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".
Google Meet in-person notes are now a real thing: Google has expanded its Gemini-powered ‘Take Notes for me’ feature beyond video calls, so it can transcribe and summarise a live, face-to-face meeting using nothing but your phone.The update was first flagged by 9to5Google. Rather than joining or starting a call, you open the Google Meet site or app, select ‘Take Notes for me’, and Gemini gets to work listening to the room. Hit ‘Pause’ if you need to take a breather from the record button, or ‘Stop’ followed by ‘Stop taking notes’ to wrap up entirely. When it’s done, the…
The Blink Outdoor 2K bundle deal currently on Amazon puts a two-camera system at $87.99, down from $159.99, which price trackers confirm is the lowest it has been. That works out to roughly $44 per camera, against $54.99 if you were to buy a single unit at its current list price.Two cameras is a practical starting point for most homes. Front door and driveway, backyard and side entrance, the sort of combinations that cover the obvious blind spots without immediately turning into a full installation project. Blink includes the Sync Module Core, batteries, and mounting hardware in the box, so…
The Snowflake Volunteer Android app lets anyone with a smartphone donate a slice of their internet connection to people who are blocked from accessing the Tor network by their governments. Developed by TechRadar-covered Portuguese Android app studio Bloco in partnership with the Tor Project, it is available now on the Google Play Store and on F-Droid.The app is not about protecting your own browsing. It is about lending your connection to someone else who cannot get online freely. Switch it on, leave your phone alone, and people in countries where Tor is blocked can use your device as an entry…
The Apple back-to-school gift card promotion is live, running from 16 July to 24 September 2026 and offering eligible buyers up to $150 in Apple Gift Card credit with the purchase of selected MacBooks and iPads, according to Apple’s terms and conditions.The headline figure is $150, tied to a MacBook Pro purchase. Buy a MacBook Air, iPad Air, or iPad Pro instead, and the gift card drops to $100. Either way, it is real money back on hardware that, as of this year, costs more than it did not long ago: Apple raised prices on many of its devices by…
The DJI Osmo 360 price drop has landed the Standard Combo kit at a record low of $349.99 on Amazon, down from its original $467, a saving of $117.01. The timing is no accident: DJI has just released the Osmo 360 II, making this the moment the older model gets its most aggressive discount yet.If you have been eyeing a 360-degree action camera for a while, this is the kind of price movement worth paying attention to. The outgoing model is no also-ran being cleared off shelves, it is a genuinely capable bit of kit that holds up well against…
The Pisces horoscope today, 13 August, carries one blunt instruction: put down the daydream and pick up the work. Written by Spiros Halaris, the daily reading says Venus moving through Pisces’ eighth house is sharpening creative hunger, while Mercury sitting in the sixth house of daily rhythms is supplying something Pisces often lacks, the actual follow-through. What the Pisces horoscope today August 13 is asking of you The advice is refreshingly practical for a sign that can spend half a morning picturing the finished version of something it has not started yet. Block out sixty minutes, the reading says. Skip…
The Pixel Watch 5 new features list is shorter than Google might like to admit, but what’s exclusive to the new model is worth understanding before you decide whether to upgrade. Six hardware and software additions set it apart from the Pixel Watch 4, even if the two watches look almost identical side by side.Same circular body, same Actua 360 display running at 320 PPI, same maximum brightness of 3,000 nits, same choice of 41mm or 45mm cases. Google has not moved the design on in any obvious way. Several of the headline health features announced alongside the Pixel Watch…
The watchOS 27 upgrade worth it question has a straightforward answer for a lot of Apple Watch owners this year: no, and for many of them, it is not even an option. Apple’s watchOS page confirms that watchOS 27 requires an iPhone 11 or later, or an iPhone SE (2nd generation or later), running iOS 27, and that is before you even get to the watch itself. The supported Apple Watch lineup has been cut to just six models, leaving behind the Series 6, Series 7, Series 8, first-generation Ultra and second-generation SE.When Apple announced watchOS 27 at its Monday…
The Asus ROG Strix XG34WCDG deal currently on Amazon takes $350 off what is, by any reasonable measure, a serious ultrawide panel: a 34-inch QD-OLED running at 3440×1440, 175Hz, and a 0.03ms response time, now sitting at $649 against a normal asking price of $999. According to price-tracking tools, that is the lowest price it has ever reached.Not the kind of monitor you’d usually associate with a quick lunchtime impulse buy, but here we are.What the Asus ROG Strix XG34WCDG actually offersThe QD-OLED panel is the obvious headline. You get OLED’s perfect blacks and near-instant pixel response fused with quantum…
Fasted cardio fat burning is one of those fitness ideas that sounds almost too logical to question: skip breakfast, go for a run, and your body has no choice but to torch through your fat stores. Neat theory. The science, however, tells a rather messier story.What Fasted Cardio Actually MeansAt its most basic, fasted cardio means doing aerobic exercise after a period without food. According to Levels, that typically means exercising after going around 10 to 14 hours without eating, which is roughly what happens when you roll out of bed in the morning and head straight out for a…
The 2026 World Cup free streaming question is one millions of people are now trying to answer, with the tournament having kicked off on 11 June and running all the way to the final on 19 July. A record 48 teams are competing across 104 matches, played over 39 days at 16 venues spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, according to Road Trips. That is a lot of football. And a lot of potential subscription fees.The good news is you have more options than you might think. Some of them are genuinely free. Most of the others involve…
The Sony WH-CH720N noise-cancelling deal ahead of Prime Day has pushed the headphones to their lowest ever price: $87.95, down 51% from a list price of $179.99, saving you $92.04 at Amazon. If you’ve been sitting on the fence about a decent pair of wireless cans, that fence just got a lot lower.At a price point where most headphones make you pick between battery life, build quality, or actual noise cancellation, the WH-CH720N makes a reasonable case for doing most things well enough. Not everything, but enough.What You Actually Get with the Sony WH-CH720N Noise-Cancelling DealStart with the weight. At…
