A collaboration between Spotify and Bookshop.org that allows readers to purchase physical books in the Spotify app is now live in the US and UK.

Rather than positioning audiobooks as the hard copy-killer, Spotify is encouraging you to see them as complimentary to one another. First announced back in February, the new partnership with Bookshop.org appears to be an acknowledgement from Spotify that physical still reigns supreme in the book world. Bookshop is a digital marketplace that enables indie booksellers to take their businesses online, and Spotify says any purchase made through its app will “directly support those bookshops and the authors who brought the story to life.”

When viewing an audiobook on Spotify, where available you should now see a “Get a copy for your bookshelf” link that redirects you to the Bookshop.org website, which takes over the rest of the purchase and shipping process, reports TechCrunch. The feature is now live on Android, with iOS support arriving next week.

Key to this partnership is the new Page Match feature that Spotify launched in February, which allows readers to sync their progress between audiobooks and physical or ebooks so they can jump between formats seamlessly. When reading a paperback, you can use your phone camera to scan the page you reach and continue from that point in the audiobook. It also allows you to scan ereader pages so you can pick up when you left off in the audiobook, and vice versa.

Spotify has today expanded Page Match to support more than 30 new languages, including French, German and Swedish, while Audiobook Recaps are now available on Android. Introduced last year, initially for iOS users, these AI-powered audio summaries refresh you on your progress before you start reading, becoming available once you pass the 10-minute threshold in a book.

Spotify launched audiobooks in 2022 and now offers 15 hours of free listening time a month to Premium subscribers.

After selling its shoe brand and assets last month for $39 million, Allbirds is pivoting to AI. Of course, the company is also changing its name, since the footwear brand “Allbirds” was part of the sale. Introducing: NewBird AI, a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” the company announced via its investor relations site on Wednesday.

The rebranded AI company also announced a $50 million investment from an undisclosed institutional investor in the form of a convertible financing facility.

It’s objectively pretty funny that Allbirds is becoming an AI company — not because it’s unusual for companies to pivot, but because of how extreme this pivot is. The maker of the shoes once craved by the Silicon Valley tech set is now going to be a provider of GPUs. It’s somewhat absurd — and risky — but you can see how the business came to this decision. After the asset and brand sale, Allbirds can keep the public company’s shell (it’s been traded on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “BIRD”) and then reuse it to invest in the hot AI sector.

This recalls the time in 2017 when the Long Island Iced Tea company pivoted to the blockchain, prompting the stock to jump some 275% after the rebranding. That pivot didn’t pan out, as the NASDAQ stock exchange delisted the stock the following year after Bitcoin fever died down.

Allbirds-turned-NewBird is likely hoping for a different outcome.

The company says that the financing and the asset sale are still subject to stockholder approval, with a meeting planned to take place on May 18. If the sale goes through, stockholders will receive a dividend during the third quarter. The new owner of the Allbirds brand and assets, American Exchange Group, will continue to make products for Allbirds customers.

Meanwhile, NewBird AI plans to use the new financing to acquire GPU assets, which it will offer to customers seeking AI compute capacity. Over time, the company hopes to grow its service offerings through partnerships and even strategic mergers and acquisitions — if the opportunity arises.

People prefer to bring this portable speaker with them on weekend treks or to backyard gatherings, and before long, they’re using it almost daily. For $90 (was $140), it punches far below what many people expect to pay for portable audio. Anker engineered the Boom 2 to endure whatever life throws at it and still create a sound that’s a lot greater than you’d expect from a speaker of this size.

The sound immediately fills the space, with a nice balance of highs and deep lows.That’s thanks to two tweeters and a separate subwoofer that produce a total of 80 watts of sound. The bass strikes strong enough to be noticeable on drum loops or electronic beats, but it remains under control, so you don’t have to worry about it getting too crazy. Voices are smooth and clear and come across effectively across all music kinds. Turn up the volume, and the speaker holds its own without becoming overly feedbacky or breaking up. The free app on your phone lets you become a little more adventurous with a 9-band equalizer and a few preset options, so you can tune in exactly the sound you like without having to fiddle around.

Sale

Soundcore Boom 2 By Anker, Outdoor Speaker, 80W, Subwoofer, BassUp 2.0, 24H Playtime, IPX7 Waterproof…

• 80W Max Booming Bass: Feel the power of the bass in every song thanks to a racetrack subwoofer for added depth and clarity. And with BassUp 2.0, you…
• 2.1 Stereo Clarity: A 50W racetrack subwoofer and dual 15W tweeters deliver crisp highs and deep bass, balanced by smart crossover technology, for an…
• Listen All-Day Anywhere: Boom 2 outdoor speaker keep the beats playing for 24 hours on a single charge, and with the built-in power bank, you can keep…

The battery life is particularly impressive here, with users able to get up to 24 hours at moderate volumes with the lights and extra bass off.Heavy usage of those functions still provides plenty of hours before the device requires recharging. A USB-C port gets it back up and running in around 5.5 hours. The built-in USB-A output also functions as a power bank to top off your phone as needed, so one device covers music while keeping other gear operating.

This speaker’s compact size and built-in handle make it easy to transport.It weighs only approximately 4 pounds and dimensions 7 x 12 x 4 inches, so it fits easily into a backpack. An IPX7 rating means that a dunk in water will not harm it, and even if it falls into a lake or pool, it will simply float.The enclosed rear hatch protects the ports from getting wet in the rain.

It also has vibrant lighting for evening use, with the bright LEDs pulsing and shifting in a variety of patterns that either match the music or remain stable.You can manage the basic volume and power on the speaker, but the app allows you to be a little more creative with the lighting. Pairing up over Bluetooth 5.3 is a breeze to say the least, and the built-in microphone performs an excellent job of picking up calls for group chats without having to yell.

Most teens in the United States say that Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat aren’t harming their mental health, though a slightly higher proportion report negative effects on their sleep and productivity, according to a new report from Pew Research. The report offers fresh insights into how teens perceive the effects of social media at a time when there are increasing calls to ban younger teens from social platforms altogether.

The report is based on a survey of 1,458 teens between the ages of 13 and 17. Teens were asked about their use of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok and how those apps affect them. Pew also asked the teens’ parents to weigh in.

Relatively few teens reported negative mental health effects, with 9 percent of Snapchat and TikTok users and 11 percent of Instagram users saying they thought the services had hurt their mental health. More teens reported negative effects on sleep and productivity, however, especially when it comes to use of TikTok. Thirty-seven percent of teens said their use of the app had hurt their sleep and 29 percent reported that it had affected their productivity. Even so, the majority of teens responded that the apps had “neither helped nor hurt” their mental health, sleep or productivity.

A significant number of teens did say that social media apps had helped their friendships, particularly Snapchat. At the same time, the app had a “somewhat higher rate” of bullying and harassment compared with the other services.

While the self-reported data is hardly a definitive answer to whether social media is harming teens, the numbers do offer a somewhat different narrative than the one that lawmakers, regulators and other critics have used to pursue social media bans and civil litigation against major companies. Meta, Snap and TikTok are all facing lawsuits that claim the platforms have purposefully created addicting features and enabled other harms to teen users,

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when researchers surveyed those same teens’ parents, they had a more negative view of the apps’ impact on their children. About four in ten parents said that social media hurts their kids’ sleep and productivity and about a quarter thought it hurt their mental health. Forty-four percent of parents whose teens use TikTok said they thought their child was spending “too much” time in the app.

“The share of parents who say the same of Snapchat and Instagram is lower,” the researchers note. “But the same pattern continues for both, with parents being more likely than teens to describe their teens’ use of these sites as excessive.”

The report isn’t the first time Pew has polled teens on their relationship with social media. Last year, a separate report found that teens were becoming more worried about social media, though they were less likely to say they had been negatively impacted on a personal level.

When it comes to electronic gadgets, I’m a sucker for a good deal. If it’s got a circuit board on the inside and a low enough price tag on the outside, you can be pretty sure I’ll be taking it home with me. So a few years ago, when I saw USB external hard drives on the shelf of a national discount chain for just $10, I couldn’t resist picking one up. What I didn’t realize at the time however, was that I’d be getting more in the bargain than just some extra storage space.

It’s a story that I actually hadn’t thought of for some time — it only came to mind recently after reading about how the rising cost of computer components has pushed more users to the secondhand market than ever before. That makes the lessons from this experience, for both the buyer and the seller, particularly relevant.

What’s in the Box?

It wasn’t just the low price that attracted me to these hard drives, it was also the stated capacity. They were listed as 80 GB, which is an unusually low figure to see on a box in 2026. Obviously nobody is making 80 GB drives these days, so given the price, my first thought was that it would contain a jerry-rigged USB flash drive. But if that was the case, you would expect the capacity to be some power of two.

Upon opening up the case, what I found inside was somehow both surprising and incredibly obvious. The last thing I expected to see was an actual spinning hard drive, but only because I lacked the imagination of whoever put this product together. I was thinking in terms of newly manufactured, modern, hardware. Instead, this drive was nearly 20 years old, and must have been available for pennies on the dollar since they were presumably just collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere.

Or at least, that’s what I assumed. After all, surely nobody would have the audacity to take a take a bunch of ancient used hard drives and repackage them as new products…right?

Certified Pre-Owned

Once I saw that the drive inside the enclosure was older than both of my children, I got curious about its history. Especially given the scuff marks and dirt on the drive itself. A new old stock drive from 2008 is one thing, but if this drive actually had any time on the clock, that’s a very different story. Forget the implications of selling used merchandise as new — if the drive has seen significant use, even $10 is a steep price.

Fortunately, we can easily find out this information through Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART). Using the smartctl tool, we can get a readout of all the drive’s SMART parameters and figure out what we’re dealing with:

Well, now we know why these things are so cheap. According to the SMART data, this particular drive has gone through 9,538 power cycles and accumulated a whopping 31,049 hours of total powered on time. I’ll save you the math, that’s a little over 3.5 years.

Note that all of the attributes are either Old_age or Pre-fail. The term “used” barely covers it, this drive has been beat to hell.

Buried Treasure

It’s a fair bet that anyone finding themselves regularly reading Hackaday possesses an inquisitive mind. So at his point, I’m willing to bet you’re wondering the same thing I did: if this drive has been used for years, could it still contain files from its previous life?

Obviously it was formatted before getting boxed up and put back on the shelf. But frankly, anyone who’s unscrupulous enough to pass off decades-old salvaged drives as new probably isn’t putting in the effort to make sure said drives are securely wiped.

I was willing to bet that the drive went through nothing more than a standard quick format, and that even a simplistic attempt at file recovery would return some interesting results. As it so happens, “Simplistic Attempt” is basically my middle name, so I fired up PhotoRec and pointed it at our bargain drive.

It only took a few minutes before the file counters started jumping, proving that no effort was made to properly sanitize the drive before repackaging it. So not only is this drive old and used, but it still contains information from wherever it was for all those years. If it came from an individual’s personal computer, the information could be private in nature. If it was a business machine, the files may contain valuable proprietary data.

In this case, it looks to be a little of both. I didn’t spend a lot of time poring over the recovered files, but I spot checked enough of them to know that there’s somebody in China who probably wouldn’t be too happy to know their old hard drive ended up on the shelf in an American discount store.

For one thing we’ve got hundreds of personal photographs, ranging from vacation shots to formal portraits.

The pictures show fun in the sun, but the DOC and PDF files are all business. I won’t reveal the name of the company this individual worked for, but I found business proposals for various civil engineering projects within the Minhang District of Shanghai worth millions of dollars.

Once is Happenstance….

I know what you’re wondering, Dear Reader. If the first drive I pulled off the shelf happened to have a trove of personal and professional information on it, what are the chances that it would happen again? Perhaps it was a fluke, and the rest of the drives would be blank.

That’s an excellent question, and of course we can’t make a determination either way with only a single point of data. Which is why I went back the next day and bought three more drives.

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that no two drives are actually the same. Two are Western Digital and two are Fujitsu, but none of them have the same model number. The keen-eyed reader will also note that one of the drives is 100 GB, but it has been partitioned to 80 GB to match the others.

Three of the drives were manufactured in 2008, and one is from 2007. I won’t go through the SMART data for each one, but suffice it to say that each drive has several thousand hours on the clock. Although for what it’s worth, the first drive is the lifetime leader by far.

In terms of file recovery, each drive gave up several gigabytes worth of data. In addition to the one we’ve already looked at, two more were clearly the primary drives in Windows boxes, and each contained a mix of personal data and technical documents such as AutoCAD drawings, datasheets, bills of materials, and schematics. Given their contents, I would guess the drives came from off-lease computers that were used by engineering firms.

The fourth drive was different. It contained more than 32 GBs worth of Hollywood movies, the most recent of which was released in 2010. I imagine this drive came out of somebody’s media center. Now I haven’t sailed the high seas, as it were, since my teenage years, but even if I had wanted to add these titles to my ill-gotten trove of films, it was a non-starter. Given the time period they were downloaded in, most of them were below DVD resolution.

Plus, they were all dubbed in Chinese. Not exactly my idea of a movie night.

A Cautionary Tale

Admittedly, given that they were being sold in a home electronics chain-store, the likelihood that these drives would be purchased by somebody with the means to extract any meaningful data from them isn’t very high. But since you’re reading this, you know the chances clearly aren’t zero. I didn’t have any malicious intent, but the same can’t necessarily be said for others.

So what can we take away from this? To start with, if you’re planning on selling or giving away any of your old drives, make sure they are properly wiped. In the dusty past, the recommendation would have been to use the Linux-based Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) live CD, but the project was was acquired back in 2012 and development was halted a few years later. Luckily, the GPLv2 tool that DBAN actually ran against the drive was forked and is now available as nwipe.

But as mentioned earlier, I get the impression that these drives were from businesses that unloaded their old machines. In that case, the users can’t really be blamed, as they wouldn’t have been able to wipe the drives even if they knew ahead of time their work computers were getting swapped out. But they certainly could have made an effort to keep their personal data off of company property. It’s one thing to have some corporate secrets stolen down the line, but you don’t want pictures of your kids to be in the mix.

In short, nobody cares about what happens with your personal data more than you do, so make sure it doesn’t get away from you. Otherwise some bargain-hunting nerd might be pawing through it in a few years.