I always loved menu bar calendar apps. They let me check upcoming events, add events quickly, and access my calendar without switching apps. It’s one of those small quality-of-life improvements that, once you experience it, you can’t go back from.

My menu bar calendar journey started with Fantastical. It’s one of the best calendar apps on Mac, period. But when Flexibits moved to a subscription model, I couldn’t justify paying for features I wasn’t using. So I moved on.

I then switched to Dato, which is a solid app and served me well for a long time. But it lacks some features, and again, the pricing didn’t feel right. I needed something modern, cleaner, and more affordable. That’s when I discovered Dot.

Is Dot actually worth switching to?

Dot is a menu bar-only Mac calendar app, and it does exactly what it promises without any bloat. It works with iCloud, Google, Outlook, and Exchange by reading directly from your Mac’s built-in Calendar app, so there’s no separate account to create or sign into.

The interface is clean and looks beautiful. At the top, you get a quick glance at today’s event count, the day and date, and a settings icon. You can also add a Day and Year progress bar, which shows how much time is left before the end of the day or year. 

Below that, there’s a month view with small dots marking days that have events scheduled, which makes it easy to spot busy days at a glance. Scroll further and you get a full list of upcoming events.

Adding events is fast and supports natural language input. You can type something like “publish Dot’s review at 11:30 am” or “meeting with Sara at 2 PM” and Dot figures out the rest. You can also jump to any date by pressing F and typing it in, which is a small but genuinely useful touch.

What makes Dot stand out?

A few features make Dot feel more considered than its competition. The first is the customizability. You can change the accent color, choose what information appears in the calendar, and how the calendar appears in the Menu Bar. 

Meeting prep is another feature I like a lot. When you have a video call scheduled, Dot automatically surfaces links from your invite, so you are not digging through your email five minutes before the call. It also supports one-click joining for Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Webex, along with a camera and mic preview so you can check your setup before jumping in.

The Command Bar is another highlight, and a feature I have not seen in any other calendar app. With a single shortcut, I can create events, search my schedule, check world clocks, or copy my day’s agenda without leaving whatever I am doing.

Dot also lets you mark special dates on your calendar by right-clicking any day, giving it a title and a color, and it shows up highlighted with the label on hover. It’s a simple feature, but surprisingly useful for flagging things like deadlines, paydays, or trips.

And these are just some of the features. Dot is one of my favorite Mac apps I discovered in 2026, and I highly recommend you use its 14-day trial to explore the app and check it out for yourself by visiting trydot.app. 

If you are happy with it, you can purchase it for a one-time price of $14.99 (currently $9.99 with the launch code). There’s no subscription and no account required, and your data stays on your Mac. For anyone tired of paying monthly for a calendar app, Dot is the answer.

You may be familiar with the various memes detailing the fact that once you reach middle age, you’re automatically sorted, Harry Potter hat–style, into one of a handful of hobbies, such as sourdough bread making, gardening, or bird-watching. I can’t contradict this, since I’m a middle-aged person who got sorted into bird-watching. But I do know that enjoying birds and their various activities is fun for all ages. Birds are beautiful, interesting, and unpredictable, and it’s fascinating to keep a running life list of all the birds you’ve seen and hope to see in your lifetime.

Whether someone you know is in their bird-watching phase, preparing for this phase, or has been in it for decades, all of these unique gifts—for traveling bird-watchers and backyard bird enthusiasts alike—are things either I or another bird-loving Reviews team member tested, was gifted, or bought IRL and enjoyed.

For more specific equipment recommendations, check out our guides to the Best Smart Bird Feeders and the Best Binoculars. For other gift ideas, check out all our gift guide coverage, including the Best White Elephant Gifts, Best Gifts for Men, and Best Viral TikTok Gifts.

Updated May 2026: I’ve overhauled this guide into a new format, swapped out picks, and added a game, a smart nest box, a journal, and a new jacket. I’ve also ensured that links and prices are up to date.

Our Favorite Smart Bird Feeder

If you love birds, nothing beats seeing them up close and personal, conducting all their birdy activities. I have learned more about birds in the past two years of testing smart bird feeders than I have over my entire lifetime, such as the fact that cowbirds will lay their eggs in other birds’ nests (such as juncos) and the “host” birds will raise the cowbird chicks as their own, even if they look nothing alike. Or that jays and other corvids are scatter-hoarders, and will spend an entire day picking nuts out of a feeder’s seed mix to hide caches around the yard. There are many smart seed feeders on the market, but Birdfy’s high-quality basic model (available with a blue or yellow roof) stands out for its balance of price, features, reliability, and usability without a subscription, making it a great gift option that I have personally given.

A Family Pick

My mom gifted this to my family about 10 years ago, and to this day, it is the single most-played and most-enjoyed game we have ever owned, in any genre. Shuffle the small cards and call them out; players place a blue cardstock square on their bingo card if they have that bird. My son loved it, his friends loved it, neighbors loved it, extended family loved it—it can be played by up to six people at a time, and is suitable for all ages. No reading or parsing of rules required. Best of all, neither my husband nor I minded playing it multiple times a day for years on end (a bonus feature important for any parent of young kids).

For Beginning Birders

Bushnell

Powerview 2 8×21 Binoculars

Experienced birders probably already have a decent set of binoculars, but for the birding-curious, kids, or someone just starting out, quality binoculars and a life list journal ($22) would make a great gift. WIRED contributing reviewer Caramel Quin declared these the Best Budget Binoculars. I bought a set for each member of my family for a cruise to Alaska last summer, and I’m glad I did. They’re lightweight (7.2 ounces) yet sturdy, with an aluminum casing instead of plastic, and small enough to slip into a pocket if you’ll be hiking and don’t want to deal with them around your neck.

A Bird Nerd Classic

David Allen Sibley

“What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why”

This 8- by 11-inch hardcover by famed ornithologist David Sibley (known for his Sibley field guides) may be too big and too heavy to fit in a backpack for field reading, but it remains the definitive source for interesting bird facts. Did you know mallard nestlings have only a 15 percent chance of fledging and that once they’re hatched, fewer than half of ducklings survive? And that jays in the Northeastern US often eat paint chips in search of calcium, which doesn’t occur naturally in that region’s soil? Or that chickadees specifically seek out spiders to feed their young for the first week after they hatch, as spiders are high in taurine? Whether you want to or not, you will know all these things and more if you give someone close to you this book.

A Different Kind of Bird Food

My husband and I received this feeder basket and some suet cakes as a gift about 10 years ago. The basket has fallen on the ground countless times; been chewed on and used as gymnastics equipment by squirrels; and survived windstorms, snow, and pretty much everything Pacific Northwest winters have to offer. Sure, looks-wise, it’s seen better days, but it still does the job.

Samuel Potozkin spent months shaping a life-size C-3PO head from plastic filament and careful layers of paint. What started as a simple Star Wars fan project grew into a working machine that listens to spoken words and replies in the droid’s familiar voice. Anyone who has ever wished the golden protocol droid from Star Wars could answer back now has a real version sitting on a shelf or desk.

Potozkin printed the head on a Prusa Core 1 machine with PETG filament and a few wobbly layers. Hours of hand sanding later, the curves are velvety smooth. Primer was then used, followed by many layers of Alclad II chrome paint to achieve the desired reflecting gold surface. To achieve that movie-accurate gloss, apply a final layer of yellow-orange color and seal with clear 2K resin. There was a hiccup when the object fell off the desk and a crack formed, but a dab of glue and putty fixed it and work resumed as usual.

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Inside the hollow head, there’s a Raspberry Pi 5, a tiny microphone, and a speaker, all neatly wired. The Pi runs a special piece of programming that manages the conversation. The sound from the microphone is routed through a Whisper-based speech-to-text system and then to a large language model, which generates a response in the style of C-3PO, the bot from the films. A voice-synthesis layer then converts the text into proper speech that sounds similar to Anthony Daniels’ original performance, with a speaker pushing it all out so the head appears to be speaking to you.

Conversations with the head feel natural, even if there is a small delay between asking and receiving an answer. Ask who the droid is, and you’ll get a nice protocol-droid response. When you ask about Earth, it regales you with statistics in the same super-formal tone that fans associate with the films. The lag was a bit of an issue at first, but with a few code modifications, everything is fine again. When it comes to running the device, no further equipment is required because it is completely self-contained and does not require a separate computer or smartphone app.

He’s also made the complete code and 3D files available on GitHub so that anyone can try their hand at creating their own version. If you’re curious about how the software pipeline works, there’s a lengthy paper on the same repository that explains everything. Potozkin believes that this effort is simply a modest step toward machines that can sit with humans in the real world rather than merely live on a screen all the time.
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Fans of survival horror and classic shooters now have a unique way to experience the latest Resident Evil title. A fresh mod called Requiem for Ravenholm arrived in early access and it transforms Resident Evil Requiem using assets pulled straight from the Half-Life series. Created by FlamingosPeak Workshop the project replaces key elements throughout the game.

Weapons, props, and even the enemies are all given a Half-Life makeover, which means you’re now walking through places that were once populated with standard infected who are now stumbling around with Headcrabs clinging to their heads. Meanwhile, Combine soldiers wait in the shadows, just as they did in Half-Life 2. The Ravenholm name is a dead giveaway, as this mod recreates the desperate, isolated mood that made Half-Life 2 so unforgettable, but set within Requiem’s lovingly constructed locales.

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The gameplay remains the same as in the original, with alternating perspectives between the characters and careful resource management, but every time you pick up a crowbar to whack some zombies instead of using your standard melee option, or find yourself creeping through a dark corridor feeling that familiar (and a little creepy) sci-fi dread creeping over you, it feels completely new.

The mod is still in early access, so expect some rough edges, especially in the opening scene, where it first interacts with the source game’s code. The team is working on an earlier version of Requiem, so anticipate the occasional issue to appear, but they invite you to report them on the Nexus page so they can be corrected, and yes, updates will be released over time to iron out the bugs. This mod is simple to download and install; simply navigate to the Resident Evil Requiem Nexus Mods page and you’re ready to go.
[Source]

I’ve been into cycling for decades—riding with grade-school buddies, kicking around in college, then city commuting in Boston, Paris, Barcelona, New York, and now Seattle. Somehow only in the last 10 years, when I became a volunteer mechanic at a bike-centric Seattle nonprofit, did I think about adjusting anything more than the seat height. Now I’m diligent about making sure I have the right bike and that it’s fit for my body and my riding style.

I wish I could have figured that stuff out sooner, so for this story, I wanted to gather expert advice on the basics of what people should look for and what questions to ask when buying a bike. (My colleague Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has more advice if you’re going that route.) After that, I’d take my own bike to a professional fitter and go deep into the nitty-gritty of bike fit to find out what it means to have a tailored ride.

I start with no bike at all. I walk to meet Rebekah Ko, the community resources director at Seattle’s Bike Works, the nonprofit where I volunteer. Ko previously ran the sales floor as general manager at the city’s Mend Bicycles, and for the purposes of this story we pretend like I am in the market for a bike that I’d use for transportation and general kicking-around fun. We make sure it’s unlike my own bike, so I won’t be comparing the two in the back of my mind.

Bike Works sells new bikes and refurbished older bikes, and after a round of questions about what I was looking for, particularly about how and how often I planned to use it, Ko wheels out a Trek Multitrack 7200, a sturdy hybrid likely from the late aughts. This Trek is upright and handsome and silver and blue, with a short wheelbase, flat bars, grip shifters, and a big, squishy seat, all of which are very different from what I’m used to.

“Hybrids are a soft landing ground for many people looking to get into cycling,” she explains.

She checks for about two inches of standover clearance between me and the top of the frame. She then has me put a thumb on top of my left hip and extend my hand out flat in the air next to it, setting the initial seat height just beneath it. With Ko bracing the bike, I hop on, so she can fine-tune the saddle height, making sure I have a slight bend in my knee with the pedal at its lowest point.

“That slight bend helps make sure we are engaging the larger muscles—the glutes and the thighs—where the power comes from,” she says. “It also helps keep pressure off of the knees.”

From there, it’s time to grab the bars, which can typically be raised, lowered, and pivoted. We then adjust the brake lever angle to make sure my hands rest on them in a relaxed position.

Ko makes sure I look comfortable, not overreached, without locked elbows or a pinched neck, not scrunched into what some call “meerkat position,” with a straight back and the wrists and elbows very bent like you’re peering over the top of them.

After these adjustments, it’s generally a good time for some preliminary stock-taking, as you’ll hopefully be spending a lot of time on this bike. So how’s your keister feel? If the saddle feels wonky, consider a different one. If it feels good, it’s time for a test drive.

I hop on the Trek and pedal around a parking lot, first noticing that giant squishy seat, which is kind of weird … but kinda fun! It fits the bike’s vibe, and I like it. The brakes are nice and grabby. The whole thing feels surprisingly nimble.

The Mighty2 has a built-in AQI (air quality index) monitor and a MegaScan laser sensor to automatically detect three distinct air particle sizes: bacteria and microplastics; fumes, smoke, allergens, and fine dust; and dust mites, pollen, pet dander, and mold. The monitor can quantify in real time how much pollution is in the air, including large and ultrafine particles.

Coway uses its own air-quality color-coding system, but the Mighty2 uses different colors from the OG Mighty model. Now the air quality light flashes blue for clean air, green for moderate, orange for unhealthy, and red for very unhealthy. Coway’s color-coding system is a bit confusing, considering that it differs from the US air quality index standards of green for good, red for unhealthy, and purple for very unhealthy. At a glance, I was often confused by what the color was signifying about my home’s air. Using the built-in air sensors, the Mighty2 automatically adjusts its fan speed (in auto mode) to most effectively purify the air in response to air quality changes.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

When I tested, I mostly used it in my bedroom near my cats’ litter boxes; near my living room window, which has lots of outside exhaust and pollutants; and in my kitchen while cooking on my gas stove, which doesn’t have proper ventilation. I tested this model for several weeks, moving around my home and letting the air purifier automatically adjust for various situations where air quality periodically became unhealthy. Although I most often used the auto feature, I also tested the timer and sleep features, which worked as expected every time, and I appreciated the auto-enabled sleep mode when dark, when I forgot to change settings at night.

For all air purifiers, I manually test the air with my own air quality monitor in various situations, and use a decibel monitor to measure how loud the purifier is on the highest setting. I also use a sealed tent and smoke pellets to see how quickly each air purifier clears the pellet smoke (and returns the air to healthy quality) inside the tent when in auto mode. For the smoke test, the Mighty2 took 50 seconds for the smoke to visually clear, and another three minutes and 20 seconds for the built-in air quality sensor light to read that the air was back to healthy on auto mode (from red to blue indication light). In a test with the slightly cheaper Levoit Vital 200S, the smoke cleared in about 40 seconds and took another four and a half minutes to read back as healthy air. Although the statistics are comparable, the Mighty2 was a bit faster overall. However, I really appreciated having the Levoit’s app to check air quality and purification through my phone (since the purifier was visually covered in smoke), and the app notified me when it had reached clean air status again.

According to my decibel reader, the Mighty2 hovered around a moderate 65 to 70 dB on the highest fan setting, and was about 35 dB on sleep mode, not even registering on the reader above the ambient noises of my home. For reference, the hum of a refrigerator is somewhere between 40 and 50 decibels, and a conversation is around 60 decibels. Even on the highest setting, it didn’t feel egregiously loud and provided white noise. Ideally, an air purifier should be able to clean the air in your room five times an hour without reaching the noise levels of a conversation. On auto modes and sleep mode, the fan noise was virtually undetectable.

If you’re a fan of Coway’s air purifiers, or want to upgrade your air purifier from the previous model, the Mighty2 is a solid choice. It’s only $30 more than the previous model, can effectively purify more square feet per hour, and its filters last twice as long as the previous model’s. The upgrade to the Mighty2 will pay for itself in a year of use through filters alone. It’s easy to clean and disassemble, and the purifier helped to keep the residual dust from my cats’ litter down, reduce dander during shedding season, and improve the overall quality of the air around their toilet/general living space.

Students everywhere once pulled the same trusty graphing calculator from their backpacks for every math class. Texas Instruments just released the TI-84 Evo, a direct update that keeps everything people already know and like while fixing the slow spots that frustrated users for years.

You can see the color selections straight away: a pure clean white, a gentle raspberry, mint, lavender, teal, silver, pink, and a bright yellow. Each one includes a matching slide cover and a compact USB-C cable, all neatly bundled together. It still feels substantial in the hand, same like the earlier TI-84 Plus CE models, but it now has a nicer keypad layout with much clearer labeling, making it a lot easier to use.

The TI-84 Evo is powered by an ARM Cortex CPU that runs at 156 megahertz. This single adjustment provides you three times the speed of the old devices. No more waiting for graphs to load; they are now drawn quickly. Complex equations are solved faster, and you can switch between panels without detecting any pauses.

The screen still boasts 320 by 240 pixels, but Texas Instruments has managed to shoehorn in a larger graphing window to make the most of the display. The result is an additional 50% of area to play with, and it truly makes a difference: curves appear nicer, labels are lot simpler to read at a glance, and kids can discover patterns faster because nothing is packed in and butchered anymore.

You get a much smoother experience from the moment you switch it on. A pleasant, large icon-based home screen welcomes you with clear tiles for the most common functions. Menus now have smaller wording and shorter explanations, requiring fewer button pushes to get to your desired destination. The graphing menu has been completely overhauled, and helpful status notes are now displayed at the top of each screen, right where you need them.

There are some fresh new math features included in, such as the points of interest trace, which automatically follows any curve and highlights critical areas. The Lines and Conics app has also been updated to make it easier to navigate those difficult themes. Both of these modifications save time by eliminating the need to browse through menus the old way.

Python is now included alongside the classic TI-BASIC language. Students can build basic scripts and connect them directly to the calculator’s math engine, allowing coding lessons to be completed without leaving the device. Furthermore, because the operating system enables USB upgrades, new features and fixes will be available long after your purchase.

The TI-84 Evo remains eligible for the SAT, ACT, AP examinations, IB programs, and all other important standardized assessments. Teachers like a tool that is purely focused on math and does not try to lure pupils with social media or games. It’s priced at $160, but schools can contact the company to negotiate a bulk sale at a cheaper rate. Availability began immediately following the April announcement, so the new units are currently available at major shops including Amazon.