Windows keeps track of that for you, making it easy to investigate and troubleshoot. On Windows 11, head over to Settings > System > Power & battery. Then, scroll down and expand the Battery usage section to view battery usage by app. On Windows 10, go to Settings > System > Battery to find these same details. Once you know which apps are killing your battery life, you can make informed decisions on what to do. (Battery stress is one of the common mistakes killing your laptop’s lifespan.) Further reading: Is it bad to always leave your laptop plugged in? Read...

I recently described how a recent flurry of smart home failures made me turn to Home Assistant, the increasingly polished DIY smart home platform that you can host yourself without relying on the cloud. Starting today, Home Assistant users have an awesome new toy to play with.  The Home Assistant Connect ZQA-2 ($69) is a new smart home adapter with a very tall antenna. And before you ask, it’s not for Matter, the latest and hottest new thing in smart home. Instead, the Connect ZQA-2 is all about Z-Wave, an older but widely used smart home technology that’s getting renewed attention thanks to its new “Long Range” capability, which allows for connectivity with Z-Wave LR (Long Range) client devices up to a mile—yes, a mile—away.  Home Assistant has long supported Z-Wave, in addition to Zigbee (the smart home standard favored by Phillips Hue) and the aforementioned Matter. (I just added the Matter integration to my own Home Assistant instance.)   But the Connect ZQA-2, which is based on the latest Z-Wave 800-series chipset, is the first Z-Wave adapter built by and for the Home Assistant platform, with the group behind Home Assistant noting that the hardware has been “precisely tuned to Z-Wave’s ideal wavelength.”  For those not familiar with Z-Wave, it’s a radio technology that operates in the sub-1GHz frequency band. This low frequency is ideal for penetrating solid barriers, such as walls, but it also avoids interference from Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee devices that all operate in the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum. More than 4,500 smart devices from the likes of Ring, Leviton, Shelly, Yale, and Vivint offer Z-Wave devices, making Z-Wave a key ingredient in any Home Assistant installation.  Earlier generations of Z-Wave devices utilize a mesh network protocol that can support a maximum of 232 nodes. The newer Z-Wave 800-powered components are backward-compatible, but they can also use the Z-Wave Long Range protocol to operate on a star network that can support up to 4,000 (!) nodes. Nabu Casa, the commercial arm of the Open Home Foundation under which Home Assistant operates, offered me a sample Connect ZQA-2 for evaluation. While I haven’t had time to give it a formal review (I’ve been playing with the unit for a little less than a week), I can attest that it was easy to install and has—thus far, anyway—worked like a charm.  The Connect ZQA-2 comes in two parts: a 5 x 5-inch plastic base, and a 12-inch antenna with a 1.5-inch LED segment at the top that serves as a status indicator. Assembly is easy: Screw the antenna into the base, use the provided USB-C cable to connect the base to your Home Assistant server (a Raspberry Pi 5 in my case), and that’s pretty much it.  Assembling the Home Assistant Connect ZQA-2 is a simple matter of screwing the foot-long antenna into the 5-by-5-inch base.Ben Patterson/Foundry Deciding where to locate the Connect ZQA-2 is a potential issue. Home Assistant advises keeping it away from objects that could cause interference, such as thick brick walls, bodies of water (like fish tanks), other wireless transmitters, and wire mesh or metal fixtures (such as server racks).   I admit, I broke the rule and place the ZQA-2 on top of the wire mesh cabinet that houses my collection of Raspberry Pi boards, but a quick diagnostics check showed that the radio’s performance wasn’t unduly hampered. The antenna’s LED tip will blink yellow to warn you of a “sub-optimal” connection.  The Home Assistant folks also packed in a few Z-Wave devices for me to connect to the ZQA-2, all of which support both the standard Z-Wave protocol as well as Z-Wave LR: a smart plug, a water leak detector, and a smart water valve actuator, all built by Z-Wave device manufacturer Zooz.  Being that I’m an apartment dweller, I wasn’t able to install the smart water valve device, but I did try the smart plug and the water leak detector, which I configured via the Z-Wave JS control panel. (I run Home Assistant in a Docker container, so as a new Z-Wave user, I first had to spin up the Z-Wave integration in a separate container, a process that took all of 20 minutes.)  I didn’t perform formal testing on the connectivity between the two Zooz devices and the ZQA-2, but they worked flawlessly on an anecdotal level. I first connected the water leak sensor via Z-Wave LR and the smart plug with standard Z-Wave, and then swapped the protocols.    Ideally, I’d have done some true long-range testing with the new antenna—a great example might be placing the water leak sensor in a detached shed that’s, say, 100 yards away from the main building. The Z-Wave Long Range protocol supports a theoretical range of one mile, line of sight, so one could certainly dream up some inventive use cases.  The Home Assistant Connect ZQA-2 is available now on the Home Assistant website. I’ll update my findings as I continue testing. Read...

Nobody really expects Windows on Arm PCs to keep up with their cousins running games locally on AMD or Intel CPUs — but until now, they had trouble simply being allowed to do so. Now, Microsoft is testing a way to enable local gaming via the Xbox app on Windows on Arm PCs. You’ve always been able to game on a PC running with Windows on Arm, with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor inside. But if you loaded up the Xbox app on a Windows PC, the only way to do so was via cloud gaming, not locally. That changes with Microsoft’s new test build. Microsoft now has a new update (version 2508.1001.27.0 and higher) for those who are both Windows Insiders and Xbox Insiders enrolled in the PC Gaming Preview on their Arm-based Windows 11 PCs, via the Xbox Insider Hub. (That’s probably not a lot of users.) If you and your PC meet those requirements, you should be able to download an updated version of the Xbox app allowing you to try out games via the Windows Store and Xbox Game Pass for PC. The latter is what makes this update important. Game Pass allows those who pay a monthly fee to take advantage of an ever-changing pantheon of games, both top-tier and independent offerings. To date, Windows on Arm “gamers” have had to use Valve’s Steam instead. The problem is that the Adreno GPU inside the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite just doesn’t have the horsepower to run top-tier titles. Qualcomm showed off games like Control running at about 40fps on Low settings, and that’s fine. Our deep dive into Snapdragon X Elite gaming, however, showed most games still chugging away at single-digit frame rates, or at levels that simply weren’t playable. Qualcomm has also been hamstrung by the lack of support for anti-cheat systems that has improved over time. It’s less of an issue with older games or those that use older or even 2D graphics, as our tests showed DOTA 2 ran at an average of 52.8 frames per second on Low settings — but would dip down as low as 9.8fps when taxed to the limit. Still, the Xbox app is now a pretty convenient way to download games via Microsoft’s Game Pass, so the addition is good news. We’ll simply have to wait for what we expect to be a next-gen Snapdragon to be launched at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit at the end of September for even better gaming on Windows on Arm. Read...

The threat from AI-powered online scams is on the rise. You can be fooled by realistic-looking fake emails and messages pretending to be from your bank or other companies, that convince you to unwittingly install malware on your device. How can everyday people have a chance against these hugely sophisticated schemes? Avast has the answer – fight fire with fire. It has launched a new AI assistant that can answer security-related questions about communications you may suspect are fraudulent, as well as check URLs to see if websites really are what they report to be. So, if you want to stay safer online, it’s time to level-up your defences with an AI powered scam detector. Getty Ask the Avast Assistant if you’re worried about something being fake One of the main ways that AI-powered scams work is in trying to trick the recipient into believing that they have received a message or email from either a business, friend or family member. There’s often also some kind of time-pressure involved, which is there to force you into making a snap decision – ‘Do this now or your account will be closed!’ In those moments, it would be good to have an advisor on-hand who can tell you whether the crisis is authentic or fake. With Avast Assistant, you can simply paste in the link that’s included in the message, the email address, and you can even copy and paste the text from the message itself. Then the AI software will analyse it for you and tell you whether it’s likely to be trustworthy or not and how you should proceed. It’s a simple, fast and reliable way to avoid being scammed, plus the whole experience is conducted as a conversation, so you don’t need any security experience to be able to use Avast Assistant. It also offers you tips on how to improve your privacy and security online, so you’ll have a constant advisor there to help keep you safe. New – Scam Guardian will fight scammers for you Avast Avast Assistant is part of Scam Guardian a new suite of tools that are included in Avast Free Antivirus, and purpose-built to seek out and help protect against online scams aiming to steal your data, identity or money. Alongside Avast Assistant there is also Web Guard that analyses the content and code in the websites you visit for hidden scams before it has a chance to get past your defences. If you move up to the Avast Premium Security plan, then you’ll also have access to Email Guard, which scans messages before you open them to ascertain whether they include malicious links or scams that attempt to deceive you and do you harm. All of the tools use the latest AI training helping ensure they stay up-to-date with emerging new threats that appear. Getty Use Avast AI technology to keep your security strong Online threats are moving too fast and becoming so sophisticated that everyday people simply can’t be expected to fight off the constant attacks. That’s why it’s important to take security seriously and bolster your defences with powerful tools of your own. You can download Avast Free Antivirus today, at no cost, and instantly have Avast Assistant and Web Guard by your side in the fight against online scams. Sign up to Avast Premium Security Sign up to Avast Premium Security (£39.99 for the first year) and you’ll also get Email Guard as well as several other features that help protect your device and data. AI is powering up the scams that are out there, so now is the time to match it with your own security-focused armour. Read...

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The Home Office says the technology helps locate suspects but civil liberties groups warn of heightened surveillance. Read...

The technology will be introduced at the Women’s Rugby World Cup to help alert referees to head injuries. Read...

Lancom Technology warns executives must swiftly adopt AI strategies to avoid falling behind as companies prioritise AI for productivity and competitive edge in 2025. Read...

Maybe it was the sight of Sengled users literally left in the dark by their useless Wi-Fi bulbs, maybe it was another price hike, or just an overall sense that my smart devices weren’t truly under my control. Whatever the reason, I’d developed a growing desire to build a smart home setup that wasn’t a hostage to the cloud.  Specifically, I’m talking about a locally hosted smart home setup, and I’m currently in the process of building one. And while I’m a smart home expert thanks to my six years’ experience here at TechHive, I’m quickly realizing how much I still don’t know as I tackle the steep learning curve of a DIY smart home.  This isn’t a step-by-step guide of how to build your own smart home system—that might come later—but more of a journal about where I am in my self-hosted smart home journey, where I started, and what I’m hoping to achieve. If you’ve been harboring similar thoughts and my story gives you some inspiration, all the better.  I was a complete smart home novice when I started here at TechHive; I’d been writing about computers and technology for 20 years but had never installed a smart bulb before, much less a smart home hub. Over time, my apartment became stuffed with smart devices, from Alexa speakers and Google displays to Philips Hue bulbs and even a Ring video doorbell. My dumb home was rapidly becoming smart.  What I didn’t like was how smart systems I’d grown accustomed to changed when one manufacturer or another would randomly redesign an app, throwing my smart home workflow into chaos. Nor did I like the occasional server outages that left me unable to control my devices, nor the features that were unceremoniously placed behind paywalls. Oh, and don’t forget the price hikes. Stumbling into self-hosted smart home  I stumbled into the self-hosted smart home world by accident. I was experimenting with an unused Raspberry Pi a few years back (this was before I wound up with four of the diminutive computer boards running on my network) and noticed an option to install something called Home Assistant. Sounded kinda cool, so I tried it, and was astonished to have a Home Assistant instance spun up in minutes.  Easy, right? Not quite. Sure, getting Home Assistant—an open-source smart home platform that offers scores of integrations and boasts hundreds of avid contributors—up and running isn’t a big deal. Getting it configured, though, takes gumption, experimentation, and patience, the latter quality being among those I could use more of. Instead of depending on the cloud, my work-in-progress smart home setup runs on this little Raspberry Pi board.Ben Patterson/Foundry See, Home Assistant is pretty good about pinging your local network and seeing which devices, smart or otherwise, can be set up on the platform. But once you add all those products to a default Home Assistant dashboard, it’s up to you to get them organized and working together. Home Assistant gives you tons of freedom to arrange your devices in practically any way you see fit, but the massive range of options—not to mention dozens of drop-down menus and settings with arcane labels—can be intimidating.  Dealing with the learning curve  That’s why every few months or so, I’d give Home Assistant another go, tinkering away at a custom dashboard but eventually getting nowhere. A proprietary smart ecosystem like Philips Hue, in contrast, is incredibly intuitive and a cinch to set up. The downside of Hue, Ring, and other closed platforms is that you’re subject to their ever-changing whims, whereas your Home Assistant setup is yours—provided you can get it set up.  In the past few weeks, though, things have begun to accelerate. I recently migrated my Home Assistant instance to a more powerful Raspberry Pi 5 (my old Pi 3 just didn’t have the horsepower or the RAM to keep Home Assistant stable), and later I acquired some Z-Wave hardware that basically turned my Pi into a Z-Wave hub.  Next, I spun up a Matter server on the Pi and began controlling my Thread devices directly on Home Assistant, right alongside my Z-Wave products. For now, my Thread setup depends on an Apple HomePod mini and its Thread border router, which requires signing into my Apple account; eventually, I plan on adding a dedicated Thread module to my Home Assistant rig to cut that tie to the cloud.  Just a little help from my (AI) friends  Finally, it was time to deal with that pesky dashboard again, but this time I brought reinforcements—you guessed it, we’re talking ChatGPT. I fed the chatbot a lengthy list of all the devices registered on my Home Assistant instance, and the AI dutifully spat out a raw YAML configuration file. (YAML is a programming language, and the acronym stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language). I plugged in the code, and voilà—a multi-tabbed dashboard appeared with most of my devices and automations neatly displayed. ChatGPT’s work wasn’t perfect; there’s one tab filled with misconfiguration errors, and some of the tabs aren’t laid out exactly as I’d like. But it’s a starting point—and more importantly, I can study ChatGPT’s work and learn how to do it on my own.  Taking the next step  So, what’s next? A Zigbee module, for starters—and then, if I’m really ambitious, I might unpair my Phillips Hue lights from the Hue Bridge (which, naturally, depends on a cloud connection) and re-pair them directly to the local Zigbee hub. Doing so would mean losing all the extra functionality in the Hue app—no more nifty animations, for example, and so long music syncing—but it would also mean not caring about whether the Hue servers are up or down. (To be fair, Philips Hue servers rarely suffer any hiccups at all, or at least not in my experience.) A steeper hill to climb involves using a voice assistant powered by local AI to control my devices. Home Assistant offers integrations for all the big AI providers, including OpenAI and Google Gemini, as well as Ollama, an app that allows local hardware to run large-language AI models.  But configuring local LLMs to deal with dozens of smart home devices has been a surprisingly tricky task. My locally hosted AI models have routinely choked on the more than 100 entities that are exposed to my Home Assistant instance, so my next task will be to pare down and subdivide that total into bite-sized pieces, as well as to craft a system prompt that will help the AI reliably understand the meaning and intention of my typed commands. (Speech-to-text voice control on Home Assistant requires either local processing, which is an awful lot for my local hardware to take on, or an optional $6.50/month cloud subscription.)  So yes, a locally hosted smart home system like Home Assistant isn’t for everyone. For an easier experience, consider Hubitat, a locally hosted but closed-source smart home system that has a large cadre of fans. (I’ve never tried it, but our reviewer deemed it “impractical” in his 2021 evaluation. We’re way overdue for another look at that, as well as a couple of other newish hubs.) But if you’re ever shaken your fist at a smart home manufacturer for redesigning its app, raising subscription fees, or permanently bricking one of your devices, a self-hosted smart home system is the best revenge.  This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart home systems. Read...

AOL was once the largest provider of internet service for Americans. Today, it belongs to Yahoo! Inc. and operates as a web portal where you can read online articles aggregated from sources across the web—and it also still offers dial-up internet service! But not for much longer. Last week, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing its dial-up internet service starting September 30, 2025. Active users will need to switch to another internet provider by then, and the shutdown will also affect associated software including AOL Dialer and AOL Shield. Once bustling with 30 million customers It’s quite stunning that AOL is still offering dial-up service in 2025, and more astonishing that people are still paying for it. In 2022, one report counted about 175,000 dial-up subscribers in the US—and that number has surely dwindled in the three years since, but not to zero. The reason why people still pay for dial-up is more sad than amusing: many people in rural areas simply have no other access to the internet, forced to rely on dial-up through telephone lines to stay connected. AOL isn’t the only dial-up provider, but was the largest for a long time. AOL began offering its dial-up internet service back in 1991, then grew to be the largest internet provider in the world in 2000 with around 30 million active users. In recent years, however, AOL earned more from tech support and digital security services than from its internet services. Dial-up internet is a legacy service In recent years, the number of dial-up internet users has fallen sharply due to the proliferation of broadband infrastructure in the US. Unfortunately, broadband still hasn’t reached every nook of the country, and those who have no other option must still resort to traditional dial-up access. Dial-up isn’t only slow and impractical, but also exceedingly expensive for what you get, plus susceptible to cyberattacks and other security risks. Many now consider dial-up internet to be a legacy service and we wouldn’t be caught dead using such an outdated technology—but legacy tech continues to power our country in ways unseen. For example, Windows 95 and floppy disks are still used in air traffic control and some businesses still use Commodore 64s for customer checkouts. Read...