I use ChatGPT pretty much every day, but somewhere along the way, I’ve also developed a habit of poking around and looking for features I haven’t tried yet. Some discoveries are genuinely useful, while others are the kind I’ll probably remember once every six months.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something that actually changes how I use ChatGPT. That happened recently with three features I’d somehow been overlooking. I’ve started using all three regularly now, and if you spend a lot of time in ChatGPT too, I think you’re missing out by not giving them a shot.

I let ChatGPT figure out my mornings

One feature I’ve started relying on a lot is scheduled tasks. ChatGPT can now run these for me automatically every day in my local time zone, which means I don’t have to remember to come back and ask it the same thing every morning. I’ve set mine up as a daily work brief. Since a lot of my work happens across Slack and Gmail, I connected both and asked ChatGPT to pull together the things that actually deserve my attention. Once everything is connected, it can read across those sources and immediately build a brief using what’s happening there right now. And this is where it becomes genuinely useful for me. Every morning, I get a short list of around three to five things that are most likely to need my attention that day. ChatGPT tells me what each one is about, why it matters, how urgent it seems, and what I should probably do next, along with a link or citation so I can jump straight to the original message.

Instead of opening Slack, then Gmail, and slowly figuring out what needs to happen first, I already have a pretty good idea of how my day looks. I can tackle anything urgent first and plan everything else around it. I’ve even asked ChatGPT to send the brief when absolutely nothing important is waiting for me. On those glorious mornings, all I get is a simple, “No urgent items found.” Quite frankly, that might be my favorite version of the brief. ChatGPT uses Codex to help set this workflow up, so you’ll need a Pro subscription to use it this way. Pro comes with plenty of other perks as well, and considering how much I use ChatGPT throughout my workday, I’ve found the subscription easy to justify. The whole idea reminds me quite a bit of the Daily Brief experience you can get with Gemini. The result isn’t dramatically different: both are trying to save you from manually digging through everything before your day has even properly started. But ChatGPT has become the AI tool I naturally reach for first, so having my morning brief live here fits my workflow better.

I moved in without unpacking everything again

I’d be lying if I said I’ve always been a ChatGPT person. Before making the switch, I relied pretty heavily on Claude, and for a long time, it simply fit the way I worked better. Naturally, that also meant Claude knew quite a bit about me and how I liked to get things done. That was actually my biggest hesitation when I decided to move over to ChatGPT. I wasn’t worried about learning a new interface or figuring out where everything lived. I was worried about starting from scratch. Thankfully, ChatGPT now has an Import from Claude feature, and it made that switch a lot less painful for me. Instead of manually rebuilding all that context conversation by conversation, I could bring my existing Claude data over and give ChatGPT a much better starting point.

For example, if Claude already knew how I preferred my research to be like, the kind of work I regularly do, or other details I’d previously asked it to remember, I didn’t have to sit down and feed all of that information to ChatGPT again. It might sound like a small convenience, but if you’ve spent months building up context with another AI assistant, you’ll know just how annoying starting with a completely blank slate can be. ChatGPT can also keep connected sources up to date by syncing new or changed content, so the information it can work with doesn’t necessarily stay frozen at the moment you connect it. For me, it meant switching AI tools without having to introduce myself all over again.

I can finally take my work with me

It gets even better from here because ChatGPT also lets me download the work I create inside it. This sounds like such a basic feature until you actually need to move something out of ChatGPT, and then you realize how useful it is. I run into this quite often with my study projects. If I’m working on something for my psychology thesis, for example, I might spend a long time inside ChatGPT brainstorming ideas, organizing my research, cleaning up notes, or turning a messy collection of thoughts into something I can actually work with. Once I’m happy with it, I can download the finished work as a Markdown file, PDF, or Microsoft Word document and continue working on it wherever I want.

That’s a much nicer experience than what I was doing before. I’d finish something in ChatGPT, open Word or another app, copy everything over, fix the formatting that inevitably went wonky somewhere along the way, and then continue working. It wasn’t difficult, but doing it repeatedly got very boring and time-consuming. Now, I can keep ChatGPT as the place where I brainstorm and build something, then simply download the result when I’m ready to take it elsewhere.

Your turn to give them a try

If you use ChatGPT regularly, I’d definitely recommend giving these features a try. I’ve been having a genuinely good time discovering new ways to use ChatGPT, and clearly, I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. So, if I stumble across another feature that makes my day a little easier, you can bet I’ll be back to tell you about it. Until then, give these three a shot. Your ChatGPT routine might just get a little better.

Apple quietly killed the ceramic Apple Watch in 2020, and for the fans of the fancy material, it has been an inexplicable absence ever since. For those catching up, ceramic was the lineup’s most premium material option. 

It was smooth to touch, scratch-resistant, and had that distinct non-metallic appearance, a characteristic of all titanium and aluminum frames. Now, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is actively planning its return.

Why does the ceramic case’s return actually matter?

While it isn’t mentioned clearly in the report, Apple could re-introduce a ceramic version of the Apple Watch with either the Series 12 in September or in 2027. “It will also offer new colors and bands, and a series of new health and fitness-related upgrades,” the report mentions.

For those catching up, ceramic is harder than stainless steel and retains its polish far longer. Basically, it’s the perfect blend of a luxury and a sporty finish. It’s the kind of materials upgrade that could serve as a major marketing campaign for the lineup without changing a single feature. 

For anyone who missed it the first time, or who has been wearing a titanium Ultra and doesn’t like the finish, the ceramic version could be the way to go. Fair warning: the Apple Watch could get fairly expensive with the ceramic case.

What else is Apple changing with the Series 12 and Ultra 4?

Bringing back ceramic is a smart way to restock the premium end of the Apple Watch lineup, but in my opinion, it will buy the company some time to figure out what the smartwatch will look like over the next decade: Apple’s yearning for a major Watch overhaul. 

Quite a bit, actually. Beyond the ceramic case option, both the Series 12 and the Ultra 4 are getting their first meaningful performance bump in years. The performance upgrade could be accompanied by new colors, updated band options, and a bunch of new health and fitness-related features.

Together, the performance upgrade on the Series 12 and Ultra 4 and the potential arrival of a ceramic case version suggest Apple wants to ship a comprehensive Watch lineup this year.

The takeaway: Memory prices have been trending upward for more than a year, with many analysts predicting further increases in the near future. A prominent GitHub developer has now published a series of graphs and charts showing just how quickly prices have surged to 2007 levels on a per-unit basis, effectively undoing two decades of progress in making PC hardware more affordable for consumers.

According to computer science researcher and software performance expert Daniel Lemire, skyrocketing memory prices are a “historical anomaly,” with the unprecedented increases effectively erasing decades of steady, exponential cost reductions.

He believes that for prices to normalize, either software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory, or the hardware industry will need to increase production capacity.

Driven largely by rising demand from the AI sector, global memory prices have surged dramatically over the last two years, with a recent J.P. Morgan report estimating an increase of more than 400% since the start of 2024. Unfortunately for consumers, the surge isn’t limited to DRAM chips, as an acute manufacturing shortage in flash memory has also pushed up prices for SSDs, flash drives, memory cards, and external storage.

– Daniel Lemire (@lemire) August 5, 2026

According to industry reports, contract and retail prices for NAND flash have risen between 50% and 100% since the start of the crisis, triggering price increases across a broad spectrum of consumer electronics, including laptops, desktops, graphics cards, smartphones, and video game consoles. While brands such as HP, Dell, and Apple have raised prices for their laptops and MacBooks, Sony and Nintendo have also raised prices for the PS5 and Switch 2, respectively.

Ominously for consumers, South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix has predicted that the global memory crisis is far from over. According to CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, 2027 will be the worst year ever for the industry, with demand continuing to outstrip supply even beyond 2030.

However, whether these predictions materialize will depend in part on the health of the AI industry, amid growing fears that speculative investment in the sector is creating a bubble that could burst at any time.

This spring, my wife and I moved from the Denver suburbs into the Colorado Rockies. The high-altitude retreat presented a welcome reprieve from our otherwise tech-dominated lives. As remote workers, however, we faced certain challenges, and technology was the only reason our move was possible in the first place.

Prior to my time at El Reg, I, among other things, breathlessly covered a subset of the networking industry, which as it happens had become big business following the COVID-19 outbreak and the pandemic that followed. I’m speaking, of course, about software defined wide-area-networking (SD-WAN).

Little did I know, a mere six years later, this technology would become essential to my wife and me.

Had it not been for 5G and Starlink, the move might as well have been time travel. To put it into perspective just how far into the foothills we’d ventured, the fastest wired connection at our disposal was DSL. CenturyLink promised, but notably did not guarantee, up to 20 Mbps down and a staggering 1.5 Mbps up.

Compared to the symmetrical gigabit fiber line we’d enjoyed in the Denver suburbs for the past six years, relying on DSL alone felt positively medieval. To those, including many of my neighbors, living this reality, you have my sympathies.

Thankfully, DSL wasn’t our only option. For better or worse, 5G and Starlink are helping to close the digital divide in a meaningful way — but individually they’re still far from perfect. 

Where we live, T-Mobile’s 5G internet service delivers near-gigabit download speeds and uplink speeds ranging from 30–40 Mbps. Meanwhile, Starlink promised between 100 and 400 Mbps downlink depending on the plan, with uplinks that, at least for us, capped out at around 30 Mbps.

Either would be fast enough for our needs, but reliable? Turns out there’s still some room for improvement. In the past two months we’ve experienced no fewer than a dozen dropped connections lasting anywhere from a minute all the way to five. Making matters worse, the majority of these drops took place during working hours.

With a relatively clear view of the sky, we’ve found Starlink to be more reliable, but even SpaceX isn’t immune to the occasional outage. That’s not to mention the threat of space junk kicking off a Kessler syndrome-like event.

SD-WAN to the rescue

The easy way to approach multi-WAN would have been to set up two networks, each with its own SSID. In the event one went down, we’d switch to the other. 

While simple, it’s far from perfect, and does nothing to mitigate disruptions to the voice and video calls on which my wife and I spend a considerable amount of our week. With two WiFi access points, we’d also have to contend with interference from overlapping channels.

Wrangling multiple LANs, wireless SSIDs, and firewall rules isn’t exactly ideal. Thankfully, there’s a better way, and we just so happened to have all the equipment we needed.

SD-WAN was developed in the early 2010s to solve a very specific problem: as SaaS apps like Office 365, Salesforce, and Google Apps took off, more and more enterprise traffic was going out to the internet. 

This was a problem for a lot of enterprise WANs, which often relied on expensive MPLS links designed to connect satellite offices to servers running back at headquarters or regional datacenters. In many cases, these WANs were built to prioritize reliability over bandwidth, and due to their topology required backhauling traffic tens or hundreds of miles just to access the internet.

SD-WAN gateways offered an alternative. These devices could route internal traffic over the private WAN while SaaS and other internet-bound traffic could be piped over whatever local ISP served businesses in that area.

SD-WAN is an entire can of worms in itself, but for my purposes two key capabilities stood out: multi-WAN and policy-based routing support. Our router, a Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine SE (UDM-SE), already supported both.

The hardware

The UDM-SE is not Ubiquiti’s newest nor even its most capable gateway. Introduced in 2022, the all-in-one appliance combines a 3.5 Gbps router (with IPS/IDS enabled) with an 8-port gigabit PoE switch, an integrated network video recorder, and critically two WAN ports, one good for 2.5 Gbps and another capable of 10 Gbps. 

Ubiquiti’s SD-WAN implementation is somewhat basic compared to gateways from HPE, Cisco, or Extreme. However, of the bevy of networking and security features SD-WAN encompasses, we only really needed a handful – multi-WAN and policy-based routing were the main ones – and Ubiquiti is kind enough not to gate this functionality behind an enterprise license.

The setup itself was about as simple as it gets: plug each ISP-provided gateway into one of UDM-SE’s WAN ports and tell it whether you want to load-balance traffic across the two, or failover in the event of an outage or dropped connection.

In practice there were a few extra steps, including disabling the 5G and Starlink gateways’ onboard routing and WiFi functionality. Starlink supports a bypass mode, but the T-Mobile modem+router combo didn’t. We were able to disable the onboard WiFi, but only using an onboard utility.

Putting it to the test

With everything connected, we opted to configure the UDM-SE for WAN failover with T-Mobile as the primary and Starlink as the backup, rather than load-balancing traffic across the two, in part because the 5G link was so much faster.

The first few days after setting everything up, my wife and I were questioning whether we even needed Starlink. But then we saw the notification: “Internet connection WAN1 (T-Mobile USA) on port 9 is down and WAN2 (Starlink) is now active,” and then a few minutes later, “Internet connection WAN1 (T-Mobile USA) on port 9 is restored after failing over to WAN2 (Starlink).”

Both notifications were dated two hours earlier. We just hadn’t noticed. In fact, despite at least a dozen dropped connections over the past two months, the UDM-SE failed over fast enough that it was never an issue. No dropped calls, no buffering video, no timed-out web pages.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery was that while Starlink didn’t offer the fastest or lowest-latency connectivity, it was remarkably reliable. Despite less than perfect alignment and view of the sky, the logs show just two dropped connections in the past month, one of which happened in the middle of the night when no one was awake to notice.

While WAN failover kept us online, it didn’t do anything to guard against network congestion. The UDM-SE offers a preconfigured quality-of-service (QoS) policy that in theory should detect Zoom or MS Teams traffic and prioritize it over something like Windows Update or YouTube.

But since we had two WANs, we could go one better and take advantage of another SD-WAN favorite: policy-based routing. This allowed us to force certain devices or services to prioritize one ISP over the other. For example, because Starlink had proven to be the more reliable of the two links, I wrote a policy to route traffic from my wife’s work laptop over the satellite link first and fail over to T-Mobile in the event of an outage. This also had the benefit of ensuring that if I happened to kick off a large game or AI model download while she was in the middle of a meeting, I wouldn’t get myself in trouble for turning her Zoom call into a pixelated mess.

The digital divide is narrowing, not closed

In the more rural parts of the US where wired connectivity isn’t a given, cellular home internet and low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications, like Starlink, have gone a long way toward closing the digital divide — particularly for those working from home.

However, individually they’re still far from perfect. Dropped connections weren’t a daily occurrence, but they still occurred more frequently and for longer than we would have liked. Five minutes is a long time to wait wondering whether the person on the other end of the Zoom call will be there when you eventually get back online.

Technologies like SD-WAN can help to mitigate the problem by allowing multi-WAN failover, load balancing, and policy based routing, but to take advantage of them also requires paying for two ISPs and hundreds of dollars of equipment, which may or may not require monthly subscriptions or annual licenses.

We were fortunate that the hardware we already owned supported these features and didn’t lock them behind a pricy enterprise license. Even still, we’re paying more for internet than we’d like. Between T-Mobile and Starlink, we’re spending around $125 a month to get online.

Along with the higher price, network latency is also a lot higher than we’d like. Compared to our old fiber line, which routinely achieved latencies under 5 ms, T-Mobile and Starlink ranged from 15 ms at best to as much as 80 ms at worst.

The only online game I play regularly is a real-time strategy that’s old enough to drink. I’m not playing CS:GO or whatever twitch shooter is popular these days, so the higher latency wasn’t that big of a deal, but if you’re a competitive gamer, a wired connection is still a must.

The good news is T-Mobile and Starlink may not be our only options for high-speed internet for much longer. There are numerous ongoing efforts across the US and other nations to improve access to fiber connectivity, including one slowly working its way down the highway in our general direction.

On a personal note, while it’s neat to experience a technology firsthand that I dedicated years of my life to writing about, the moment fiber-to-the-home comes, both our Starlink and 5G home internet subscriptions are getting the boot. ®

[Jan] of [Roetz 4.0] has a unique approach to multi-material 3D printing: he’s designed an extruder which takes two different materials and extrudes one as a shell around the other. This opens up some interesting possibilities, such as a conductive filament surrounded by an insulating shell; [Jan], however, didn’t have an immediate use for the process, so he moved on to a related technique: extruding plastic tubes with a compressed-air core.

The extruder he used for this was a variation on the dual-material extruder; it takes in two strands of filament, melts them, and extrudes them as a shell around the outlet of a compressed-air line, which was controlled by a high-precision pressure regulator. During testing with PLA, it seemed capable of extruding airtight tubes of filament, though it had a tendency to blow bubbles and form tubes with inconsistent diameters. The low thermal conductivity of the stainless steel extruder also proved problematic; coupled with the cooling effect of the compressed air, filament sometimes solidified inside the extruder.

[Jan] found it almost impossible to get consistent results using only pressure-based control; as the layer of molten plastic around the air gets thinner, it provides less resistance to further ballooning, leading to continuous expansion until the bubble bursts. Controlling the volume of air extruded provided much more consistent results, and in a second video, he built a peristaltic pump to do just that. He also switched to using TPU filament, which greatly improved layer adhesion. When inflated with compressed air, the finished TPU structures expanded slightly, though there were still air leaks. The results look promising, and TU Darmstadt has already carried out some research in this area.

In a separate research project, we’ve seen a similar multi-material co-extrusion approach used to print pneumatic channels. For more on the history of [Jan]’s multi-filament extruder, check out his Minuteman printer.

Thanks to [Tix] for the tip!

There are a few different ways to keep apps under the radar.

The primary method for hiding iPhone apps

Mr.Mikla/Shutterstock

Hidden apps aren’t totally invisible

Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Other methods to keep apps under control

Tada Images/Shutterstock

The Apple Watch will see a revamp in the coming years, as Apple is reportedly in the middle of a shake up its wearables formula to meet an ever-changing market.

The Apple Watch has retained the same core design of a square display on a watch band, but it has evolved over time. While it has become thinner, larger, and more rugged in the Apple Watch Ultra, it can potentially do more.

In Sunday’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman writes that the Apple Watch is ready to get overhauled into something new. The company’s industrial design team has been rethinking smartwatches in general over the last year, and it’s considering new directions to go in.

The team hasn’t quite decided what to actually do with the Apple Watch yet, but it is mulling the problem over.

These changes apparently include switching the square display for a circular version of various sizes. There’s also the possibility of removing the display altogether, to match the growing market for wearables without screens.

Smart rings are also seeing a rise in adoption, which gives Apple another wearable avenue to explore. It has repeatedly filed patents in the field, but an Apple Ring release continues to elude the company.

Sooner changes

Whatever new direction the Apple Watch takes, it won’t be anytime soon. The expected Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 will be largely performance-based updates.

Health and fitness changes are said to be included. Despite previous rumors, there are no major design changes in 2026 for the main Apple Watch body.

There is, however, a rumor that Apple will be introducing a new band attachment method for the 2026 model. If correct, it’s a change that will probably make earlier Apple Watch bands incompatible with the new model.

That said, it’s a rumor that we have heard on and off since 2022. It may happen, but it could be better suited as part of a larger overhaul.

I was fourteen or so when I went to the Gadget Show Live (once a big tech event in the UK which showed off the latest technology) in 2016 as a punter and overheard someone on a stand I’d visited mention they’d spent £1,000 on a custom gaming PC.

A thousand pounds. On a computer. I remember turning that figure over in my head (it’s roughly $1,400) and not quite being able to make sense of it, not necessarily because I couldn’t fathom how much money that was, but because at the time, it seemed like a lot of money to spend on a PC without any frame of reference as to what that price got you.

When a loved one dies, who downloads their important files from their cloud storage account? Who monitors their email inbox? Who decides what happens to the photos and videos on their social media accounts? And what if those tasks fall to you?

Everyone will die, but not everyone has planned what they want to happen with their digital assets after they’re gone. Even when someone makes a plan, survivors might still be limited in what they can do.

Tying up loose ends can become a nightmare for the living, especially when the volume of digital assets is enormous. Still, the more you know, the better you can plan for your own digital estate, and the easier it will be to manage someone else’s.

Take Inventory

The biggest determining factor in how much work it’s going to be to manage the online accounts and digital assets of someone who is incapacitated or deceased is whether they did any estate planning. If a person doesn’t write down what digital assets they have and what they want done with them, it’s impossible for anyone to know.

It’s not always a simple matter of memorializing a Facebook account or downloading photos from iCloud either. Digital assets can have as much monetary value as sentimental value. Say a person’s social media accounts earn dividends. How will a beneficiary collect future proceeds? And should they keep the account alive?

What about cryptocurrency? If it’s stored in a private wallet and no one has the key, the money is lost forever. It’s a different story, however, if a third party, like Coinbase or PayPal, holds the crypto. At present, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are considered “digital assets” and thus need to be treated that way when doing any estate planning.

Navigating the Law

In the US, digital inheritance is overseen by state law, the same as traditional probate and estate matters, according to Benjamin Orzeske, chief counsel at the Uniform Law Commission. He and his organization developed a state law known as the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), which has been enacted in 48 states, Washington, DC, and the US Virgin Islands. The missing two states are Massachusetts, where RUFADAA has been adopted but not yet enacted as of this writing, and Louisiana, which went its own way with a similar but different law.

“At the heart of RUFADAA is this recognition that digital property is in some ways different from traditional, tangible property,” Orzeske says. He gives the example of mail versus email. When a person dies, their mail gets forwarded to a dedicated person, the fiduciary, who then receives incoming communication, bills, and payments. If they get a bill in the mail for a magazine subscription, they know to cancel it. Receiving the mail effectively gives the person appropriate information and access to manage the deceased’s accounts and estate going forward. Email is different. The fiduciary doesn’t just get new incoming mail. They might also have access to a searchable history of communication, which the deceased person might have expected to be kept private.

The real point of conflict, according to Orzeske, lies in the Stored Communications Act, a federal law that says companies that handle our online assets can’t release them without our permission. So RUFADAA gives survivors some rights while retaining the original asset holder’s privacy.

Under RUFADAA, a named trusted person can close accounts, but they can only get the contents—meaning the bodies of emails, private messages, videos, photos, attachments, and so forth—if the decedent specifically “grants the authority to the personal representative fiduciary,” according to Catherine Hodder, a senior attorney editor at FindLaw. FindLaw is an informational website that breaks down legal issues for a general audience.