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The Google Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is now the smartest part of my smart home

Even with positive developments like growing Matter and Thread adoption, the modern smart home is still plagued by incompatible standards, expensive subscriptions, and discontinued products. Nest, under the stewardship of Google, is responsible for its fair share of those annoyances, but the original Nest product line continues to be the gold standard: the Nest Learning

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GM’s PowerBank home battery is now available

The PowerBank is part of GM’s Home System bundle but can be purchased separately. | Image: GM GM is launching its new PowerBank home battery unit today, which slots right into the company’s lineup of residential energy management products. The battery lets homeowners collect energy at off-peak times from the grid or a solar panel

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I want my smart Android TV to be dumb again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztEtMszCGX4 I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on last year’s necessary TV upgrade, but one of my few requirements was Android TV support. Obviously, I’m a fan of Android’s open approach to software (I wouldn’t be here otherwise), and I didn’t want to end up in the more limited ecosystems of Tizen

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The Punched Card Detective

[John Graham-Cumming] might not be the first person to thumb through an old book and find an IBM punched card inside. But he might be the first to actually track down the origin of the cards. Admittedly, there were clues. The book was a Portuguese book about computers from the 1970s. The cards also had

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Turkey Blocks Discord

Turkey has blocked access to Discord after the messaging platform refused to share potentially illegal information with authorities. Reuters reports: Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of “child sexual abuse and obscenity” had been committed by some using the

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Internet Archive Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Breach Impacting 31 Million Users

BleepingComputer’s Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the

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Deno 2.0 arrives, ready to battle Node.js

Deno 2.0, a major update to the open source Deno runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly, is now available as a production release. It emphasizes backward compatibility with the rival Node.js runtime and NPM and a stabilized standard library. Proponents say the Deno 2.0 update was designed to make JavaScript development simpler and more scalable.

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