However, Notion urged users to export drafts and scheduled emails by September 21, since those won’t automatically carry over to an alternative app. Notion noted that users can also save their Notion Mail setups and “export your snippets and auto label instructions to use elsewhere.”

“If you have auto label set up in Notion Mail, you won’t have to rebuild it. Create a Custom Agent in a few clicks, and we’ll bring your existing rules over for you,” the X post explained. “And if you’re already running Notion agents to manage email, they’ll continue running. Your email connection in Notion stays in place.”

Organizations that relied on Notion Mail in a regulated environment might have to transition from Notion Mail earlier.

“If you rely on HIPAA coverage, you should plan to transition off Notion Mail by June 30, 2026,” Notion’s support page reads.

Skiff reportedly served 2 million users, giving rivals like Proton Mail a run for their money before the Notion acquisition. As a Gmail client that didn’t support end-to-end encryption, Notion’s AI-centric approach to email lacked the privacy focus that Skiff carried as an email provider. Still, Notion Mail was built with Skiff’s infrastructure and by former Skiff executives, making its impending demise feel like a sort of swan song for Skiff.

Although Notion is killing its Skiff-influenced email client, it may continue leveraging the human resources and other productivity ideas (around calendars and storage, for instance) gained through its Skiff acquisition as it tries to compete more strongly against rivals like Google Workspace. Notion, however, has strayed from releasing direct follow-up products to Skiff’s portfolio.

Jazz centennial campaigns can become a lazy excuse to wheel out the same greatest-hits package with a new hype sticker. Craft Recordings is taking a more credible route. Its Original Jazz Classics series will mark the 100th birthdays of Miles Davis and John Coltrane on August 14 with new vinyl editions of Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet and Coltrane’s self-titled 1957 Prestige debut; two records that capture both men before history turned them into monuments.

Cookin’ documents Davis’ First Great Quintet—Miles, Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones during the legendary 1956 Prestige sessions that also yielded Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. Meanwhile, Coltrane captures Trane’s first session as a leader, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in May 1957, just as his unmistakable voice was beginning to emerge from the hard-bop crowd. 

Both reissues will feature AAA lacquers cut from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio, 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI, and Stoughton Tip-On jackets with obi strips; the same sensible formula that has made the revived OJC line one of the more reliable modern options for collectors who want the real albums, properly presented, without being asked to sell a kidney for a One-Step. Digital editions will arrive simultaneously in 24-bit/192kHz hi-res formats.

They also continue a busy run for OJC, which has recently returned Wes Montgomery’s Full House, Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete’s From All Sides, Thelonious Monk’s Alone in San Francisco, The Young Lions, Lee Morgan’s Introducing Lee Morgan, and Bobby Timmons’ This Here Is Bobby Timmons to vinyl with the same core AAA, RTI, and tip-on-jacket approach.

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Miles and Trane at Full Boil

There are jazz records that arrive carrying the weight of history so heavily that listeners forget to enjoy them. Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet is not one of those records. Yes, it documents Miles Davis’ First Great Quintet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, but it still moves like a great band caught on a particularly historic night.

Recorded on October 26, 1956, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio, Cookin’ was drawn from the same pair of Prestige sessions that also produced Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. Davis had already signed with Columbia and needed to finish his Prestige obligations, but there is nothing contractual or dutiful about the results. The quintet had spent months refining this material on the road, and the sessions were approached much like a club set: little fussing, few second guesses, and enough confidence to make difficult music sound almost casual.

The album opens with “My Funny Valentine,” a beautiful reminder that Davis did not need volume or velocity to take command of a room. With Coltrane sitting out, Miles works against Garland, Chambers, and Jones with a measured, almost conversational sense of space. From there, the temperature rises quickly. “Blues by Five” has all the relaxed authority of a band that knows exactly where the pocket lives, while “Airegin” lets Coltrane begin to push against the tune’s hard-bop architecture with the restless energy that would soon define his own work.

The closing pairing of “Tune Up” and “When Lights Are Low” gives the full group room to stretch without ever losing the plot. Garland brings elegance, Chambers keeps everything grounded, and Philly Joe Jones drives the proceedings with the kind of alert, propulsive swing that makes lesser drummers sound like they are waiting for a bus.

Cookin’ is not Miles at his most radical, nor is it Coltrane at his most searching. That is precisely why it remains so essential. This is a great working band at the moment when its collective instinct, individual brilliance, and pure sense of swing were all firing at once.

Where to buy: $38.98 at Amazon (Available August 14, 2026)

Coltrane’s Coltrane: The First Step Toward a New Jazz Language

Before John Coltrane became the spiritual force behind Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and some of the most searching music ever committed to tape, he was a gifted but unsettled tenor player trying to establish his own voice. Coltrane, recorded on May 31, 1957, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio, is his first album as a leader and it catches that voice coming into focus in real time.

The timing matters. Coltrane had spent much of the previous two years alongside Miles Davis in the First Great Quintet, including the 1956 Prestige sessions that produced Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’. By the time of this date, he was no longer in Miles’ band and had begun the difficult work of rebuilding both his career and his life. Later that summer, he would join Thelonious Monk, beginning one of the most important short-term partnerships in jazz. But Coltrane is where the transition becomes audible.

This is not yet the relentless Coltrane of the early ’60s, but the hunger is already there. “Bakai,” written by Calvin Massey, opens with a slightly off-kilter, almost teasing arrangement before the band settles into a muscular groove. “Straight Street” and “Chronic Blues,” both Coltrane originals, reveal a player determined to stretch hard-bop language without throwing away its swing, blues feeling, or melodic discipline in the process.

The personnel shifts across the two sides. Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Albert “Tootie” Heath bring some of the easy authority associated with the Miles Davis orbit to the first half, while Mal Waldron’s more percussive and angular piano work gives the latter half a different edge. Trumpeter Johnnie Splawn and baritone saxophonist Sahib Shihab add weight and contrast to several of the arrangements, but this remains Coltrane’s statement from beginning to end.

There are softer moments, most notably the elegant “Violets for Your Furs” and “While My Lady Sleeps,” yet even those ballads carry an underlying tension. Coltrane was not interested in pretty sounds for their own sake. He was already pushing through the chord changes with a directness and urgency that made clear he had far more on his mind than simply becoming another excellent tenor saxophonist.

Coltrane is not the finished monument. It is more interesting than that. This is the sound of an artist standing at the threshold, still rooted in hard bop but beginning to see a much larger horizon.

Where to buy: $38.98 at Amazon or get both for $68 at Craft Recordings (Available August 14, 2026)

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Motherboard deals at this level of discount don’t come around that often. Right now, Amazon has the MSI PRO X870-P WiFi at $152 (was $170) for AMD Ryzen and the MSI B760 Gaming Plus WiFi at $133 (was $200) for Intel in the Prime Day sale.

Both are well-regarded ATX boards with built-in Wi-Fi, and both represent meaningful savings if you’re mid-build or planning an upgrade. And both punch above their discounted price.

The two boards target different platforms entirely — one is AMD AM5, the other Intel LGA 1700 — so this isn’t a true apples-to-apples comparison. Think of them as two separate opportunities: one for Ryzen 7000/8000/9000 builders, and one for 12th/13th/14th Gen Intel builders.

More on the PRO X870-P WiFi — AMD AM5

MSI’s PRO series is positioned more toward productivity and professional use than the flashier gaming-branded boards, which means the design is restrained — minimal RGB, clean silver heatsinks, no aggressive aesthetics. Whether that’s a positive depends entirely on what you want your build to look like. Best Buy reviewers have praised it as straightforward to install and stable from the first boot, with multiple builders noting it’s working well with everything from Ryzen 7700X to the 9800X3D.

One honest note: the PRO X870-P is tuned more for stability and accessibility than aggressive overclocking. If you’re planning to push DDR5 kits to their absolute limits or run a flagship Ryzen 9 chip at sustained all-core maximum TDP, a higher-end X870E board would give you more VRM headroom. For the majority of builds — including enthusiast setups — it handles everything without issue.

More on the B760 Gaming Plus WiFi Gaming Motherboard

Also consider: Pre-built PC deals

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly visible part of healthcare. From administrative workflows and clinical decision support to remote monitoring and wellness technologies, organizations are exploring how AI can help process information more efficiently and provide greater visibility into health-related data. Yet as adoption accelerates, one challenge continues to influence whether these technologies gain meaningful acceptance.

Trust has become a central issue in the broader conversation around artificial intelligence. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranked misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe short-term global risk, while concerns about the adverse outcomes of AI technologies rose significantly in the report’s long-term outlook. As organizations introduce AI into increasingly sensitive areas, including healthcare, the findings underscore the importance of transparency, governance, and accountability in building public confidence.

Doug Benoit, CEO of FacialDx, believes trust begins with clarity. FacialDx is an AI-powered wellness intelligence company that uses facial analysis technology to identify visual biomarkers associated with wellness indicators and provide structured observations intended to support awareness. Benoit explains that users increasingly want to understand how conclusions are reached rather than simply receiving results.

Doug Benoit, CEO of FacialDx

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“People want access to the information behind the outcome,” Benoit says. “Trust grows when organizations are willing to show the methodology, the data, and the reasoning that support what the technology is presenting.”

That expectation reflects a broader shift taking place across healthcare and technology. Organizations are facing growing pressure from regulators, providers, employers, and consumers to demonstrate how AI systems function, how data is managed, and where human judgment remains involved. “Transparency is no longer viewed as a supplementary feature,” Benoit notes. “For many stakeholders, it is becoming a prerequisite for adoption.”

Privacy represents an equally important consideration. Benoit explains that healthcare information remains among the most sensitive categories of personal data, which places significant responsibility on organizations developing AI-enabled solutions. Research shows that AI systems handling sensitive health information raise significant concerns around privacy, data protection, and the risk of data breaches, while also highlighting the importance of ensuring that AI supports rather than overrides the judgment of healthcare professionals. Benoit believes those considerations reinforce the need for strong governance, security safeguards, and clearly defined human oversight as AI becomes more integrated into health-related environments.

Benoit notes that conversations around AI have evolved considerably during the past several years. According to him, many organizations have moved beyond asking whether AI should be used and are now focused on understanding how it can be implemented responsibly within existing workflows.

“The concern we hear most often is not whether AI exists,” Benoit explains. “Organizations want to know how it integrates into what they already do, how information is protected, and whether the technology supports the people responsible for making decisions.”

Human oversight remains central to that discussion. He explains that while AI can help identify patterns, organize information, and improve efficiency, healthcare decisions often involve context, judgment, and interpersonal considerations that extend beyond data analysis alone.

Benoit believes AI should be viewed as a support tool rather than an autonomous authority. “Technology can help surface information faster and more consistently,” he says. “But people still need people. Human oversight provides accountability, interpretation, and the ability to apply professional judgment in ways that technology alone cannot.”

This distinction is becoming increasingly important as organizations define governance frameworks around AI deployment. “Successful implementation often depends on clearly establishing what a system is designed to do, what it is not designed to do, and how outputs should be interpreted within existing professional processes,” Benoit says.

For FacialDx, that philosophy shapes the company’s position within the healthcare ecosystem. Benoit emphasizes that the platform is intended to provide wellness intelligence and observational insights rather than diagnostic conclusions. According to him, maintaining clearly defined boundaries helps support responsible adoption while reinforcing the role of healthcare professionals in evaluating information and determining appropriate next steps.

He also points to governance and controlled access as important components of trust. “The goal is to make information accessible, understandable, and secure,” Benoit says. “People should know who can access their information, how it is being handled, and what safeguards exist around it.”

As AI continues to expand across healthcare, enterprise wellness, and telehealth environments, trust may ultimately become the factor that separates short-term experimentation from long-term adoption. Innovation remains important, but sustained success will likely depend on whether organizations can balance technological advancement with accountability, transparency, privacy protection, and human oversight.

Benoit believes the future of AI health intelligence will be shaped by that balance. “The organizations that earn trust will be the organizations that remain transparent, stay focused on their purpose, and use AI to support better decisions,” he says. “When innovation and accountability move forward together, people gain confidence in the technology and confidence in how it is being used.“

Microsoft announced yet another price increase for the Xbox Series X and S consoles, starting Aug. 1. This is the third time Microsoft has hiked the price of its Xbox consoles since May 2025, another example of gaming hardware increasing in price due to the ongoing global memory shortage.

Xbox console prices are jumping $100 for the 512GB model and $150 for the 1TB models. Microsoft says it will discontinue the 2TB version of the Xbox Series X. Here’s the new breakdown of prices:

• Series S 512GB: $500
• Series S 1TB: $600
• Series X 1TB digital: $750
• Series X 1TB disc drive: $800

Microsoft’s blog post said the company spent several months working with suppliers, hoping to avoid another price increase. “Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x, and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027.” It noted that the the components crisis — which was also behind the latest price hike for Apple products — is hitting consoles particularly hard.

That same blog post introduced buy now, pay later and zero-interest financing options, which the company framed as “programs to make XBOX consoles more accessible.” 

Microsoft initially raised the price of the Xbox Series X|S back in May 2025, shortly after President Trump instituted new tariffs on products manufactured in other countries. The company raised the prices again last October, likely due to the beginning of the current memory shortage. 

Both Nintendo and Sony also re-evaluated the pricing of their respective consoles due to the tariffs and the cost of memory. The PS5 saw its price jump twice: The first came last August, followed by another in March. Nintendo will increase the price of the Switch 2 in September, and it already hiked up the price of the original Switch last August. 

New products aren’t immune, either. On Monday, Valve revealed the price of its PC gaming console, the Steam Machine, which starts at $1049. The price tag shocked many gamers, as the company had telegraphed that its new hardware should be similarly priced as other home consoles when it was first revealed last November. Instead, it’s $150 more expensive than the PS5 Pro. Valve also hiked the price of its Steam Deck portable console last month.

For more, check out our best budget laptops and whether iPhones might be next on the price hike list.

Corporate America is hemorrhaging money through inefficient IT business processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, believes that the industry is complacent about it. Technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of deferred IT fixes, misconfigurations, and other operational inefficiencies, is projected to cost US enterprises $2.41 trillion a year, costing $1.52 trillion to fix. With numbers this staggering, Roland argues that awareness, however, remains precariously low.

“The numbers projected only tell part of the story,” he says. “The struggles companies are going through are far greater than any figure on a slide. I’ve walked into organizations spending $251 million a year on IT and found $51 million of it being wasted, year over year, on problems they didn’t even know existed.”

Jay Roland

To address the bottlenecks he witnessed, Roland launched Varex Solutions. The company functions within a specific pressure point, in the gap where enterprises believe their IT is costing them, and what it is actually costing them. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, Varex offers a suite of consulting services spanning ITSM (IT Service Management) platform implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization, and SLA practice guidance.

According to Roland, the company’s key commitment is to uncover bottlenecks, technical debt, misconfigurations, and workflow inefficiencies and then turn those findings into actionable improvements that help increase ROI. This is achieved by Varex’s proprietary technical debt calculator. The tool, he explains, requires just three inputs from a company: industry, employee headcount, and annual revenue.

From those three data points, Roland’s algorithm, which he notes is built on years of archetypal industrial modelling, is designed to autofill an entire financial landscape. The output is intended to encompass a cohesive analysis of expenditure, wasted resources, action steps, and return on investment.

Roland explains, “There’s no AI involved in this entire process. This is all algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. There’s no point in telling someone they’re wasting money unless you can show them how to stop. Otherwise, it’s just noise. When I give you a number, I can show you exactly how I arrived at it, and your own IT team can verify it.”

While most paths follow a direct pipeline shaped by education, Roland’s entry into the industry came through a side door, literally. In November 1999, he tagged along with a friend to a local internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan, intending to play video games on the T3 line. Someone placed a broken computer on his desk and walked away. He started fixing it. “Ten minutes later, a manager walked by, glanced at the screen, and told me they’d put me on the payroll,” he recalls. “That was my entry into IT.”

He carried that resourcefulness through a career that moved in and out of the industry, through the dot-com crash, through a tech support subscription startup he co-founded, and through a chapter advancing a popular role-playing game that handed him the exact spreadsheet modeling skillset he would later need to build Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining professional trait.

“No matter what I do, I bring everything with me,” he says. “What started as projective analysis on character leveling in a Dungeons and Dragons-style game converted into using a spreadsheet software to optimize a quoting process, and eventually into the algorithms behind Varex Solutions. You never know when you’re going to need it.”

Roland recalls growing up with modest means, without the cushion of inherited privilege, and he frames that experience as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency as simply the cost of doing business, which now shapes his work. “The same water that boils the egg softens the potato,” he says. “Different people react differently to the same circumstances. It was sheer will and determination that got me here, to make something, to give my children something.”

He rejects the common notion of walking into a boardroom with abstract consulting promises. Instead, Roland believes in handing executives a specific, verified number. He explains, “I show them: this is what you’re wasting, this is the proof, and this is how to fix it.” The calculator, he says, was built to close the distance between vague projections and hard accountability.

The resistance he often encounters tells its own story. “I once asked a CIO if I could help uncover $25 to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spend,” he recalls. “But the response I received was one of indifference.” Roland believes this dynamic exists because uncovering decades of avoidable waste is a conversation most executives would prefer never to have. “Would you want to tell your CFO that you have been wasting tens of millions of dollars annually for all these years?” he asks.

The question Roland keeps returning to is a direct one: how bad does a problem have to get before the people responsible for it decide it’s actually a problem? How many misconfigurations have to stack up before the cumulative damage becomes unsustainable? That is the conversation Varex Solutions exists to propel forward, and on Roland’s timeline, it is already overdue.

Rent the Runway’s Mark Kenny discusses his role in software engineering and his experiences of working abroad.

“I’m born and bred in Kilkenny and went to college in UL where I studied computer systems followed by a masters degree and I left Ireland in 2005 after finishing college and moved to London,” Mark Kenny told SiliconRepublic.com.

Having moved in his 20s, Kenny, who is a software engineer at Rent the Runway, explained initially the plan was only to stay for a few short years. However, he said he was drawn in by “everything the city had to offer” and ended up staying for a total of nine years.

“At the time, there simply weren’t any jobs in graduate roles,” he said. “I finished my initial undergraduate degree just as the dot-com bubble burst and no one was taking on graduate positions. In order to buy time, I did a master’s degree but the tech sector was still barely in recovery, especially in Ireland. 

“Most of my classmates were either heading abroad or taking roles unrelated to what we had studied. For me, London was the obvious option since it was close to home, a diverse job market, and a chance to explore different career options.  It’s important to note that at the time, I didn’t think of it as emigrating, but just being a few years away from home before I came back.”

Here he discusses his return to Ireland and his current day to day.

What made you decide to come back?

My kids, mainly. My wife and I had our first child and spent a year in London and found it difficult. There was no safety net, no-one to pick up children in an emergency or help out in any other way.

Don’t get me wrong, London is a fantastic place to live, especially in your 20s, but we found it to be a different proposition once we were trying to put down roots and raise children. At the time renting, never mind purchasing a house in a decent area, was well beyond our means.

We wanted our children to grow up around family and to be in an environment where they could stay kids for as long as possible.

How did your current role come about?

After several years of running my own business, I was ready for a new challenge when I joined Rent the Runway last year.

Moving from a start-up environment into a larger corporate company was a significant change, but I have to admit, the people at Rent the Runway made the transition very smooth. During the interview process, it was refreshing to meet a team that really understood my somewhat diverse background and experience.

What does your work involve on a day-to-day basis?

My day to day involves working as a full-stack engineer within a small Ireland-based team. It’s great having the entire team here in Ireland, as it helps foster strong collaboration and close working relationships.  I work as part of the larger growth pod that has teams both here in Galway as well as our head offices in Brooklyn, New York. 

What do you like most about your job?

The role itself is very varied, which is something I really enjoy. On any given day I might be working on front-end user experiences, back-end services, integrations, or improving internal tooling and performance. A big part of the role also involves collaborating with product managers, designers and other engineers to plan features and refine requirements, which gives me valuable insight into different areas of the business and how other teams operate.  

Working in a smaller team also means there’s a strong sense of ownership. We’re involved throughout the full development life cycle from discussing ideas and technical approaches, to implementation, testing, deployment and monitoring after release. That level of involvement keeps the work interesting. What really stands out though is the people. 

How did your employer make it easier for you to move back?

My case is slightly unusual as by the time I joined Rent the Runway, I’d already been back in Ireland for a few years, running my own company. So the practical move home was something I’d organised for myself.

When I moved back I worked remotely so now having flexibility around hybrid working is amazing.  There are other nice perks of the job too like half-day Fridays during the summer.

How did your time working abroad make you better suited for your job?

While living in London I had the opportunity to explore several different career paths.

I worked as a recording engineer, which involved dealing with some very interesting, and often complex personalities. I also worked as a lecturer and managed a college campus before eventually starting my own business, where I designed and built software systems from the ground up.

Each role brought its own unique challenges and learning experiences. During that time, I worked alongside some extraordinarily talented people and learned how to adapt to a wide range of environments and industries. That combination of hands-on engineering experience and real commercial exposure has been genuinely valuable in a role like this, where thinking beyond just the code itself is an important part of the role.

What is the best thing about being back in Ireland?

99s and curry chips.

But beyond that, it’s definitely the lifestyle, without question. Raising children close to family and old friends, having more space, a sense of community, these are things you really notice once you’ve lived without them for a while.

The tech scene has also transformed beyond recognition since I left. Now Ireland has some of the best engineering opportunities in Europe, with major global companies based here and a thriving start-up ecosystem alongside them. With the rise of hybrid and remote work, you also have the freedom to live in some of the most beautiful parts of the country while still building a strong career.

What advice would you give to others thinking about moving back to their home country?

Don’t wait for the perfect moment, it doesn’t exist.

It’s also much easier to move home when you have fewer ties, so before kids start school or before you become more established in the housing market. If possible, keeping your existing job and negotiating remote work can make the transition much smoother too.

It’s also important to understand the cost of living changes, when we moved back, USC was a completely new tax for us.

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