Finding your favorite workout app may require a bit of trial and error since you’ll want to see if you’re looking for a personalized experience or are comfortable with a cookie cutter plan.

Where will you be using the app? Think about where you’ll mainly be using the app. Do you work out at home, at the gym, outside or a mix of all three? If you like to run outdoors, for example, you’d likely want an app that offers location tracking. Similarly, when looking into a specific app, figure out whether its classes require you to have certain equipment on-hand, like dumbbells or a yoga mat.

Your goals: You should also think about your goals for using the app. Do you just want to get moving more often, or are there specific fitness goals (like running a certain speed or lifting a certain weight) that you want to achieve? Some apps allow you to personalize your goals or even connect with a personal trainer to help you meet them.

Budget: Lastly, know that there are workout apps for every budget — including free. Some require a monthly subscription to access, so take advantage of the free trials to determine if it’s worth the cost to you.

Sometimes you just know that you have the best ever idea for a hardware product, to the point that you’re willing to quit your job and make said product a reality. If only you can get the product and its brilliance to people, it would really brighten up their lives. This was the starry-eyed vision that [Simon Berens] started out with in January of 2025, when he set up a Kickstarter campaign for the World’s Brightest Lamp.

At 50,000 lumens this LED-based lamp would indeed bring the Sun into one’s home, and crowdfunding money poured in, leaving [Simon] scrambling to get the first five-hundred units manufactured. Since it was ‘just a lamp’, how hard could it possibly be? As it turns out, ‘design for manufacturing’ isn’t just a catchy phrase, but the harsh reality of where countless well-intended designs go to die.

The first scramble was to raise the lumens output from the prototype’s 39K to a slight overshot at 60K, after which a Chinese manufacturer was handed the design files. This manufacturer had to create among other things the die casting molds for the heatsinks before production could even commence. Along with the horror show of massive US import taxes suddenly appearing in April, [Simon] noticed during his visit to the Chinese factory that due to miscommunication the heatsink was completely wrong.

Months of communication and repeated trips to the factory follow after this, but then the first units ship out, only for users to start reporting issues with the control knobs ‘scraping’. This was due to an issue with tolerances not being marked in the CNC drawings. Fortunately the factory was able to rework this issue within a few days, only for users to then report issues with the internal cable length, also due to this not having been specified explicitly.

All of these issues are very common in manufacturing, and as [Simon] learned the hard way, it’s crucial to do as much planning and communication with the manufacturer and suppliers beforehand. It’s also crucial to specify every single part of the design, down to the last millimeter of length, thickness, diameter, tolerance and powder coating layers, along with colors, materials, etc. ad nauseam. It’s hard to add too many details to design files, but very easy to specify too little.

Ultimately a lot of things did go right for [Simon], making it a successful crowdfunding campaign, but there were absolutely many things that could have saved him a lot of time, effort, lost sleep, and general stress.

Thanks to [Nevyn] for the tip.

Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks announced Friday that he has joined prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder, making him the first NBA player to invest directly in the company.

“The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” said the two-time NBA MVP in a social media post. “Today, I’m joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now.”

The announcement has not gone over well on social media. On Reddit, for example, one user described it as “literally a conflict of interest,” while another described Kalshi as “cancerous” and yet another wondered, “is this even allowed.”

According to The Athletic, the NBA’s recent collective bargaining agreement allows players to advertise and take stakes of up to 1% in sports betting companies, as long as they’re not promoting league-related wagers.

Kalshi said it will partner with Antetokounmpo on marketing and live events — and in accordance with the company’s “strict terms of service that ban insider trading and market manipulation,” he will not be allowed to trade on markets related to the NBA.

The Super Bowl is happening in Silicon Valley this Sunday, and the Patriots-Seahawks game at Levi’s Stadium is going to be packed with tech money. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is expected to be there. Apple’s Tim Cook, too. (He has become a Super Bowl fixture since Apple Music began sponsoring the halftime show several years ago.)

Longtime VC Venky Ganesan from Menlo Ventures gave the New York Times a quote about the whole thing, saying the Super Bowl in the Bay Area is “tech billionaires who got picked last in gym class paying $50,000 to pretend they’re friends with the guys who got picked first.” Added Ganesan, “And for the record, I, too, was picked last in gym class.”

Ganesan could likely afford a $50,000 ticket if he needed one. Menlo went all-in on Anthropic, setting up a $100 million fund with the AI company in summer 2024 to invest in other AI startups. The firm has also joined numerous funding rounds for Anthropic itself, both through its flagship fund and various special purpose vehicles. (Anthropic is reportedly expected to close a $20 billion round of funding next week at a post-money valuation of $350 billion.)

Tickets are expensive across the board, averaging almost $7,000 according to the Times (with some last-minute seats still available on StubHub for closer to $3,600, according to a quick glance at the ticket reseller site). Only a quarter go to the general public; the rest are distributed to NFL teams. Of all ticket buyers, the largest group (27%) is coming from Washington State for the Seahawks, who’ve won just one Super Bowl in franchise history compared with the Patriots’ six titles, all with Tom Brady as quarterback.

Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta are splashing out for competing ads about whose AI is best for customers, so maybe their respective CEOs will show up, too. Other than Amazon’s Andy Jassy, who reportedly splits his time between Seattle and Santa Monica, all of them have homes within an hour or so of Sunday’s game.

This is just the third time the Bay Area has hosted the Super Bowl. The first time was in 1985 at Stanford Stadium, the original football stadium at Stanford University, where the 49ers beat the Dolphins. The second took place 10 years ago at Levi’s Stadium, when the Broncos beat the Panthers.

Josh Grenier got a powerful lesson in the benefits of revitalization when he was a high school art teacher in Edina, Minnesota. He was teaching ceramics and photography in a dull classroom in the basement. No windows. Poor ventilation.

“It was an old, underutilized, leftover space down in the bowels of the building,” Grenier says.

Worse, the dreary room seemed to reflect an unspoken, but obvious, negativity directed at the people who used it: “I think the program and the students who were involved with it were not perceived particularly well.”

Within a few short years, though, the school went through a major renovation, which included a new, stylish fine-arts wing at the front of the existing structure. Grenier and his art students moved from “the worst space to the best space” in the building, a shift that transformed how others perceived the arts program, and how the students perceived themselves and their place in the school.

“Facilities investments are really expressions of what a community values,” Grenier says. “I think the people who are in them feel that; I witnessed that firsthand.”

The experience so moved Grenier that he left his nine-year teaching job to become an architect. Today, he’s an educational practice leader and educational planner in the Denver office of Wold Architects & Engineers, where he works with communities across Colorado that are trying to shape their school needs for the future. Sometimes they choose to build new schools. More often, they revamp old schools that have been around for decades, but lack the space or mechanical systems to meet the demands of modern learners.

Grenier and his design peers are part of a pivotal moment in education. Shifting populations have left cities and towns with unused school buildings in zero-growth areas and too few classrooms in high-growth areas. Many schools still in use were constructed in the boom years after World War II and don’t meet today’s building codes, some dangerously so. A 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the nation’s 100,000 K-12 schools need to replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems or plumbing to mitigate health hazards.

At the same time, the amount districts have to spend on school renovations has dropped by about $85 billion a year nationwide since 2016, according to a recent report from the American Institute of Architects. This despite research of the past 20 years showing a strong link between unhealthy school buildings and poor learning outcomes. The Harvard School of Public Health concluded in 2017 that by failing to modernize old schools “policymakers and parents may be missing one of the largest health and safety issues affecting students daily.” On the other hand, the study’s authors wrote, “properly designed, maintained and operated school buildings…have been shown to prevent cognitive deficits, optimize student and teacher performance, and create a thriving learning environment within the school.”

In Colorado, about 85 percent of the population lives in urban areas; its small plains and mountain towns struggle to keep their identities. Grenier has worked with districts of all sizes in the state, including Manzanola School District, with fewer than 200 students; the eight-school district in touristy Cañon City, southeast of Aspen; and St. Vrain Valley Schools, the state’s seventh largest district.

Grenier spoke with EdSurge about the challenges of rebuilding old schools — and how his experience as a teacher informs every aspect of his job.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: When you talk about how depressing it was to work in a basement, I think many people would identify with that. There are thousands of offices and schools where only a select few have access to light.

Josh Grenier: You’re pointing to something that I was very conscious of. Spaces communicate something to us about where we sit in a hierarchy of the world and how we’re valued and perceived by others. Schools are very much that way, too.

In that [Edina] school, we had a front that was nice and well invested in, and it had a back with dumpsters and a loading dock. The buses dropped the kids off in the back by the dumpsters. The people who owned their own cars and could drive themselves to school would park in the front, and they’d walk in the nice front door. And I remember thinking, ‘what is that saying?’ If you don’t have a car and you’re of lesser means, well, you come in the back door by the dumpster. That’s the kind of thing that if you’re not thinking about it, the buildings themselves can communicate that.

Did that orientation change when the school was renovated?

No. That project was not perfect. That was another reason why I thought that I could contribute by joining the architecture side. We were winners — the arts program. But there were others who were not. There were other parts of the building that could have been thought about more deliberately.

What’s involved in designing for modern learners?

There’s so much variety from student to student of what they’re doing throughout the day, when things are happening, how things are unfolding. There are far more moments of independence, informal opportunities.

That’s another part I like about having been a teacher. I’m pretty good at imagining what’s going to happen, and I like doing that. You’re working on a floor plan, you’re working on a space, and you’re trying to just imagine, well, there’s that kid and there’s all those backpacks, and here he goes doing this, and there she is doing that. They’re gathering over here, and the teachers are walking from here to here, and they’re stopping here.

That’s always been something that I find a lot of pleasure in, just imagining what’s going to happen.

I had a teacher in architecture school who encouraged [us] to try to make it so that people feel they’re being embraced by this space. If you can’t find in yourself some fondness for whoever is going to be there, well, what are you doing?

Many kids today have conditions that hadn’t been identified when these old schools were built. How do you accommodate them?

It’s not a revolutionary idea, but allowing spaces to be used in a variety of different ways helps. You don’t have to make everything dedicated to one function.

Furniture is a huge part. It is the furniture that can help make those flexible spaces work. Things that are on wheels to support different uses or subtly separate one space from another.

You see a lot of modern furniture that has a ‘fidget component’ built into it so a kid can kind of vibrate. You know, a lot of times, kids just have extra energy; they’ll stay more engaged and more present if you just let them fidget.

It’s complicated and costly to renovate a school. How does it begin? In Cañon City, for instance, you took on four schools at once.

Mostly we just listen. People are pretty quick to talk about what’s wrong. We also try to lean into ‘what are you proud of? What are you really good at?’ We try to find a few things that they can rally around and then build a list of possible projects at each of the four schools.

One of the complexities of planning with large entities is that you’re trying to navigate lots of different individual stakeholders and everybody has their own unique point of view. You’re trying to help [them] see bigger picture things. But that’s another benefit of having been a teacher. I feel like [teachers are] pretty good at facilitating those kinds of conversations.

The featured project was the high school. Like so many of our public schools, it was built in the post-World War II era. Most schools start there. And then it’s been added onto, like, 10 times.

They become Franken-buildings…?

[Nods] They become mazes. The circulation becomes overly complex. They’re disorganized and confused. But that school, Cañon City High School, was really proud of its CTE programs. They’re a model in the state for allowing student choices to define the educational path that each of those students is going down. And they have a lot of specialized spaces already in place. But what they were lacking was a central part to the building that reinforced and supported all these piecemeal things that had been cobbled together.

We really focused on creating a new core to the building that felt like it reflected the pride they had in their programs.

How do emotions and nostalgia play into design? How did it work in Manzanola?

The town is around 400 people. In communities like that, the school really is the heart of the town. With those small communities, one of the first things we hear is that they’re afraid if the school goes away, the whole town will go away.

Athletics are huge, and it’s not just Friday night football. Members of the town and the outlying areas will attend athletic events even if they don’t have kids in the school system. In addition to athletics, performances are huge. [The school gym] is usually the biggest space in town. When a prominent member of the community passes away, they have the funeral in the gym. People get married in the school.

That alone makes it fun because it’s just such a key element to that community.

[We knew] it was going to be a public-facing building off-hours because of so much of the community use. It really needed a public side and a learning side with a pretty clear boundary.

After launching the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip last year, Apple is now preparing more powerful variants featuring the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Recent leaks suggest the company could unveil the updated laptops soon, and a new report now points to an early March announcement.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has a strong track record with Apple-related leaks, the new MacBooks could arrive in the first week of March. The lineup is expected to include updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, along with a new MacBook Air featuring the M5 chip.

It’s not immediately clear whether Apple will introduce the long-rumored OLED MacBook Pro as part of this refresh. Reports suggest the OLED model, which is also expected to add touch support, is likely to debut in 2026, with display production already underway.

Beyond the MacBook Pro upgrades, Gurman says Apple is also planning to launch a new low-cost MacBook in the first half of the year. The entry-level model is expected to feature a sub-13-inch display and an “iPhone-class chip.” New Mac Studio desktops are also in development and are said to arrive not long after Apple’s spring Mac refresh.

More Apple hardware launches are on the horizon

A refreshed Studio Display, referenced in multiple leaks over the past few months, is on the way, while new Mac mini models are also on Apple’s roadmap for the year. Alongside new Macs, Apple is reportedly gearing up to launch the iPhone 17e in the coming weeks, as well as a new entry-level iPad powered by the A18 chip and a refreshed iPad Air featuring the M4 processor.

Apple has yet to make anything official. If the reported timeline holds, Apple could announce the iPhone 17e later this month, followed by refreshed iPads and the new MacBook Pro lineup in early March.

Following last year’s trend of showcasing AI in multimillion-dollar ad spots, the 2026 Super Bowl advertisements took it a step further by leveraging AI both to create the commercials and to promote the latest AI products. Love it or hate it, the technology has become a star in its own right, alongside the latest movie trailers and snack brands. 

Let’s explore the biggest moments from this year’s Big Game ads, which featured everything from robots and AI glasses to a touch of drama involving tech founders.

Svedka

Vodka brand Svedka went with what it touts as the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl spot. The 30-second ad, titled “Shake Your Bots Off,” features the company’s robot character, Fembot, and her new companion, Brobot, dancing their circuits off at a human party.

According to Svedka’s parent company, Sazerac, it took roughly four months to reconstruct the Fembot and train the AI to mimic facial expressions and body movements, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, the vodka brand noted that certain aspects were still handled by humans, such as developing the storyline.

​The company partnered with AI company Silverside to create the Super Bowl spot, according to ADWEEK. Silverside AI is the same team behind recent AI-generated Coca-Cola commercials that sparked controversy.

​It’s a bold move to debut AI-generated content during the Super Bowl, an event known for star-studded, high-production ads. The heavy reliance on AI is polarizing, fueling debates over whether AI will replace creative jobs.

Either way, Svedka definitely got people talking.

Anthropic

Anthropic’s ad wasn’t just about selling its Claude chatbot; it was about throwing shade. The commercial took a jab at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads to ChatGPT, with a tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Rather than focus solely on Claude’s features, it poked fun at the idea of your helpful AI assistant suddenly turning into a hype man for “Step Boost Maxx” insoles, for example.

It wasn’t a standard product pitch, and it escalated into an online feud. OpenAI’s Sam Altman fired back on social media, calling the ad “clearly dishonest.” So while we didn’t get any more Kendrick vs. Drake rap beef this time around, maybe we did get our own AI, nerdy version of it.

Meta spotlighted its Oakley-branded AI glasses, designed for sports, workouts, and adventures, including extreme scenarios such as chasing down a departing plane. 

The ad showcased thrill-seekers, from skydivers to mountain bikers, using the glasses to capture epic moments. Famous faces like IShowSpeed and filmmaker Spike Lee made appearances, demonstrating capabilities like filming a basketball dunk in slow motion, posting hands-free to Instagram, and other advanced features.

The tech giant also featured its wearable AI tech in last year’s Super Bowl ad to spark consumer interest, with stars like Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner showing off Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Amazon

Amazon’s ad took a cheeky (and slightly unsettling) approach, starring Chris Hemsworth in a satirical “AI is out to get me” storyline. The commercial exaggerates common fears about AI, with Hemsworth humorously accusing Alexa+ of plotting against him. Scenes included Alexa+ closing the garage door on his head and shutting the pool cover while he swam, each mishap escalating in absurdity.

Beyond the dark comedy, the ad introduced the new Alexa+, showcasing its enhanced intelligence and capabilities, ranging from managing smart home devices to planning vacations. Alexa+ had been available in early access for over a year and officially launched to all U.S. users on Wednesday.

Ring

Ring’s commercial spotlighted its “Search Party” feature, which leverages AI and a community network to reunite lost pets with their owners. The ad followed a young girl searching for her dog Milo, illustrating how users can upload a pet’s photo to the app, where AI works to identify matches and taps into nearby cameras and the broader Ring user community to help track down missing furry family members.

Ring recently announced that anyone can now use Search Party, even without owning a Ring security camera. According to the company, the feature has already helped reunite more than one lost dog with its owner every day.

Google

Google’s ad showcased the Nano Banana Pro, its newest image-generation model. The commercial followed a mother and son as they used AI to envision and design their new home, uploading photos of bare rooms and turning them into personalized spaces with just a few prompts.

Ramp

Ramp scored big by getting Brian Baumgartner — the actor who played Kevin in “The Office” — for its Super Bowl commercial.

In the spot, Baumgartner uses Ramp’s AI-powered spend management platform to “multiply” himself, effortlessly tackling a mountain of work. The ad highlights how Ramp’s all-in-one solution helps teams focus on the most important tasks through smart automation.

And, as a playful nod to his TV persona, Baumgartner is seen carrying a pot of chili in the ad, referencing Kevin’s legendary scene where he brings his cherished recipe for his co-workers to try, only to disastrously spill the entire pot on the floor.

Rippling

Rippling, the cloud-based workforce management platform, went all in on its first-ever Super Bowl ad. The company tapped comedian Tim Robinson in a spot about onboarding an alien monster, poking fun at HR headaches and the promise of AI automation.

Hims & Hers

Health company Hims & Hers used its Super Bowl spot to address disparities in healthcare access. The ad cleverly references the lengths the wealthy go to for health and longevity, even appearing to poke fun at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight in 2021 and Bryan Johnson’s expensive anti-aging routines.

In recent years, the company launched an AI-powered “MedMatch” tool to deliver more personalized treatment recommendations, especially for mental health and wellness.

Wix

Website builder Wix spotlighted its new AI-powered Wix Harmony platform, promising website creation as easy as chatting with a friend. Unveiled in January, the flagship platform combines AI-driven creation and “vibe coding” with full visual editing and customization.

Wix’s biggest competitor, Squarespace, also has a Super Bowl ad this year. Squarespace’s ad has a more cinematic approach starring Emma Stone and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.

This post was initially published on February 6, 2026.

Danny Spencer took his trusty old Game Boy Color and turned it into a canvas for real-time 3D shading, transforming the simple handheld into a shockingly convincing three dimensional environment. As the teapot spins, its curves capture the light from a source you control with the D-pad, causing shadows to alter seamlessly in response to each nudge.

Pixels light up one by one with a Lambertian shader, which tells you exactly how directly light hits a surface, and Spencer solved the problem of multiplying non-integer numbers by baking surface information into normal maps and storing them in tiny three-byte chunks in the ROM. Each pixel selects a normal vector from these maps, doses it with light direction, and outputs a shade ranging from dead black to full-on white. The teapot’s spout glints in the light or falls into shade, with each frame a whole new creation from raw calculations.

The hardware will not be pleased because the Game Boy Color only runs at 8 MHz, which equates to approximately 140,000 cycles each 60 FPS frame. There is no multiply command, so Spencer had to get inventive. He had no trouble swapping multiplications for logarithms and lookup tables. Log tables convert products into sums, whereas power tables do the reverse. All values are compressed into 8-bit fractions from 1 to 1, with signs hidden away in the highest bits. Negative numbers in logarithmic space? No need to worry, he flags them independently and makes modifications on the fly.

To reduce the workload, Spencer shifted to spherical coordinates, in which vectors become angles: tilt (theta) and spin (phi), where light theta remains constant and you only adjust phi to move the light. The dot product is a simple formula: sin(Nθ)sin(Lθ)cos(Nφ – Lφ) + cos(Nθ)cos(Lθ). One subtraction later, he’s incorporating a custom cos_log table, a combination of cosine and logarithm, to speed things up. Five lookups every pixel, subtract, add, lookup, add, for a total of 960 pixels and 89% of the frame budget.

Spencer can patch the shader method in real time, swapping memory loads for hard-coded immediates. That’s an additional 8 cycles saved every subtraction, for a total of 11,520 over the frame. He skips over rows that contain no pixels at a rate of three cycles per pop. As a result, all of the frames remain consistent, even with some slight LCD ghosting to contend with.

You can examine the code for yourself in the GitHub repository, which was compiled with the RGBDS toolkit and includes Python scripts to transform Blender normal maps into ROM data. Two ROMs appear: teapot and gbspin. The releases page contains pre-compiled versions that will get you up and running. You can launch the BGB emulator or flash it onto a cart. Or, better yet, simply press some keys on Spencer’s internet emulator.
[Source]