Technology

If you go check the back of your TV, games console, soundbar, or Blu-ray player, you'll almost certainly see a little port with red light coming from it. That's TOSLINK or "Toshiba Link".

Dropping expensive electronic devices onto hard surfaces often ends in tears, but not all drops are equal. Though device and case manufacturers are going further than they ever have in a bid to protect your smartphone, there are some surfaces around which you should exercise additional caution.

SAVE $71: As of Oct. 25, this DJI mic mini is on sale for $98, down from its list price of $169. 

Opens in a new window Credit: DJI DJI Mic Mini (2 TX + 1 RX + Charging Case) $98 at Amazon
$169 Save $71   Get Deal

This small but mighty DJI mic mini is on sale right now, and it packs a punch with a laundry list of features. The mic comes with two transmitters (mini lavalier microphones with clips) and one receiver. All of the pieces fit neatly into its lightweight portable charging case. Each lavalier transmitter microphone weighs just under 10 grams. The design is intended to blend in discreetly when used during filming. The DJI mic mini has a 400m max transmission distance for clear sound from far away or chaotic environments like busy streets or rough elements like wind and rain. 

This model‘s battery life can last up to 48 hours with the charging case. It’s also designed with 48kHz sampling and 120 dB SPL for crystal-clear sound for your content. There are two different noise-cancellation settings. Basic is perfect for quieter spaces that you really want to isolate, like indoor settings. Strong can isolate your audio when there’s a lot of outside noise or if you’re in a space with a lot of noise.

DJI Mic Mini is also intuitively designed to automatically lower input sounds that register as too loud. Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or filmmaker who is looking for a step up in your mic game or someone who has been relying on the built-in microphone in your device, this model could really step up your content’s audio quality.

There were headlines about the next Xbox console this week, but the biggest news out of Microsoft's gaming division actually concerned a competitor's platform.

On Friday, Xbox and current series developer Halo Studios announced Halo: Campaign Evolved. As its name suggests, this is a full-scale remake of the original Halo single-player campaign, built in Unreal Engine 5. It features all of the original levels, plus some new gameplay features on top of the rebuilt visuals. It's set for release sometime in 2026, and in a shocking development for anyone who used internet forums 20 years ago, it's coming to PlayStation 5 as well as Xbox and PC.

As you can see in a lengthy gameplay demo video set in perhaps the game's most famous level, The Silent Cartographer, Halo Studios has done some work on this game beyond just making it look more like a modern title. Features from later Halo games, like sprinting and the ability to aim down sights with every weapon, have made their way into this game. There will also be some weapons that weren't present in the first Halo, such as the Battle Rifle and Energy Sword, available for use in this game. Halo Studios is also promising three new prequel levels, but did not show them off or specify what they would be about.

SEE ALSO: Xbox president calls console exclusives 'antiquated'

This is interesting on a number of levels. First and foremost, for those of us who are old enough to remember the console wars of yesteryear, seeing Halo on a PlayStation console is roughly akin to when they opened a McDonald's in the Soviet Union. It's an anticlimactic conclusion to a decades-long ideological struggle, one that you could see coming from a mile away if you'd been paying attention for the past few years. Microsoft has been slowly building up to this by releasing first-party titles like Gears of War: Reloaded and Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 in recent months. Halo coming to PS5 in some form was inevitable.

It's also not without some controversy. Some longtime Halo fans online are not happy about the visual style on display here, while others have questioned the need to add new vehicles, weapons, and movement abilities to a game that arguably doesn't need them. One of the game's original level designers even weighed in on X to mildly criticize elements of the remake.

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That sort of thing is to be expected when remaking a bona fide classic like Halo, but at least on my social feeds, the reaction was harsher than usual. We'll see how it works out when Campaign Evolved launches sometime next year.

SAVE $150: As of October 25, this 13-inch 2025 MacBook Air is $849, down from its list price of $999 on Amazon. 

Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple 2025 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop $849
$999 Save $150   Get Deal

Finding the right time to spring for a new computer can be all about waiting for the right device, with the right specs, and the right deal. This 2025 model with an M4 chip might be just the right fit for you. Coming in at $849 for a 13.6-inch display, Apple’s super-fast M4 chip, 16 GB of unified memory, and a 256 GB SSD. While this model isn’t ideal for folks working with large video editing projects or sizable photo editing content because of the hard drive size, it’s seriously powerful. 

This 2025 MacBook Air deal has a 12 MP center stage camera designed to render zoom calls with crystal clear resolution. It offers 18 hours of battery life to accompany you throughout your day at work or school. This particular MacBook Air comes in midnight black. You can also grab models in silver, gold, or sky blue for a $50 price increase. Stay connected to your other devices or up to two external displays with two built-in Thunderbolt 4 ports, a MagSafe charging port, one headphone jack, and Bluetooth connectivity.

Happy Friday and welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.

Released in August 2025, the Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.

Currently, if you're stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move onto the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.

How to play Pips

If you've ever played dominoes, you'll have a passing familiarity for how Pips is played. As we've shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don't necessarily have to match.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for October 18, 2025

The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible – and common – for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.

Here are common examples you'll run into across the difficulty levels:

• Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.

• Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.

• Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.

• Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.

• Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.

If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.

SEE ALSO: NYT Strands hints, answers for October 18, 2025 Easy difficulty hints, answers for Oct. 25 Pips

Equal (5): Everything in this light blue space must be equal to 5. The answer is 5-5, placed vertically; 5-6, placed vertically.

Less Than (8): Everything in this space must be less than 8. The answer is 0-0, placed horizontally; 1-4, placed vertically; 2-6, placed vertically.

Number (11): Everything in this space must add to 11. The answer is 5-6, placed vertically; 5-0, placed horizontally.

Number (10): Everything in this space must add to 10. The answer is 1-4, placed vertically; 2-6, placed vertically.

Medium difficulty hints, answers for Oct. 25 Pips

Number (24): Everything in this space must add to 24. The answer is 6-6, placed vertically; 6-2, placed vertically; 6-3, placed horizontally.

Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 6-2, placed vertically; 2-2, placed horizontally.

Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 4-4, placed vertically; 6-3, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally; 5-5, placed horizontally; 1-1, placed horizontally.

Number (1): Everything in this space must add to 1. The answer is 1-5, placed vertically.

Equal (5): Everything in this light blue space must be equal to 5. The answer is 5-5, placed horizontally; 5-2, placed vertically; 1-5, placed vertically; 5-3, placed vertically

Number (3): Everything in this space must add to 3. The answer is 1-1, placed horizontally; 5-2, placed vertically; 5-3, placed vertically.

Hard difficulty hints, answers for Oct. 25 Pips

Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 0-3, placed vertically; 0-4, placed vertically; 2-4, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this green space must add to 4. The answer is 0-4, placed vertically.

Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 5-0, placed vertically.

Number (0): Everything in this space must add to 0. The answer is 5-0, placed vertically.

Number (2): Everything in this space must add to 2. The answer is 2-4, placed vertically.

Number (26): Everything in this space must add to 26. The answer is 5-5, placed vertically; 5-1, placed horizontally; 6-0, placed vertically; 5-2, placed horizontally.

Number (0): Everything in this light blue space must add to 0. The answer is 6-0, placed vertically; 0-2, placed horizontally.

Number (1): Everything in this purple space must add to 1. The answer is 6-1, placed vertically.

Number (6): Everything in this space must add to 6. The answer is 0-2, placed horizontally; 4-1, placed horizontally.

Number (12): Everything in this space must add to 12. The answer is 6-1, placed vertically; 6-4, placed horizontally.

Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 5-2, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally; 2-1, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this light blue space must add to 4. The answer is 4-1, placed horizontally; 1-1, placed horizontally; 2-1, placed vertically.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

So, you dropped big money on a gaming mouse but find that you're just as bad with it as with that $20 rodent from your local Walmart. I hear you. Turns out, what really makes a gaming mouse great isn't the price tag—it's how well it fits you. Allow me to explain.

Google is a company that’s not exactly known for sticking with products for the long haul. However, it doesn’t always put the final nail in the coffin. There are a few Google apps still kicking around that could really use some love and attention.

In the race for best gas mileage without a hybrid badge, three major brands are in the spotlight, Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai. Each has made efficiency a priority, consistently coming out ahead when it comes to traditional gasoline vehicles.

Gemini just got easier to access in Google's mobile web browser.

Chrome users on both iOS and Android can now activate "AI Mode" from the page that opens when you try to open a new tab, per 9to5Google. Previously, this page had a Google search bar and icons for some frequently visited websites, but now it has a big old AI Mode button right underneath the search bar.

There's also a button to launch an incognito tab right next to it, which might be more useful to you, depending on how you live your life.

SEE ALSO: How to use Google Meet's new AI makeup tool There it is. Credit: Screenshot: Google/Alex Perry

This gives users a much quicker way to launch into the Gemini-powered search capabilities of AI mode. To be clear, you could always use AI mode on mobile, but now there's a convenient shortcut for it that negates the need to remember the URL or set a bookmark.

For those who don't like AI-powered search, regular old Google search is right there on top of the shortcut.

Before buying a product or trying out a new service, you probably check online reviews first. What most of us don’t realize, though, is that some companies pay for fake reviews to sway buyers away from competitors. Thankfully, with a bit of attention, you can tell genuine reviews apart from fake ones.

I first discovered Waze back in 2014 when traveling to a tech event in Colorado. I flew into Denver and had a 120-mile journey to my destination. It seemed like a simple trip, most of my time would be spent on a single interstate, and the resort was only a few short miles from the exit. About an hour into the trip, Waze suddenly told me to get off the highway at the upcoming exit. I knew I had just over an hour left on this highway, but needing a pit stop, I followed the directions.

Are you ready to ditch Google Photos and self-host your own photo server? There are a number of ways to go about doing that, allowing you to store your pictures without giving Google the rights to crawl through them all.

Every homeowner or trade worker has their preferred power tool brand, and whether you're team Ryobi, love everything Milwaukee, or something else, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the nearly identical options at big-box retail stores. Each brand makes a few unique items catering to certain professions or tasks, and here are five useful Ryobi tools that Milwaukee doesn't make.

This was another big week in tech news, with the long-awaited release of Samsung and Google's XR headset, some exciting updates in the Linux ecosystem, a disappointing change to Windows Paint, and much more. Here are the biggest stories you might have missed.

During the early hours of Tuesday, Oct. 21, AWS went down. You'd think that would simply mean we couldn't shop on Amazon or Woot in the middle of the night, but this is highly incorrect, as we all now know. The AWS outage took down what felt like half of the internet. WhatsApp, Snapchat, Venmo, Slack, banks, airlines, shipping networks, and trading platforms like Robinhood all went offline on a global scale.

Some folks were impacted by the AWS outage to the point of losing sleep. Yes, the spendy Eight Sleep Pod system operates via a WiFi connection only, and the brand uses Amazon's cloud network to make that happen. Once AWS crashed, the Eight Sleep Pods lost connection to the mothership.

I'm in the process of testing the Eight Sleep Pod 5 for Mashable, the latest version of the Eight Sleep system. My full review isn't out yet, but I was certainly one of the sad people who slept poorly due to the outage. While the experience was much better than other nights I've had (like sleeping on an airport floor), it wasn't a great night, and getting my bed back online once AWS was back online took me hours.

The Eight Sleep Pod's (former?) WiFi addiction

The Eight Sleep Pod is a pricey smart bed with several components. First, there's the Eight Sleep Pod's cover, which slips over your mattress like a fitted sheet. This cover contains small water channels that connect to the Pod's Hub, or the brains of the bed. The Hub connects to the Eight Sleep Pod app, and from there, users can set temperature preferences, schedules, and a wake-up alarm.

Should users add the Eight Sleep Pod Blanket to the Cover, the Hub can also control it. The Blanket essentially works in the same way as the Cover. It's laced with small water channels that either cool or heat the sleeper to their preferred settings. The Eight Sleep Pod also uses AI with an automatic mode that makes small temperature adjustments throughout the night to optimize sleep.

People are paying big money to equip their mattress with the Eight Sleep Pod system. In a queen-size, the current model, the Eight Sleep Pod 5 with Hub and Cover, is selling for $3,348. Add the blanket to this setup, and you're at a total of $4,348. For those who want to further upgrade the sleep experience, Eight Sleep also sells an adjustable base with fancy features like a built-in speaker, the ability to set an alarm with vibration, and snoring mitigation. Add the base to the setup and it's a grand total of $6,398.

Credit: Eight Sleep Pod

Every element of the Eight Sleep Pod requires a WiFi connection to work, so when AWS crashed, so did the Sleep Pod. The temperature regulation stopped working, the base's elevation and vibration functions went offline, alarms went dead, and the app did not function except to give an error message after a few minutes.

Some sleepers were stuck in a real pickle

My bedroom is chilly by design. I love a cold room with a warm, cozy bed. I keep the Eight Sleep Pod's Cover and Blanket, keeping me toasty but not sweating. I woke up sometime around 1 a.m. PT on Oct. 21 to a cold bed. Since the water in the cover and blanket was no longer warming, and my bedroom was probably about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, my bed was cold to the touch. The water had more or less taken on the ambient temperature in my room.

I dove into the app to fix my chills, and while waiting for it to load (it was not loading), I noticed I was lying totally flat, not the standard sleep position with head and legs slightly elevated the base typically adjusts to at night.

It took me maybe an hour to figure out my bed was offline because of the AWS outage. I found out by reinstalling X on my phone and then locating the EightSleepApp account, which had posted about the outage to its 38 followers. At the time, the outage information wasn't posted to the brand's main X account, EightSleepPod.

I put on warmer pajamas and socks and added more blankets to my bed, and eventually, my body heat seemed to heat up the water chambers well enough that I could sleep again.

Other users were not so lucky and took to the internet to explain they were way too cold or sweating thanks to a hot bed. Others said their bases were stuck in an elevated position. Since the app wouldn't load, there was no way to make temperature or elevation adjustments. People also said they didn't wake up on time since the alarm function on the Eight Sleep Pod was also offline.

Changes coming to the Eight Sleep Pod

Eight Sleep has since acknowledged the bed's reliance on WiFi, and the AWS is not ideal. The brand's CEO, Matteo Franceschetti, announced Backup Mode on Oct. 22 via his X account. This new function allows users to alter the Pod's temperature and elevation when either the WiFi is out or the cloud network is down. Features vary slightly depending on which outage users are battling with, but the main problem of having no control over the temperature could be solved with this upgrade. Eight Sleep says the rollout is "gradual," and doesn't mention when all users will be in line for this new Bluetooth support.

This upgrade is great news for Eight Sleep Pod users who were left concerned about the expensive Pod's functionality during future outages. This is especially relevant as we head into stormy winter weather, which could turn WiFi routers off, unless you use a portable power station.

When all is said and done, we all gained a bit more knowledge this week. We now know AWS is one powerful beast that can legitimately ruin your slumber.

Oh, how the seasons are flying by! Can you believe the year is almost over? There has been a metric ton of killer shows and movies that have gone to and from Netflix over the past 10 months, and November is no different, with the streaming giant releasing the month's newest recruits.

Back when physical keyboards were common on smartphones, most companies had settled on slide-out designs. Motorola, however, had a different idea. What if the keyboard swiveled out? And what if the phone was a square instead of a rectangle?

TL;DR: The latest Stuff Your Kindle Day takes place on Oct. 24-26. Spook Your Kindle, hosted by Dark Romance Team, is offering free dark romance books for your e-reader.

Opens in a new window Credit: Dark Romance Team Spook Your Kindle (Oct. 24-26)   Learn More

The Stuff Your Kindle Day schedule has lost all sense of reason. Fresh from the Stuff Your Kindle: Crime Edition and Cozy Mystery eBook Blast, we've got another event running through the weekend. And this isn't even the last event in October. We've got another two events lined up before the end of the month. This is great news for bookworms but terrible news for anyone who writes about the events.

Spook Your Kindle, hosted by Dark Romance Team, is offering you the chance to download free dark romance books on Oct. 24-26. And better yet, the books that you download are yours to keep forever. Lusting after dark romance? This is your chance to stock up and save big.

SEE ALSO: The best Kindle accessories for reading in luxury

Looking to make the most of the latest Stuff Your Kindle Day? We've lined up everything you need to know about this popular event.

When is Stuff Your Kindle Day?

Spook Your Kindle takes place on Oct. 24-26. Recent events have taken place over a single day, which puts a lot of pressure on participants to find exactly what they want and download before time is up. This event is a little more generous and takes place over a few days. So relax, take your time, and peruse your options.

Who can take part in Stuff Your Kindle Day?

Arguably the best thing about Stuff Your Kindle Day (besides the free books, obviously) is that anyone can participate. Kindle, Kobo, and Nook readers can download these books for free. You can even download these books on your preferred app and read them directly from your phone. Everyone is invited.

Which e-books are free?

Dark Romance Team are hosting the Spook Your Kindle event. They state that "not all books are discounted for the entire length of the event, and we have noted that for each book based on our most recent update from the author." You can find every available title by following the link on the hub page to a helpful document. In that document, the author, book title, genre, tropes, and social links are all listed out so you can find something that ticks all your boxes.

Is Stuff Your Kindle Day the same as Amazon Kindle Unlimited?

Everything you download on Stuff Your Kindle Day is yours to keep forever, and there's no limit on the number of books you can download. Stuff Your Kindle Day downloads don't count towards the 20 books that Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscribers can borrow at the same time. There's no reason to hold back.

The best Stuff Your Kindle Day deal Opens in a new window Credit: Amazon Kindle Paperwhite + Kindle Unlimited (3-Month Plan)   Get Deal Why we like it

These popular e-readers help you take your entire library on the go. With weeks of battery life and an anti-glare display, you can read anywhere and anytime with the Kindle Paperwhite. Prices start at $159.99, but you can get three months of Kindle Unlimited for free with your purchase.

Samsung's Galaxy XR Headset is official! Plus, the OnePlus 15 is going to have a massive 7,300 mAh battery, Google Maps on Android Auto gets an important safety upgrade, and the classic Pebble app is back for old Pebble watches. And much more!