Author: The Tech Guy

There’s nothing wrong with paying for great PC software. Some apps absolutely earn their price for the convenience they offer. But over the past few years, many tools that were once essential are no longer must-haves. This includes screen capturing tools like SnagIt, PDF editors like Adobe Acrobat, password managers like 1Password, and even the all-mighty Microsoft Office Suite. What makes it even harder to justify is that most of these apps don’t offer a one-time purchase. They lock you into a subscription, so once you’re used to the workflow, you’re paying every single year just to keep access. SnagIt…

First, a confession: I’m actually very tolerant of ambient noise. I’m used to clanging plates and barbells at the gym, and some of my favorite musical genres are metal, industrial, and power electronics. On an early date, I once made the mistake of taking my wife to an Author and Punisher concert — she couldn’t even get in the door before her ears were overwhelmed. A noisy Windows PC is nothing by comparison, but I really do detest the sound of a computer’s fans whirring at top speed for more than a few seconds. It’s a distraction when I’m playing…

xAI Grok 4.20 created a 47% return in the Nasdaq and outperformed all others in the Alpha Arena competition. 32 instances of various LLMs (including multiple variants of the same model under different prompting strategies like “Situational Awareness,” “Monk Mode,” “Max Leverage,” and “New Baseline”) were each allocated $10,000 in real money to trade autonomously on the Nasdaq exchange. The total capital across all participants was $320,000. Models had to generate trading ideas, size positions, time entries/exits, and manage risk without human intervention, using only market data inputs. This lasted 2 weeks and focused on volatile tech stocks, including Tesla…

Apple used to employ Intel chips in its laptops and desktops, but moved away from them once the in-house designed M-series chips arrived. Now it seems like the company is on the verge of reaching a new deal with Intel, but this will be different. Intel will just be making chips for Apple – it won’t be involved in the design phase at all. Basically, Apple wants to not depend entirely on TSMC for chip fabrication, and Intel is the way to do that. GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu says he and his colleagues now expect a deal between Intel…

ChatGPT’s growth is starting to taper off, according to new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Today, the OpenAI-owned AI chatbot remains the leader in the space, accounting for 50% of global downloads on mobile devices and 55% of the global monthly active users. However, Google’s Gemini has begun to outpace ChatGPT in terms of download growth, growth of monthly active users, and growth of time spent in app, the firm found. Over time, that increased pace of adoption could help Gemini narrow the gap with ChatGPT. That’s something OpenAI is now worried about, as its recent “code red”…

OpenAI’s o3 model won a five-day poker tournament of nine AI chatbotsThe o3 model won by playing the most consistent gameMost top language models handled poker well, but struggled with bluffing, position, and basic mathIn a digital showdown unlike anything ever dealt at the felt, nine of the world’s most powerful large language models spent five days locked in a high-stakes poker match.OpenAI’s o3, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, X.ai’s Grok, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, Meta’s Llama 4, DeepSeek R1, Kimi K2 from Moonshot AI, Magistral from Mistral AI, and Z.AI’s GLM 4.6 played thousands of hands of no-limit Texas hold…

Presented by Oracle NetSuiteWhen Evan Goldberg started NetSuite in 1998, his vision was radically simple: give entrepreneurs access to their business data anytime, anywhere. At the time, most enterprise software lived on local servers. As an entrepreneur himself, Goldberg understood the frustration intimately. "I had fragmented systems. They all said something different," he recalls of his early days. NetSuite was the first company to deliver enterprise applications entirely through web browsers, combining CRM, ERP, and ecommerce into one unified platform. That breakthrough idea pioneered the cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) era and propelled supersonic growth, a 2007 IPO, and an…

Now in its 26th year, the event brings teams of middle and high school students to the lab to compete with home-built contraptions. Teenagers wielding power tools and plywood demonstrated their engineering prowess at the annual Invention Challenge at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Friday. Also in evidence: lots of small motors, 3D-printed gears, PVC pipe, and duct tape. First held at JPL in 1998, the event pits middle and high school teams against each other as they try to get handmade devices to accomplish a task that changes annually. For this year’s challenge, dubbed the “Bucket…

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test. Earlier this year, I tried out the Hinomi H1 Pro and was genuinely impressed by how well the chair performs. Now, with the H2 Pro, the team at Hinomi has taken what was great about the H1 Pro and upgraded a few key features.First, they increased the number of adjustment points from 16 to 19, adding three more. Second, they reworked their lumbar support. Third, they updated and upgraded…

OnePlus is unveiling the 15R on December 17 along with the Pad Go 2 and Watch Lite. Ahead of that, today the company has officially confirmed the 15R’s battery capacity – it’s 7,400 mAh, the largest ever in a OnePlus phone sold outside of China (the recently announced Ace 6T holds the record inside of China with its 8,300 mAh cell). This battery will support 80W SuperVOOC wired charging. The battery is said to keep at least 80% of its initial capacity after four years of use. It uses 15% silicon content inside its anode. OnePlus has previously revealed that…