Monday, September 28
Author: Caitlin Rooney
Caitlin Rooney
Caitlin Rooney has been covering Greater Manchester for the best part of a decade. She started at a local paper in Salford, moved to digital, and spent three years on the housing and planning beat before going independent. She has sat through more council cabinet meetings than she cares to count and still reads the planning portal on her phone. She writes about transport, housing, devolution, policing, and the daily grind of how a city actually runs. She has a particular interest in who benefits from regeneration and who gets moved along by it. Caitlin lives in Chorlton. She thinks the Metrolink is both Manchester's best and worst infrastructure, and does not trust anyone who calls the city centre "town".
The Anker Prime Foldable Charger deal currently live on Amazon has brought the three-in-one MagSafe charger down to $99.73, from its original price of $149.99, a saving of $50.26 and, according to price-tracking tools, the lowest it has ever been. The timing is no coincidence: Amazon’s October Prime Day falls on 6 and 7 October, but early deals are already running for Prime members.If you are all-in on Apple kit and spend half your life untangling cables on a hotel nightstand, this is the kind of thing worth a look.What the Anker Prime Foldable Charger Deal Gets YouThe charger handles…
Taylor Swift’s new single ‘Patient Zero’ arrives on 25 September 2026, according to SeatGeek, and the ‘Patient Zero’ toxic relationship at its centre is not exactly a surprise from an artist who has built a discography on the archaeology of her own romantic history. The track appears on The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore and wastes little time making clear this is not a love song. It is something closer to a survivor’s account, offered to the next person who finds herself in the same situation. What ‘Patient Zero’ actually says The song’s narrator positions herself as someone who…
As part of a strategy to reinforce its technological foundations and improve the digital trading experience, a technology partnership deal worth $2 million has been signed with Eximus by international financial markets company Garnet Trade. The agreement covers development of the CRM infrastructure at Garnet Trade, together with technology initiatives linked to a platform set up as an alternative to MT5 for trading: Garnet Private. London, United Kingdom: With technology growing ever more central to operational processes and trading experiences throughout the financial sector, the level of technology investment is being taken a step higher by Garnet Trade. Under the…
American Horror Story season 13 is back, and by all accounts it is doing the reunion thing properly. According to Wikipedia, the season is set primarily in New York City and centres on Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari), a hospice caretaker with triskaidekaphobia, who takes a strange job at The Apollyon, an eerie residential building populated by characters from seasons past. Lucky number 13, then, in every sense.The returning cast is substantial: Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Emma Roberts, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe, Mena Suvari, and Jessica Lange are all back, some playing multiple roles. In Paulson’s case, multiple is…
Choosing the best power tools to gift is genuinely tricky when the person you’re buying for already owns half of what’s in the B&Q catalogue. Whether they’re just starting out or they’ve been building furniture in a back shed for years, here’s a breakdown of what’s worth wrapping up this year, across a range of budgets and skill levels.The Best Power Tools to Gift: Top Picks for Every Kind of DIYerThe standout pick overall is the Makita 18-volt LXT drill and driver set. The drill delivers about 70% more torque than its predecessors, and according to Bob Vila, the 18V…
Siri AI on Apple Watch is now rolling out to users on the waitlist, and early hands-on testing suggests the experience is patchy at best: slow, crash-prone, and noticeably behind the iPhone version of the same feature.To access it, you need both a supported watch (Series 9 or newer) and a supported phone (iPhone 15 Pro or newer), both running Apple’s latest software. The tester used an Apple Watch Series 12 alongside a phone on the iOS 27.2 developer beta. After enabling Siri AI in the phone’s Settings app, a waitlist notification arrived a few days later. Then the testing…
There are more uBlock Origin advanced settings worth knowing about than most people realise, and getting to grips with them makes a real difference to how cleanly and privately you browse. Before diving in, though, a bit of context about why the extension landscape has shifted recently.What Manifest V3 Did to Ad BlockersGoogle’s move to Manifest V3 (MV3) for browser extensions has hobbled ad blockers in ways that are still playing out. According to research published on arXiv, Google planned to fully phase out MV2 extensions by July 2025. One of the most consequential changes, as PPC.land explains, is the…
The 13-inch iPad Air M4 deal currently sitting on Woot takes $180 off the 256GB Wi-Fi plus cellular model, bringing it down to $1,019 against a list price of $1,199.99. That also undercuts the same configuration on Amazon, which is sitting at $1,099, by $80.The deal runs for two days or while supplies last. Free shipping for Prime members; everyone else pays a $6 fee.What You Get With the 13-Inch iPad Air M4 DealYahoo Finance reports that the M4 iPad Air’s C1X modem delivers up to 50% faster cellular data performance compared with the M3 iPad Air. That is a…
Fitness tracker calorie accuracy is, bluntly, poor, and the science has been saying so for years, even if the devices on your wrist haven’t caught up. Whether you’re running the canal towpath or grinding through a spin class, the calorie number your watch flashes at you is an educated guess at best, and a fairly wild one at worst.This matters in Manchester as much as anywhere. The city has no shortage of people tracking every step from Ancoats to Altrincham, fuelling their training on numbers their devices have essentially made up. So here is what the research actually says, and…
The Boox Picco tiny e-reader is Boox’s answer to the wave of micro-readers that has been quietly reshaping the market, and it arrives with a handful of genuine advantages over its closest rivals. At $99 and 3.97 inches, it sits squarely in the same pocket as the Xteink X4 Pro (same price, similar dimensions, same screen resolution) but the differences in how it is built and what it runs are worth paying attention to.What Makes the Boox Picco Tiny E-Reader DifferentOn paper, the similarities between all these micro-readers are almost comical. Every screen in this category comes from the same…
The Tapo RV50 Pro Omni deal currently live on Amazon knocks the robot vacuum and mop combo down to $499.99, from a list price of $599.99, a $100 saving that price-trackers confirm is the lowest the RV50 Pro Omni has reached. If you have hard floors, pets, and a general aversion to emptying dustbins on your hands and knees, it is worth a look.The appeal here is mostly in the Omni dock. After each cleaning run, it handles the faff automatically: emptying the dustbin, washing and drying the mop pads, dispensing detergent, and keeping the robot topped up with clean…
Your VPN is not the watertight shield you might think it is, and a WebRTC browser IP leak is one of the more quietly damaging reasons why. Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) is a feature built into Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and Safari that allows your browser to establish direct, high-speed peer-to-peer connections for video calls, voice calls and screen sharing. The problem is that it can do this by going around the encrypted tunnel your VPN creates, exposing your real IP address in the process.According to TechRadar, WebRTC leaks were first identified back in 2015, making this a vulnerability that…
