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There’s no better gift for yourself this holiday season than a cool new TV so you can enjoy your LOTR marathon in glorious 4K. But why wait for Black Friday when there are already some amazing deals going on right now? I mean, check this out: LG’s 48-inch OLED TV just got its price slashed in half. This deal is only at Best Buy, btw! Nowhere else can you get this $1,299.99 TV for an insanely low $649.99. View this Best Buy deal Imagine how wonderful your holidays could be this year with a brand-new TV sporting vibrant OLED in crisp 4K. But more than that, this TV is bolstered by AI for a greater viewing experience. It runs on an Alpha 8 AI Processor Gen2 that detects what you’re watching and automatically adjusts both picture and sound quality. That means even when you’re watching shows and movies that aren’t in 4K, the TV itself will boost it so it looks fantastic and sounds great anyway. The OLED panel delivers a most vivid experience thanks to Perfect Black and Perfect Color technologies, and the sounds will fill out your home media theater thanks to Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and Filmmaker modes. There’s also an AI-powered Personalized Picture & Sound Wizard, which creates personalized picture and audio experiences tailored for you. And if you love to game, this TV has Nvidia G-Sync and a 120Hz refresh rate so you get smooth visuals no matter what games you’re playing or how action-packed the scenes are. Score this huge 50% discount on LG`s speedy 48-inch OLED TVBuy now via Best Buy If the 48-inch diagonal isn’t big enough for you, note that the other sizes for this TV are also on sale with serious discounts: LG OLED AI, 55-inch — $899.99 (save $600) LG OLED AI, 65-inch — $999.99 (save $1,000) LG OLED AI, 77-inch — $1,499.99 (save $1,500) LG OLED AI, 83-inch — $1,999.99 (save $2,500) Read...

Thinking it’s time you finally got an actual gaming PC instead of just a gaming laptop? You know, something with enough cutting-edge power to rip and roar through the latest and greatest triple-A games? What if I said you could get such a PC for under a grand? Right now, Best Buy is selling this MSI Aegis Z2 gaming desktop for $949.99, a whopping $250 off its original price. Wait ’til you see what’s inside this thing! View this Best Buy deal As much as we love the convenience of a mini PC or the portability of a laptop, a proper gaming desktop makes sense when you need the most gaming performance at the lowest price. Between the full-sized components, upgradeability, and longevity, you can’t beat the bang for your buck of a PC like this. And so what if it’s a pre-built? With this discount, it’s almost as good as anything you can build yourself—with the exception of one bit, which we’ll dive into right now. The MSI Aegis Z2 runs on an AMD Ryzen 7 8700F processor paired with 16GB of DDR5 RAM. Yup, there it is. That isn’t a ton of memory, especially for a gaming PC nearing a grand. But this machine has four memory slots and is capable of hitting 256GB, so all you have to do is add another module or two and you’re good to go. It also comes with a 2TB SSD, which is more than enough to speedily handle files and store all your apps and games for the next few years. But the kicker here is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, which may not be the best in Nvidia’s latest line of GPUs, but it’s darn good for a desktop in this price range. That’s a powerful enough GPU to handle DLSS 4 multi-frame gen and upscaling, allowing you to enjoy the latest 3D games at smooth frame rates for years to come. It also comes in a beautiful case with an RGB CPU air cooler and a four-fan system. Save $250 on MSI`s pre-built RTX 5060 gaming desktopBuy now via Best Buy Read...

Hardly anyone can have missed the AI phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. Almost every major company has some kind of AI initiative now. Politicians talk about how important it is not to “fall behind in the AI race,” and hundreds of millions have started using AI chatbots. The AI wave took off when OpenAI released its chatbot ChatGPT, which gives large language models a conversational interface. Many competitors have emerged since then, from both small and large companies, but ChatGPT remains the most popular. ChatGPT isn’t necessarily the “best” AI service out there (recent tests show other tools can outperform it in certain areas), but it’s the most widely known and the benchmark that all other services are compared to. It’s the standard, plain and simple. If you’ve never tried AI yourself, this guide is for you. Follow along, and I’ll show you how to get started. Make an account and get started You can try out ChatGPT’s simplest features without creating an account, but to access features like the ability to save conversations for later, you’ll need an account. You can create your account in several ways, in the browser on your computer or in the ChatGPT app for iPhone or Android. For this guide, I have chosen the computer, but the app works the same way. You can either create an old-fashioned account with an email address and password or log in with Google, Microsoft, or Apple to avoid having to remember another password. Once you’re in, just start chatting. ChatGPT is conversationally trained, so you can ask questions, request help, or give prompts just like talking to a human. Responses also feel natural and ChatGPT “remembers” everything” (up to a point) that’s been typed in a conversation, so you can ask follow-up questions and reference things you’ve typed before without confusing the chatbot. Should I subscribe? One question many people ask is whether it’s worth paying for a ChatGPT Plus subscription or if the free version is enough. Here are the main advantages of a paid account: Access to the most advanced models (currently GPT-5) Better and faster image generation Other enhanced features More context (“memory”) Possibility to create customized chats, so-called GPTs Access to the Sora video generator Programming assistance with Codex For real power users, there’s also a Pro subscription, but it costs $200 a month. You get minimal restrictions, the highest possible speed of response, and access to experimental new features. My recommendation is that you start exploring ChatGPT without paying. Then, if you get curious about features that require a subscription, try it out for a few months. If you end up liking it, consider switching to an annual subscription, as it will be cheaper in the long run. Managing chats, GPTs, and Projects Foundry / Ashley Biancuzzo The interface of ChatGPT is simple, with a column on the left where you can find the different features and a list of past chats, and a main window on the right, where the chats themselves are displayed. At the top of the left column, there’s a quick button to open a new chat, a search bar for past conversations, and a Gallery feature, which collects images you’ve created with the chatbot. New users will also see a Projects button and Plus subscribers get an extra GPT button. Your previous chats are listed just below. Projects is a new addition that allows you to collect multiple chats on a particular topic in one place and get a bit more organized. It basically works like folders and you can use it for all sorts of categories. Once you’ve created a project, you can give it its own icon in any color to make it easier to find if you have many. Foundry / Ashley Biancuzzo If you have a Plus subscription, you can also create GPTs. A GPT is a customized chat where each conversation starts with a set of instructions on how the AI should respond. You can upload files that the GPT has access to, choose a preferred model (for example, GPT-5 delivers stronger reasoning capabilities), and enable additional features like web search and image generation. You can just talk to ChatGPT If you prefer, you can talk to the ChatGPT instead of typing and reading the answers. The AI can recognize and respond in many languages, and you can choose your preferred spoken language in the settings. Using ChatGPT as a search engine Many people now use AI instead of traditional search engines like Google. Google even shows “AI summaries” at the top of the search results, and many users likely read those instead of scrolling past. So it’s very common to use ChatGPT to find information of any kind–facts, news, recommendations, and so on. Foundry / Ashley Biancuzzo Doing so is easy and the results sound credible. The only problem is that AI is often wrong. Sometimes extremely wrong. According to a study commissioned by the BBC, ChatGPT is flawed in 81 percent of answers, with at least one serious error in a whopping 45 percent of all generated answers. The less knowledgeable you are about a topic as a user, the less likely you are to spot errors and flaws in the AI-generated results yourself. That’s why you shouldn’t rely on what ChatGPT spits out without first checking more reliable sources. You can ask the chatbot to include links to sources and sometimes it will do so on its own, but it’s good to actually follow these and double-check. ChatGPT and other AI chatbots don’t actually “know” anything. Their responses come either from external sources (like a search) or from the data the model was trained on. The more accurate information about a topic that’s in the training data, the more likely the results will be correct, but errors can still creep in. There’s no technical difference between a correct answer and a hallucinated one. What ChatGPT is good (and bad) at What ChatGPT and other AI chatbots using large language models are best at is generating answers that sound good–responses that feel believable and have a clear connection to what you asked for. This in turn makes ChatGPT an excellent tool for improving and rewriting text, rewriting a text in a different style, translating, and much more where form is more important than content. ChatGPT can also summarize long texts, give instructions, and answer complex questions on many topics, but you have to be careful with specific facts. Overall, it almost always gets it right, but individual numbers and other facts often get it wrong. With pictures and videos, it’s easy to see whether the results are good or not, but with text it’s more difficult. The latest reasoning models are better at solving equations, though it’s still easy to trick them into making mistakes on purpose, and some problems they completely miss. ChatGPT is good at generating and correcting errors in code, but it’s not great at building complete systems. You need to have the ideas and the big picture, otherwise it’s easy to pancake. It costs nothing extra to try again Was the result you got from ChatGPT when you asked for something not very good? Try again! For regular text chat, there’s no limit to the number of times you can ask it something. By rephrasing or adding additional details, you can often get the AI to produce significantly better results. To understand why, you need to know a bit about how the AI generates its answers. Large language models are extremely advanced word guessing machines. They take an input in the form of text, turn it into a string of numbers, and then use a huge statistical model to work out what the continuation is likely to be, one piece at a time. The AI has no knowledge, cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, and has no real understanding of anything. But it’s trained on vast amounts of existing text and conversations between humans. Since humans mostly speak coherently and stick to the topic at hand, the AI is likely to do the same. Adding more details increases the likelihood that the generated answer will be appropriate. Prompt engineering can give better results Systematically tweaking and refining prompts to ChatGPT has become a new skill called “prompt engineering.” There are thousands of videos on YouTube with tips on how to get better results, whether you’re writing code or generating images. Dozens of books have already been published on the subject. The basic idea is that some prompts, on average, lead to better answers. For example, adding a phrase like “now it’s time to think hard and rethink all assumptions” when brainstorming a problem can make ChatGPT’s response more creative. Since others have spent a lot of time finding such tricks, you can get a lot out of trying tips from videos, books, and articles. Watch out for fart fatigue Experimentation should be fun and inspiring, but it’s easy to get carried away with fine-tuning. “This is good, but maybe it could be even better if I just change this word here and that word there…” If you find that you’ve started to think like this and that your conversations with ChatGPT don’t feel fun and mentally relieving, you may be suffering from fart fatigue. This is a new phenomenon. The goal of introducing AI is to save time, letting employees get more done, but in many cases they end up spending as much time fine-tuning their prompts as they previously spent doing the work themselves. Privacy and security Foundry / Ashley Biancuzzo ChatGPT isn’t like a noticeboard in a town square where anyone passing by can see what you’ve written. But it’s also not a completely private service, so don’t share your deepest secrets on there. Your conversations aren’t encrypted, so there’s a chance OpenAI staff can see them. The likelihood of your chats being read is low, but it can happen. In addition, if you don’t change the privacy settings, OpenAI can train its models on all your conversations with ChatGPT. You can turn this off in Settings -> Data Controls -> Improve modelling for everyone. But even if you do, you should avoid sharing personal data and other sensitive information, as you can never be sure it won’t leak. Read...

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Kensington has released an absolute battlestation of a laptop docking station, the SD7100T5 EQ Pro 19-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station, complete with dedicated function buttons, a CompactFlash slot, and a Copilot button. Priced at $449.99, the SD7100T5 is the older cousin of the Kensington SD5000T5 Thunderbolt 5 dock that we saw last year. (That dock, with an MSRP of $399.99, received a substantial discount of about 34 percent on Amazon when we checked last week, bringing the price down to a much more reasonable $258.) Kensington usually fares well in my reviews of laptop docking stations, and we recommend one of its older Thunderbolt 4 docks as one of the best docking stations you can buy. They’re typically among the most stable I’ve tested, but those features and flexibility come with a price. The three standout features that this dock adds are worth calling out. First, there’s a CompactFlash slot, a relative rarity that caters to photographers. Second, it offers a whopping four audio options, including dedicated headphone and mic jacks, even an optical connection for high-end audio. Finally, there are two “hot key” buttons. By default, these are configured to trigger the Copilot application and lock the PC, though they can be configured by Kensington’s utility software to perform other functions as well. The company will also ship an EQ Pro version designed for the Mac, with the buttons configured to perform photo backup. Inside the dock hides a locking M.2 slot for an SSD.Kensington There’s one more: other docks are now moving towards adding a dedicated M.2 slot for an SSD, and this Kensington dock does as well. Still, the connectivity options goes far beyond those of a typical dock. In addition to three Thunderbolt 5 ports (plus one to connect to the laptop), the SD7100T5 includes a CompactFlash connector, as well as SD and microSD slots. It also offers a pair of 10Gbps USB-A ports and two 10Gbps USB-C ports, one of which is configured for 30W charging — even when a laptop isn’t connected. (Two additional USB-A ports are located on the rear of the dock.) There’s a 2.5Gbps Ethernet connection, too. The charging capabilities are a little less important as phones now ask for 30W to 40W to fast charge a phone, with some Asian smartphones now demanding 100W or more. Granted, Kensington’s SD7100T5 EQ Pro 19-in-1 Thunderbolt 5 Docking Station might just be total overkill for those looking to save a buck or two during this holiday season. Since Intel’s 2026 laptop platform, Panther Lake, still uses Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 5 isn’t quite necessary. On the other hand, this dock offers features I’ve rarely seen elsewhere, making the $400 price tag potentially worthwhile. Read...