Sony refines its wearable cooler for stronger everyday comfort. Summer heatwaves push people to seek relief that travels with them, and Sony answers with the latest version of its REON POCKET series. Wearers place the REON POCKET PRO Plus around their neck so a stainless steel plate rests gently against the skin between the shoulders. Electricity passes through special materials inside to cool or heat that plate directly. Blood flow then carries the temperature shift across the body, delivering noticeable comfort without touching core body heat.

Users turn it on for congested commutes, stuffy offices, or chilly evenings when they just want to get through the day without bother. Sony focused on improving the fit so that it stays in contact on a consistent basis. They strengthened the tubing in the neckband to keep the device stable even when you’re walking or just pottering around, preventing those minor motions that can degrade performance. An adjustable vent now extends and points upwards, allowing heated air to escape and clear your collar or shirt.

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The technology has also advanced significantly, with the cooling plate now two degrees Celsius colder, allowing it to get the job done in a deeper way and increasing overall production by around 20%. The item has a sensor that monitors your skin’s temperature in real time. To top it off, a little independent unit clamps onto your bag or belt loop and reads the air and humidity in the room, sending the results back to the system.

Of course, the companion app now provides you with numerous additional possibilities to play with on your phone. In smart mode, you can specify a preferred temperature range, and the device will take care of the rest, keeping you at the proper temperature without your intervention. If you want to make a quick modification, you may utilize the physical buttons on the unit itself, eliminating the need to dig out your phone. There is no fan inside, so it remains silent enough to be used in offices, on trains, or in meetings.

The battery life is more than enough for a full day, as the lowest cooling setting can operate for up to 34 hours, while higher intensities will last slightly less, 27, 18, 10, or 5.5 hours at maximum, with smart cooling mode lasting 15 hours on average. A full charge will take a little more than three hours from zero. The total set weighs little over 9 ounces and is small enough to wear under everyday clothing, however it does show up a little under thin shirts, so keep that in mind.

Sony was the first to introduce wearable thermal devices to the Japanese market years ago, and they’ve been constantly enhancing the range with each subsequent release. This PRO Plus version improves stability and power while keeping the fundamental principle at its core. You’ll probably be able to acquire one in the United States this summer, as it will be available through Sony’s online store. Prices hover about $270, and the sensing tag is included in the kit.
[Source]

If you don’t know where to start—and use—your HP coupon code, there’s a wide variety of options available at HP.com in terms of budget and use case, but my eye goes first to the high-end HP Omen gaming monitors, like the fantastic HP Omen Transcend 32. This 4K 240Hz monitor is a favorite among PC gamers, even among the huge amounts of OLED options out there. It can hit a peak brightness of over 1,000 nits in HDR, bringing scenes in games to life in vivid detail.

Or if you’re on the other side of the budget spectrum and just need something basic, we recommend checking out one of HP’s 27-inch 1080p monitors, such as the HP V27i G5, which typically retails for $209. It even comes with a 75Hz refresh rate, a small but appreciated bump over the standard 60Hz. We have HP coupon codes to help you save on all this tech and even more below.

$20 Off Your First Order With Our HP Promo Code

HP offers a $20 discount right off the top of your order if it’s your first time buying from HP.com. While you can’t use it in addition to the other coupons, it might be a better discount if you’re purchasing something less expensive. To get this HP promo code, your order has to be $65 or more though (before taxes and shipping), and it requires signing up for the HP newsletter.

This HP promo code is valid for a month after subscribing to the newsletter and is restricted to one per customer. If you aren’t planning to spend too much and it’s your first time buying from HP.com, this could be the way to go.

Top HP Coupons: Laptops for Work, School, and Everyday Use

One of the best laptops for work is the HP ProBook 4 G1, which is now only $501, a whopping 78% discount. We love the HP ZBook Fury 16 G11 Mobile Workstation PC for school, now $1,509 at 63% off, and a great laptop for everyday use is the HP Laptop 17t-cn300, now only $300 (66% off).

HP Instant Ink: Get 50% Off With This HP Deal

Printers are super handy, but one of the most annoying and expensive investments you make for it is the upkeep of ink and toner. Well, the good news is that you can save up to 50% on ink right now! With HP Instant Ink, you can save time and money with this subscription service that automatically delivers ink only when you’re running low, with plans starting at less than $2 a month.

Join the HP All-In Plan Printing Subscription to Save

We all know printing is somehow one of the hardest at-home tasks we still have to do, with printers oftentimes not keeping up with the leaps and bounds contemporary technology has made. HP is hoping to change all of that. The HP All-In Plan is a convenient, stress-free printing subscription that fulfills your printing needs with just a monthly payment. The subscription includes a brand-new printer, automatic ink delivery, an option to add automatic paper delivery, and with live support. Plus, if your printer breaks or has an issue that support can’t fix, HP will send you a replacement the next business day for free. You can try the service for 30 days for free.

Save More: HP Smart Ink

At-home printers are such a huge headache. When all other home office tech seems to be living in 2087, clunky, difficult printers seem to be stuck in 1987, with constant jams, errors, and finicky ink. The HP Smart Tank printers are refillable, cartridge-free ink tank printers that deliver reliable, low-cost, high-volume printing that lasts for years. With these HP Smart Ink printers, you’ll no longer have to worry about refilling cartridges or constant low ink notifications. Welcome to the future.

Save 40% on Tech With the HP Student Discount

If you’re a student—or a parent to a student, teacher, school faculty, or university staff member—you’re in luck. HP is offering a serious 40% off discount on all kinds of tech, including laptops, desktop PCs, printers, and accessories. All stuff you’ll need for school, of course.

HP rebranded its laptops in 2024, introducing the OmniBooks into the world, including the premium HP OmniBook Ultra Flip. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips and a killer OLED display, the OmniBook Ultra Flip would be a great laptop for college thanks to its long-lasting battery life, especially with a 40% discount for students or teachers.

It’s not just laptops though. The HP Education Program discount applies to desktop PCs, printers, and tons more qualifying products.

HP Military Discount: Get 40% Off the Latest Tech

HP offers more than just a standard military discount. The company’s exclusive military discount is extended to support active service members, veterans, and their families, but also healthcare workers and First Responders.

If you belong to any of those groups, the HP military discount will drop the retail prices significantly, whether you’re searching for a new laptop, PC, mouse, and many more select products at HP.com.

More HP Discounts on Gaming PCs and Free Games

HP’s high-performance gaming laptops and PCs are also included in this coupon code. HP has two brands of gaming laptops to choose from: the more affordable Victus and the higher-end Omen (both of which have been reviewed by me here). Finding a gaming laptop under $1,000 can be tricky, especially since you’ll want something that doesn’t use a 5-year old GPU and only 8 GB of memory. That’s why I’d avoid the cheapest Victus laptop here, and bump up to at least the Victus 16t-r100. That gets you an RTX 4050 and 16 GB of RAM, despite costing only $150 more.

Meanwhile, the higher-end Omen models get you access to the new RTX 50-series graphics cards, and the new multi-frame generation feature that’s got everyone talking. They also come with a 16-inch 1920 x 1200 screen with a 240Hz refresh rate, such as the Omen Max gaming laptop.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

A new experiment from cybersecurity company Surfshark suggests that even people who consider themselves savvy online users are struggling to tell AI bots apart from real humans on social media.

Of the 710 participants who took part in the study carried out with master’s students from Malmö University, only 53% correctly identified more bots than they misidentified humans. This means that nearly half (47%) failed the task altogether.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

The NYT puzzle editors don’t always acknowledge the calendar or holidays, but today’s NYT Strands puzzle does just that. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Thank you.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: We remember.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• MERE, RIOT, PROM, TROT, RACE, RICE, LOAD, TOAD, VICE, TOTE, MEME

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• HONOR, VIRTUE, SERVICE, SACRIFICE, PROTECTION

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is MEMORIALDAY. To find it, start with the M that’s the first letter on the top row, and wind across and then down.

If your first-generation Chromecast was acting a little wonky this week, don’t worry. Contrary to fears online, the 2014 device hasn’t been excommunicated by Google. In a statement to Ars Technica, a rep for the search giant explained that the issue, which was keeping the devices from being able to stream video from services like Netflix, was temporary and should now be resolved. That said, the OG Chromecast hasn’t officially been supported since 2023, so it’s not clear how much longer they will remain operational. Google be Google, after all.

After resisting for years, this week, Mozilla finally relented and brought Web Serial to Firefox. While there’s been some debate about the wisdom of letting the Internet directly talk to hardware gadgets, anyone who’s flashed Meshtastic or configured their Betaflight-powered drone from the browser can attest to how convenient it is. In the announcement, Mozilla acknowledges that “most folks won’t use this API”, but points out that the “community of builders and tinkerers” (that’s us!) is sure to be excited about the news. They’ve even teamed up with Adafruit to ensure their web-based microcontroller workflows are compatible in Firefox 151 and beyond. If you give it a shot, let us know how it goes.

Speaking of hardware support, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) recently picked up a couple of big-name sponsors. As reported by It’s FOSS, this week, Lenovo, Dell, and HP have signed on as Premier-level sponsors to the tune of $100,000 per year. For those unfamiliar, LVFS offers a central repository where hardware vendors can upload firmware updates. On the client side, fwupd can be used to pull these updates down automatically without having to hunt around on each vendor’s website. The experienced players don’t need a service like LVFS, but it’s certainly one of those quality-of-life improvements that make the desktop experience a bit more accessible.

While on the subject of getting hardware working, we hear that more PlayStation 5 consoles can now run Linux. Last month, a software solution for booting the operating system on PS5 consoles running the relatively ancient 3.x and 4.x firmware was released, but now developer Andy Nguyen has gotten it working on firmware 5.x and at least some versions of 6.x. That’s still considerably behind Sony’s latest release, but it does open things up for more consoles to get in on the action.

In space news, the successful first flight of Starship V3 has understandably dominated the headlines for the last few days, but SpaceX wasn’t the only commercial launch provider with good news this week. On Friday, Blue Origin announced they had completed the investigation into the failure of its New Glenn rocket back on April 19th and that the Federal Aviation Administration has approved its return to flight.

According to a statement from the FAA, Blue Origin “identified the direct cause of the mishap as a cryogenic leak that froze a hydraulic line and led to a thrust anomaly during the second stage engine burn.” This resulted in the payload, a next-generation communications satellite featuring a massive 2,400 sq ft deployable antenna array developed by AST SpaceMobile, being placed in an unsustainable orbit.

If you’ve always dreamed of piloting your own walking battle tank, you might finally be in luck. China’s Unitree Robotics has unveiled a mech standing 2.7 meters tall, complete with a promotional video showing it smashing cinder blocks. Because what else would you do with a robot you just paid more than half a million dollars for? Unfortunately, there isn’t much information about the bot’s speed or endurance, and a company spokesperson says the design still needs some refinement before it is ready for production. But still, we’re getting there. Might as well start saving up now.

Finally, we were thrilled to hear that the iconic soundtrack for DOOM has been inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. There’s perhaps no piece of software more emblematic of the hardware hacking world than the 1993 shooter, and while we don’t think that had anything to do with the decision to formally recognize the game’s heavy metal-inspired digital riffs, it will be all that much sweeter the next time we see some oddball gadget running through E1M1.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle is a bit of a challenge. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Read more: New Study Reveals Wordle’s Top 10 Toughest Words of 2025

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has one repeated letter.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has one vowel, but it’s the repeated letter, so you’ll see it twice.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with V.

Wordle hint No. 4: Last letter

Today’s Wordle answer ends with T.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to the act of going to a person or place for a short time to socialize.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is VISIT.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, May 24, No. 1800, was NIECE.

Recent Wordle answers

May 20, No. 1796: WRECK

May 21, No. 1797: AGREE

May 22, No. 1798: VOCAL

May 23, No. 1799: CHUCK

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But it’s still the underpinning of much of the business world’s electronic communication and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. The BBC Archive takes us back to a time when email was relatively new, when in 1986 [Lesley Judd] takes a very chunky 1980s laptop on a plane from London to the Netherlands, and sends an email to her colleague at home using a payphone and an acoustic coupler.

There are so many of-their-era quirks in this film it’s difficult to pick, but little things like the aircraft still having smoking and non-smoking areas, there being no sign of a mobile telephone, or the payphone operating in Guilders rather than Euros make it from a different time. Perhaps most interesting though is the email system in use, because this isn’t an internet based service. Instead it’s using Telecom Gold, which was the UK telco BT’s online service offering to businesses, and part of the international Dialcom network. This was a commercial service which  hung on until some time in the 1990s when the Internet finally displaced it.

The British writer L. P. Hartley used the phrase “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” as the opening sentence of one of his books, and the film below the break certainly brings that to mind. It’s a time that’s within reach, yet the changes in information technology over even the next decade or so would make the tech depicted not just obsolete but almost unrecognizable. Most of us today could sit at a 1996 laptop and send an email, but few of us would be as immediately at home with Telecom Gold.

It’s still possible to use an acoustic coupler today though.