Tech

In the flexible work era, how can we make the most of co-working spaces?

Published

1 hour ago

6 May 2026

Zihan Wang of the University of Sussex offers advice to professionals who want to maximise their time in shared spaces.

Co-working spaces have become a familiar part of the working landscape. A convenient alternative to working from home or an employer’s office, they have become the favoured option of millions of the world’s freelancers, entrepreneurs and remote workers.

In the UK, there are over 4,000 co-working venues to choose from. Prices vary, depending on location and facilities, but with a dedicated desk costing around £200 per month, it’s worth knowing how to make the most of what these spaces offer.

So how do you choose the right co-working space for you? And how do you get the maximum benefit? Here are four practical tips to consider:

Identify your needs

Not all co-working spaces serve the same purpose. Some people are simply looking for a quiet desk outside the home, while others want a social environment where they can meet people, exchange ideas and build connections.

Being clear about what you want, whether it’s productivity, networking opportunities or skill development, is the first step.

Smaller, independently run spaces often place greater emphasis on community building, with managers who organise regular informal events such as ‘lunch and learn’ sessions or workshops. These environments can create more opportunities for social interaction and learning.

By contrast, larger corporate-style spaces may offer more polished facilities and business services, but with fewer opportunities for facilitated interaction. Choosing the right co-working environment means considering the type of space and how you plan to use it.

Give it a try

Co-working spaces are often advertised as being open and inclusive. But research I worked on with colleagues shows that experiences can vary depending on factors such as age, gender or professional background.

Some spaces will probably feel more welcoming than others, particularly ones where equality, diversity and inclusion are a deliberate part of their design and ethos.

Many spaces are now also set up with specific groups in mind. For example, some cater to female entrepreneurs, while others offer tailored support for neurodivergent workers.

Before committing, it’s worth visiting a space, attending an event, or trying a short-term pass (for a couple of days or a week) to see whether it feels like a good fit.

It’s more than a desk

It’s easy to treat co-working spaces as simply a place to work. But research suggests much of its value lies in the connections, community and everyday interactions it makes possible.

Casual conversations in the kitchen or spontaneous exchanges over lunch can help build communication skills, expand professional networks and spark new collaborations. Evidence suggests that these benefits tend to be particularly strong for those who are newer to a city, earlier in their careers, or working independently. They may have less established local networks or fewer everyday opportunities for office-based interaction, making them more likely to seek out social connections within co-working spaces.

If you only show up, put your headphones while you work and then leave, you may miss out on some of the main advantages of co-working – the opportunity to connect with others and become part of a community. Making the most of these spaces often means being willing to take that first step, engage with others and gradually find your own circle.

Take advantage

If your work involves specialised tools, digital technology or continuous skill development, you may need more than just Wi-Fi and coffee from a co-working space.

Many now offer access to specialist software and cutting-edge equipment such as 3D printers or virtual reality devices, which can be costly or difficult to access by yourself.

Some go a step further and organise workshops and training sessions, or even events that reflect the latest developments in a particular field. These resources can be particularly valuable for independent workers including freelancers and the self-employed, who may not have access to structured on-the-job training through an employer.

Using them can help you build practical, up-to-date technical and digital skills, especially as new technologies and AI continue to reshape the skills demanded in many industries. So don’t overlook what’s on offer, whether it’s a workshop, a new tool, or a piece of equipment. Making use of these opportunities can help you stay adaptable, keep learning and be better prepared for what comes next.

Overall then, co-working spaces can offer valuable opportunities to learn new skills, build networks and adapt to changing ways of working. But these benefits are not automatic and they are not the same for everyone.

Getting the most out of co-working often depends on how you use the space and whether it matches your needs. At its best, co-working is not just about renting a desk, but about finding an environment where you can connect, learn and grow.

By Zihan Wang

Zihan Wang is a research fellow in geography and innovation at the University of Sussex. Her research examines skills as a core regional capability shaping innovation, productivity, labour market dynamics, and structural transformation. Using large-scale quantitative data including online job postings, LinkedIn data, and questionnaires, she investigates how skills are developed, deployed, and transformed across places. With a sectoral focus on manufacturing and the creative industries, she aims to bridge theoretical analysis and policy development, particularly in informing place-based skills policy and industrial strategy.

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Tin Can launches program to help schools and neighborhoods go smartphone-free together

Published

6 minutes ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

Tin Can landline phones in a variety of colors. (Tin Can Photo)

Tin Can, the Seattle startup behind the screenless, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone for kids, is launching a new feature aimed at the groups that have been driving its rapid growth: schools, neighborhoods, and parent organizations looking to ditch smartphones together.

The company is calling it Tin Can Communities — a program that lets larger groups adopt the device all at once, with bulk pricing, onboarding support, and early access to features built specifically for group use.

Groups can order a minimum of 50 phones or more than 1,000 by reaching out to Tin Can directly with details about their organization.

“If you want to help kids build real connection, it works best when people come on together,” Tin Can CEO Chet Kittleson said. “The value multiplies quickly because kids have more people to call, and parents feel less pressure to move to a smartphone because their whole network is already on Tin Can.”

Tin Can co-founder and CEO Chet Kittleson. (Tin Can Photo)

Tin Can has been riding a wave of momentum since co-founders Kittleson, Graeme Davies and Max Blumen — all veterans of Seattle real estate startup Far Homes — launched the company in 2024. The colorful $100 phone connects to home Wi-Fi, letting kids make and receive calls from contacts approved by parents through a companion app. The company has raised $15.5 million to date, including a $12 million seed round last December.

The startup has grown to 30 employees and sold hundreds of thousands of phones since launching its flagship product in 2025 — now on its sixth production batch, shipping in June.

The momentum has extended beyond the parenting world: last month, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel gave the brand an unprompted shoutout during his monologue, suggesting someone get President Trump “one of those Tin Can phones like the kids have that are not on the internet.”

Wednesday’s launch comes as parents across the country have been organizing collective efforts to delay smartphone adoption — a movement built on the idea that individual decisions only go so far. Tin Can has found itself at the center of that shift, with PTAs, school administrators, and other groups asking how to get entire communities on board at once.

On San Juan Island in Washington, Alexandra and John Iarussi co-founded a nonprofit called the Mythic Farms Foundation with the sole purpose of putting a Tin Can in the hands of every kid in Friday Harbor. The first 300 families to sign up received a phone free of charge — and after one week the group had logged more than 1,500 calls and 75 hours of talk time, nearly double the typical first-week numbers for a new network, according to the company.

“Between ages 10 and 16, every child has approximately 8,760 hours that smartphones typically displace,” Alexandra Iarussi, mother of four boys, told the San Juan Journal. “Four hours a day, six years, one childhood.”

In Kansas City, a mom named Tracy Foster — director of the nonprofit Screen Sanity — partnered with local businesses to fundraise the purchase of nearly 200 Tin Cans for Nativity Parish School, then threw a party at a local skating rink to hand them out. Tin Can says kids from the school have called each other on 29 of the last 30 days, and the average child in the community now has nearly 30 Tin Can contacts.

Tin Can’s new initiative also comes as Seattle Public Schools this week enacted its first-ever districtwide cellphone policy, requiring K-8 students to keep phones off and stored away for the entire school day, and restricting high schoolers to phones only during lunch and passing periods.

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Ars Asks: Share your shell and show us your tricked-out terminals!

Published

32 minutes ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

The timer_stop function also has the job of converting the timer into a human-readable format, and it’s probably messier than it needs to be. I’m no developer, though, so this is what Past Lee settled on after a few hours of searching through examples.

Doing it in fish for folks like me

That’s for bash when I’m ssh’d into one of my Linux hosts, but I run fish on MacOS. I have a separate fish function for getting the same results there, complete with gross hacks for turning the measurement into human-readable form. I made this code, and I am unapologetic. Witness my cobbled-together StackOverflow-sourced kludge.

function fish_prompt --description 'Write out the prompt'
    # Save the last status
    set -l last_status $status

    # Calculate the command duration if available
    set -l cmd_duration ""
    if set -q CMD_DURATION
        # Convert milliseconds to microseconds for more precise comparison
        set -l duration_us (math "$CMD_DURATION * 1000")

        # Calculate different time units
        set -l us (math "$duration_us % 1000")
        set -l ms (math "floor($duration_us / 1000) % 1000")
        set -l s (math "floor($duration_us / 1000000) % 60")
        set -l m (math "floor($duration_us / 60000000) % 60")
        set -l h (math "floor($duration_us / 3600000000)")

        # Format duration string
        if test $h -gt 0
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $h "h" $m "m)")
        else if test $m -gt 0
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $m "m" $s "s)")
        else if test $s -ge 10
            set -l fraction (math "floor($ms / 100)")
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $s "." $fraction "s)")
        else if test $s -gt 0
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $s "." (printf "%03d" $ms) "s)")
        else if test $ms -ge 100
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $ms "ms)")
        else if test $ms -gt 0
            set -l fraction (math "floor($us / 100)")
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $ms "." $fraction "ms)")
        else
            set cmd_duration (string join '' "(" $us "us)")
        end
    end

    # Define unicode symbols for status
    set -l checkmark "✓"
    set -l cross "✗"

    # Colors
    set -l normal (set_color normal)
    set -l dark_gray (set_color 555555)
    set -l blue (set_color -o blue)
    set -l red (set_color red)
    set -l green (set_color green)
    set -l purple (set_color -o purple)

    # First line
    echo # New line
    echo -n -s $dark_gray "["(date +%T)"] $last_status " # Time in brackets and exit status

    # Status indicator with exit status
    if test $last_status -eq 0
        echo -n -s $green $checkmark
    else
        echo -n -s $red $cross
    end

    # Actually echo the duration
    echo -n -s $dark_gray " $cmd_duration"

    # Do the rest of the prompt
    echo
    set -l host_color $purple
    echo -n -s $host_color $USER "@" (prompt_hostname) $normal ":" $blue (prompt_pwd) $normal " \$ "
end

A splash of color

Spending my formative years immersed in ANSI BBS graphics has probably made me a little more fond of colorful text in my terminal than the average frumpy, button-downed admin. Look, I know some folks feel that syntax highlighting and colors in general kill comprehension and encourage skimming, but what can I say? I love them and rely on them. Perhaps I skim too much, but so be it. You can take my colorful shell tools from my cold, dead hands.

To that end, I lean on a little program called GRC (for Generic Colorizer) to add highlighting and coloration to other tools. It’s broadly available and works without any additional configuration.

There’s a bit of aliasing (which I keep in .bash_aliases like a good citizen) to make colorful output the defaults on some common commands:

    alias ls="ls --color=auto"
    alias ll="ls -AlFh --group-directories-first"
    alias df="grc df -h"
    alias du='grc du -h'
    alias free="grc free -h"
    alias ping='grc ping'
    alias traceroute="grc traceroute"
    alias ip='grc ip'

I’m also a big fan of making my numbers human-readable, and the -h switch is therefore applied liberally.

(Do note that wrapping commands like ip in GRC can sometimes do weird things if you’re piping its output into something else. Use caution. Or don’t! It’s your computer, knock yourself out!)

The terminal itself

Sharp-eyed readers will note from the screenshots that I’m using MacOS’s Terminal.app for my terminal program, despite there being far better options. I suppose the excuse I have is that I’m comfy with Terminal.app and nothing has pulled me off of it. I’ve test-driven the usual suspects—Ghostty, Alacritty, the mighty iTerm2 with its awesome tmux windowing integration, and even fancy new reinterpretations of the terminal experience like Warp.

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DAEMON Tools devs confirm breach, release malware-free version

Published

47 minutes ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

Daemon Tools

Disc Soft Limited, the maker of DAEMON Tools Lite, confirmed that the software had been trojanized in a supply chain attack and released a new, malware-free version.

In a statement published earlier today, Disc Soft says it has secured its infrastructure. Still, it has yet to attribute the attack to a specific threat actor or share additional information about the breach, including the attack vector used to access its systems, as it continues to investigate the incident.

“Following an internal investigation, we identified unauthorized interference within our infrastructure. As a result, certain installation packages were impacted within our build environment and were released in a compromised state. Version 12.6 of DAEMON Tools Lite, which does not contain the suspected compromised files, was released on May 5.” the company said.

“Users of other DAEMON Tools products, including paid versions of DAEMON Tools Lite, DAEMON Tools Ultra, and DAEMON Tools Pro are not affected by this incident and can continue using their software as usual.”

Users who downloaded or installed DAEMON Tools Lite version 12.5.1 (free) since April 8 are advised to uninstall the app, run a full system scan using security or antivirus software, and install the latest version of DAEMON Tools Lite (12.6) from the official website.

Disc Soft has removed the trojanized version, which is no longer supported, and now displays a warning prompting users to install the latest version of DAEMON Tools Lite.

As cybersecurity company Kaspersky revealed on Tuesday, hackers trojanized DAEMON Tools Lite installers and used them to backdoor thousands of systems from more than 100 countries that downloaded the software from the official website since April 8.

After the unsuspecting users executed the digitally signed trojanized installers (versions ranging from 12.5.0.2421 to 12.5.0.2434), the malicious code embedded in the compromised binaries deployed a payload designed to establish persistence and activate a backdoor on system startup.

The first-stage malware dropped in the attack was a basic information stealer that collected system data (including hostname, MAC address, running processes, installed software, and system locale) and sent it to attacker-controlled servers for victim profiling. Based on the results, some of the infected systems received a second stage, a lightweight backdoor that can execute commands, download files, and run code directly in memory.

In at least one case, Kaspersky observed the deployment of a QUIC RAT malware, which can inject malicious code into legitimate processes and supports multiple communication protocols.

While investigating the attack, Kaspersky found that retail, scientific, government, and manufacturing organizations in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand, as well as home users in Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and China, were among the victims whose devices were infected with malicious payloads.

Today, in an update to the original report, the Russian cybersecurity company confirmed that DAEMON Tools Lite 12.6.0, released yesterday, no longer exhibits malicious behavior.

“Following disclosure, the vendor acknowledged the issue and published a new version of the software to address it,” Kaspersky said. “The updated DAEMON Tools version 12.6.0.2445 no longer shows the malicious behavior.”

BleepingComputer contacted Disc Soft several times regarding the incident, but we have not yet received a response.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

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Nvidia partners with Corning to build the fiber optic backbone for next-gen AI data centers

Published

1 hour ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

Nvidia said the deal will expand Corning’s US-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity tenfold and boost its domestic fiber production capacity by more than 50%. Collectively, the new facilities will create north of 3,000 high-paying jobs, we are told. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, nor was a timeline…
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Google Search updates hope to turn AI answers into a starting point for you, not a dead end

Published

2 hours ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

Google’s AI-powered Search features have fundamentally changed how we look stuff up. Instead of scrolling through the search results, most of us now just read the AI Overview and move on. Google wants to change that. The company is rolling out five updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews designed to surface more links and give users more reasons to click through to the websites behind them.

Further Exploration and inline links

The most notable addition is Further Exploration, a new section that appears at the end of AI Overviews with curated links to specific articles, case studies, or reports related to the query. For example, Google says if you search for how cities have added green space, you might see links to a stream restoration project in Seoul or a report on how architects designed New York’s High Line park. This should give users a reason to keep exploring instead of closing the tab after reading the overview.

Google is also placing more links directly within AI responses, next to the relevant text, rather than grouped at the bottom. The company explains that searching for a California bike trip, for instance, might surface a link to a Pacific Coast touring guide next to a bullet point about terrain, and a training blog post next to a bullet point about daily mileage. This will give users a more direct path from the AI answer to the source material behind it.

On desktop, hovering over any inline link will trigger a preview showing the website name and page title, which is aimed at giving users more confidence about visiting the website. Google’s internal testing found that users were more hesitant to follow links when they could not tell where they led, so the preview removes that friction before the click.

Subscriptions and community perspectives

AI Mode and AI Overviews will now label links from a user’s active news subscriptions so they stand out in results. Google says early testing showed users were significantly more likely to click those labeled links. For subscribers, it means the publications they already pay for will be easier to find inside AI search results rather than buried below them.

AI responses will also begin surfacing previews of perspectives from public forums, like Reddit, social media, and firsthand sources, with added context like a creator’s handle or community name.

A search about photographing the northern lights, for example, might surface tips from a specific photography forum, with a link to the full discussion thread. Thanks to this, users who want real-world advice rather than a synthesized summary will have a clearer path to the people who have actually been there.

The bigger picture

These updates also carry real stakes for publishers. AI Overviews have raised concerns across the media industry about declining referral traffic, and these features are Google’s most direct attempt yet to show that AI search and the open web can coexist. Whether they move the needle on click-through rates will be worth watching.

AI Overview accuracy, however, remains an open question. It has a history of confidently stating wrong information, and the featured image for this story is a reminder of that: it misidentifies today’s date as May 20, 2025. Getting users to click through to publishers may be a step in the right direction, but it’s hard to fully trust a guide that does not always know what day it is.

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iPod Nano Runs a Triple-Screen Desk Setup That Actually Delivers

Published

2 hours ago

6 May 2026

NewsAdmin

Apple iPod Nano Triple Screen Desk Workstation
Sixteen years after Apple discontinued production, a single 6th-generation iPod Nano currently stands in the center of a full workstation with three separate displays. The device, released in 2010 as the final iPod model Steve Jobs introduced, handles music playback, photo slideshows across every screen, and crystal-clear voice recordings all at once. A YouTube creator who runs the Will It Work? channel took on the challenge of stretching this tiny player into something far more capable.

He started by removing the built-in 30-pin connector and the touchscreen, which still works great after all these years. From there, it was simply a matter of converting this music player into a true multi-screen media center utilizing whatever parts were readily accessible. The entire operation is based on a 30-pin Apple keyboard dock that was originally designed for larger, more serious devices. He had to design a unique spacer to fit the iPod’s clip while yet leaving the audio jack accessible. The next stage was to connect composite video cables directly from the dock to three Sharp Aquos flat panels, which have been available since 2003. Those older monitors can be placed side by side without creating delay or without any additional software.

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Apple iPod Nano Triple Screen Desk Workstation
The audio is then split via a 3.5mm four-pole TRRS jack, with one path sending a signal to a desktop mic, which does a nice job of capturing voice memos that sound like they were recorded with a modern podcast setup. The other channel connects to a set of Apple Pro speakers that fill the room well. The powered stylus lets you glide across the iPod screen without leaving smudges. A double tap on the sleep button progresses to the next song. Tapping the arrow buttons moves you through the slideshow, while pressing pause stops both the music and the images dead in their tracks.

Apple iPod Nano Triple Screen Desk Workstation
Even the clock works properly thanks to a simple Lightning adapter that simply connects to the dock’s USB port and syncs with the iPod without interfering with the audio or video streams. The entire operation runs smoothly and completes its objectives. Try the Voice Memos app, and the external microphone does a decent job of picking up your speech and playing it back clearly.
[Source]