Other Apple Intelligence features get all the attention, but in iOS 26 one of my favorite tools does its thing quietly in the background. On iPhone models that are capable of running Apple’s AI tech, the Adaptive Power setting is at work behind the scenes to extend battery power, even on many older iPhones.

Currently, the iPhone uses as much power as it needs to perform its tasks. You can extend battery life by taking a few simple steps, such as reducing screen brightness and disabling the always-on display. Or, if your battery is running low, you can turn on Low Power Mode, which limits background activity, like fetching mail and downloading data, and dims the screen to help extend battery life. Low Power Mode also kicks in automatically when the battery level reaches 20%.

If Low Power Mode is the hammer that knocks down power consumption, Adaptive Power is the scalpel that intelligently trims energy savings here and there as needed. Based on Apple’s description that accompanies the control, the savings will be felt mostly in power-hungry situations such as recording videos, editing photos or even playing games.

Apple says Adaptive Power takes about a week to analyze your usage behavior before it begins actively working. And it works in the background without needing any management on your part. 

Here’s how Apple describes it in the iPhone user guide: “It uses on-device intelligence to predict when you’ll need extra battery power based on your recent usage patterns, then makes performance adjustments to help your battery last longer.”

Watch this: The iPhone 17 Pro Max Has Incredible Battery Life

12:10

Which iPhone models can use Adaptive Power?

The feature uses AI to monitor and choose when its power-saving measures should be activated, which means only phones compatible with Apple Intelligence get the feature. These are the models that have the option:

• iPhone 17
• iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max
• iPhone Air
• iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus
• iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
• iPhone 16e
• iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max

Although some iPad and Mac models support Apple Intelligence, the feature is only available on iPhones.

How to turn Adaptive Power on

Adaptive Power is on by default on the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air. For other models, you must opt in to use it. In iOS 26, you’ll find the Adaptive Power toggle in Settings > Battery > Power Mode. To be alerted when the feature is active, turn on the Adaptive Power Notifications option.

Advertisement

Enlarge Image

Adaptive Power sounds like an outgrowth of Gaming Mode, introduced in iOS 18, which routes all available processing and graphics power to the frontmost app and pauses other processes in order to deliver the best experience possible — at the notable expense of battery life.

Advertisement

What does this mean for your charging habits?

Although we all want as much battery life as possible all the time, judging by the description, it sounds as if Adaptive Power’s optimizations will not always be active, even if you leave the feature on. “When your battery usage is higher than usual” could include a limited number of situations. Still, considering that according to a CNET survey, 61% of people upgrade their phones because of battery life, a feature such as Adaptive Power could extend the longevity of their phones just by updating to iOS 26.

I also wonder whether slightly adjusting display brightness could be disruptive, but in my experience so far, it hasn’t been noticeable. Because the feature also selectively de-prioritizes processing tasks, the outward effects seem minimal. When it’s activated on my iPhone 16 Pro, the only indication was the Adaptive Power alert that appeared.

We’ll get a better idea about how well Adaptive Power works as more people adopt iOS 26 and start buying new iPhone models. Also, remember that shortly after installing a major software update, it’s common to experience worse battery life as the system optimizes data in the background; Apple went so far as to remind customers that it’s a temporary side effect.

Although often tossed together into a singular ‘retro game’ aesthetic, the first game consoles that focused on 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation featured very distinct visuals that make these different systems easy to distinguish. Yet whereas the N64 mostly suffered from a small texture buffer, the PS’s weak graphics hardware necessitated compromises that led to the highly defining jittery and wobbly PlayStation graphics.

These weaknesses of the PlayStation and their results are explored by [LorD of Nerds] in a recent video. Make sure to toggle on subtitles if you do not speak German.

It could be argued that the PlayStation didn’t have a 3D graphics chip at all, just a video chip that could blit primitives and sprites to the framebuffer. This forced PS developers to draw 3D graphics without such niceties like a Z-buffer, putting a lot of extra work on the CPU.

This problem extends also to texture mapping, by doing affine texture mapping, as it’s called on the PS. This mapping of textures is rather flawed and leads to the constant shifting of textures as the camera’s perspective is not taken into account. Although this texture mapping can be improved, the developers of the game have to add more polygons for this, which of course reduces performance. This is the main cause of the shifting and wobbling of textures.

Another issue on the PS was a lack of mipmapping support, which means a sequence of the same texture, each with each a different resolution. This allows for high-resolution textures to be used when the camera is close, and low-resolution textures when far away. On the PS this lack of mipmapping led to many texture pixels being rendered to the same point on the display, with camera movement leading to interesting flickering effects.

When it came to rendering to the output format, the Nintendo 64 created smooth gradients between the texture pixels (texels) to make them fit on the output resolution, whereas the PS used the much more primitive nearest neighbor interpolation that made especially edges of objects look like they both shimmered and changed shape and color.

The PS also lacked a dedicated floating point unit to handle graphics calculations, forcing a special Geometry Transformation Engine (GTE) in the CPU to handle transformation calculations, but all in integer calculations instead of with floating point values. This made e.g. fixed camera angles as in Resident Evil games very attractive for developers as movement would inevitably lead to visible artefacts.

Finally, the cartridge-based games of the N64 could load data from the mask ROMs about 100x faster than from the PS’s CDs, and with much lower latency. All of these differences would lead to entirely different games for both game consoles, with the N64 being clearly superior for 3D games, yet the PS being released long before the N64 for a competitive price along with the backing of Sony would make sure that it became a commercial success.

When it comes to the affordability crisis in child care, Lenice Emanuel says that it’s forcing families to take a hard look at their budgets — no matter their income level.

But as child care costs surpass the price of rent in some areas, those money choices are even more extreme for folks on the margins, explains Emanuel, executive director of the Alabama Institute for Social Justice.

“They’re gonna say, ‘We had to make a decision whether my husband stays home or I stay home because we both work, and we still can’t afford to pay the mortgage and child care,’” Emanuel says. “It’s just exacerbated for marginalized people, because they were already contending with deprivation, so these issues are just basically compounding what they were already dealing with. That’s why this is like a national crisis at this point.”

A recent analysis of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas found that the cost of child care for a family with two young children is more expensive than the average rent in each respective market.

Care for one child costs, on average, about 25 percent less than rent, according to the data from LendingTree. That changes with the addition of a second child, pushing child care costs up to more than double that of the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in markets like Omaha, Nebraska, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The numbers are much the same as they were last year, according to the analysis, with average rent prices increasing slightly. The national average price tag of care for one child has increased by about $3,700 since 2017, coming to about $13,100 per year in 2024.

Despite rising costs, child care workers are not feeling those increases reflected in their paychecks. It’s a sector that continues to struggle with thin margins, low wages, retaining workers and insufficient subsidies.

Managing Costs

Child care providers are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to deciding how to price their services, says Tyrone Scott, director of government and external affairs at First Up, an early childhood education advocacy group in Pennsylvania.

That’s because they’re trying to keep prices low enough for families to afford, which can be a struggle even with public-dollar subsidies, while paying their staff fairly. Scott says that the average wage for child care workers is $15 per hour in Pennsylvania, which is not enough to compete with big box retailers and convenience stores that offer a starting rate of $17 or more with no experience or degree required.

“The Wawa near me has a $5,000 signing bonus,” Scott says of the retail chain. “If you are a high school student who just graduated, you can get $5,000 and start at $21 an hour where I’m at. So you are doing much better than our teachers, which is really problematic, obviously.”

Inflation is another factor squeezing child care providers, Scott says, increasing the price of everything the food stocked in the kitchen to liability insurance — with some child care providers reporting that their insurance expenses have tripled. Those centers have to choose between eating the costs and taking in thinner margins or passing them along to parents by raising prices.

Jasmine Bowles, executive state director of 9to5 Georgia, says Georgia’s child care system has long been underfunded — despite politicians’ crowing about the state’s billions of dollars in budget surplus funds. Administrative delays in state reimbursements to child care providers also force them to go without, she says, to ensure the learners in their care have everything they need.

“When our care providers receive their class of students for the day, those babies still eat, even if [the providers] haven’t been paid from the state for a month or more,” she says. “This really manifests itself in housing, food, and health insecurity for the very caregivers that our communities depend on.”

Emanuel says that Alabama’s formula for calculating how much of child care costs the state will subsidize doesn’t accurately reflect the cost, which leaves providers to figure out how to make up the difference. Those costs are often passed on to parents, but Emanuel says providers also apply for grants or take second jobs to keep their centers running.

“Because of the way the market rate survey dictates the reimbursement rates, a parent could be paying $400, but it’s actually costing the provider $900 a month for child care,” she explains. “Many of these women do child care full time, and they actually have side hustles in order for them to be able to provide child care.”

Child care providers are not spared from rising costs for their own kids, Emanuel says. One provider in her state reports paying 80 percent of her own income for care for her own children.

The Attitude Factor

With the widespread challenges in child care affordability, experts say that one barrier to getting more state funding to address the problem is both the public’s and lawmakers’ perception of child care — including who should be doing the caring.

“I think there is some old school mentality in some legislators that still believes children should be at home with their mothers — specifically mothers. Not fathers even, but mothers,” Scott says. “That’s not the reality for a lot of families, whether you’re talking to a two-parent family or a single-parent family — most children need every available adult in the workforce to make ends meet. So there’s this myth that people don’t want to care for their own kids, or whatever, for lack of a better term, sexist trope that people put on.”

Scott and Emanuel both say that there are large swaths of the public who don’t see the benefit of their states subsidizing child care, be it support for working parents or the advantages of giving kids a strong start in their education.

“I think that a lot of times in this state, people see child care as, ‘You had the child, it’s your responsibility to pay for child care,’” Emanuel says. “But if the pandemic didn’t teach us anything else, it taught us that it is critical infrastructure because, without child care, people are not able to go to work.”

Scott says one alliance that has helped get their message across is help from Pennsylvania chambers of commerce, who can describe how the lack of affordable child care options interferes with employees’ ability to stick to their work schedules.

Emanuel says there’s another aspect of the debate over child care funding that can’t be ignored: who is doing the work.

Many Alabama child care centers are run and staffed by Black women, she says, whose labor has a long history of being undervalued. For child care providers, Emanuel says that means they are seen as babysitters rather than educators.

“A lot of the morale of these women is often times just diminished because everything about the system in child care, it’s saying to them repetitively that, ‘We don’t value you,’ and ‘You aren’t important,’” Emanuel says, “because when you do value a thing, then you’re going to tie the resources and the infrastructure in place to ensure a specific end.”

Bowles echoed Emanuel’s sentiments in Georgia, saying that the state’s historical reliance on unpaid labor is a factor in the undervaluing of child care work. There’s a disconnect between, she says, the desire of lawmakers to make the state appealing to businesses and policies that make life easier for workers — like affordable child care, health care and food.

Beyond her role as an advocate, Bowles also has the perspective of someone who sits on the board of directors for her local school district in Georgia. After the start of the coronavirus pandemic, she had a front row seat to how schools grappled with students losing ground in their academic and social skills when in-person classes restarted.

“When we get our young people in the class, we start to see the impact of those learning gaps, and I think that was most keen in our earliest learners,” Bowles says. “My district in particular has started to rethink a traditional public school district’s responsibility for [early childhood education]. We’re also starting to incorporate more pre-K classrooms, because it really is becoming the responsibility of all of us, not just day care centers, to close these gaps.”

Interplay occupies a unique place in the Bill Evans catalog. According to the liner notes, it marked the first time the legendary pianist led a quintet—and his first studio date fronting a group that included a horn player. Craft Recordings’ recent Original Jazz Classics (OJC) reissue may be the best way to revisit this spirited, upbeat session on vinyl, continuing the OJC tradition of excellent sound quality and consistently high production values.

From the official press materials:

“Continuing OJC’s commitment to quality, these reissues feature lacquers cut directly from the original stereo master tapes (AAA) by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI, and tip-on jackets faithfully reproducing the original artwork.

Originally launched in 1982 under Fantasy Records, Original Jazz Classics was revived in 2023 with a renewed emphasis on audiophile-grade reissues of landmark jazz recordings. With more than 850 titles reissued to date—drawing from the catalogs of Prestige, Riverside, Galaxy, Contemporary, Jazzland, Milestone, and others—OJC remains a reliable source for both jazz discovery and rediscovery.”

The new Craft Original Jazz Classics editions feature period-accurate labels, faithfully reproduced original cover art, and high-quality sleeve construction. Each LP is housed in an audiophile-grade, plastic-lined inner sleeve, underscoring Craft’s attention to both presentation and long-term record care.

The pressing reviewed here is dead quiet and perfectly centered—a detail that matters enormously on piano-driven recordings like this, where even slight off-center pressing can cause the pitch to waver. Here, the vinyl disappears in the best possible way, letting you simply bask in the effortless musicality of these legendary musicians.

As hinted at the start of this review, Interplay brings a noticeably different vibe compared to many other Bill Evans recordings. The band sounds more aggressive and, at times, downright on fire, with Freddie Hubbard’s sizzling trumpet clearly pushing the session’s energy higher. That spark seems to coax guitarist Jim Hall into some surprisingly hot territory. While Hall has never been one of my go-to guitarists, hearing this level of urgency and edge from his playing is a genuine revelation.

Yet it’s not all push-push bravado. This is still a Bill Evans record, and the playing remains unfailingly tasteful. The calmer moments shine just as brightly, highlighted by a positively gorgeous reading of the classic “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

I really like how Percy Heath’s vibrant walking bass lines provide steady propulsion from track to track. Even with the fairly discrete stereo spread that places him slightly to one side, his presence anchors the band. Freddie Hubbard and Jim Hall emerge from the opposite side of the soundstage, while the drums have a pleasing sense of space with crisp cymbals and natural sounding snare “bombs” delivered by the legendary Philly Joe Jones.

All in all, I am very pleased with the music here and expect to spend a lot more time with it now that it is in my collection. The tunes are wonderful, the performances exemplary, and the recording as presented on this Craft Recordings Interplay Original Jazz Classics edition is rich and round.

Where to buy: $39.99 at Amazon

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc.  You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

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

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s Saturday, so it’s a long one, and a few of the clues are tricky. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Lock lips
Answer: KISS

5A clue: Italian author of “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”
Answer: DANTE

6A clue: Cerebral ___ (part of the brain)
Answer: CORTEX

7A clue: Leave home with a stuffed pillowcase as luggage, perhaps
Answer: RUNAWAY

8A clue: No more for me, thanks”
Answer: IMGOOD

9A clue: Fancy fabrics
Answer: SILKS

10A clue: Leg joint
Answer: KNEE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Bars sung in a bar
Answer: KARAOKE

2D clue: How the animals boarded Noah’s Ark
Answer: INTWOS

3D clue: Stand in good ___
Answer: STEAD

4D clue: Smokin’ hot
Answer: SEXY

5D clue: Computer attachment
Answer: DONGLE

6D clue: Yotam Ottolenghi called it “the one spice I could never give up”
Answer: CUMIN

7D clue: Hazard
Answer: RISK

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is warning of suspected state-sponsored threat actors targeting high-ranking individuals in phishing attacks via messaging apps like Signal.

The attacks combine social engineering with legitimate features to steal data from politicians, military officers, diplomats, and investigative journalists in Germany and across Europe.

The security advisory is based on intelligence collected by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

“A defining characteristic of this attack campaign is that no malware is used, nor are technical vulnerabilities in the messaging services exploited,” the two agencies inform.

According to the advisory, the attackers contact the target directly, pretending to be from the support team of the messaging service or the support chatbot.

“The goal is to covertly gain access to one-to-one and group chats as well as contact lists of the affected individuals,”

There are two versions of these attacks: one that performs a full account takeover, and one that pairs the account with the attacker’s device to monitor chat activity.

In the first variant, the attackers impersonate Signal’s support service and send a fake security warning to create a sense of urgency.

The target is then tricked into sharing their Signal PIN or an SMS verification code, which allows the attackers to register the account to a device they control. Then they hijack the account and lock out the victim.

In the second case, the attacker uses a plausible ruse to convince the target to scan a QR code. This abuses Signal’s legitimate linked-device feature that allows adding the account to multiple devices (computer, tablet, phone).

The result is that the victim account is paired with a device controlled by the bad actor, who gets access chats and contacts without raising any flags.

Although Signal lists all devices attached to the account under Settings > Linked devices, users rarely check it.

Such attacks were observed to occur on Signal, but the bulletin warns that WhatsApp also supports similar functionality and could be abused in the same way.

Last year, Google threat researchers reported that the QR code pairing technique was employed by Russian state-aligned threat groups such as Sandworm.

Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) also attributed similar attacks to Russian hackers, targeting WhatsApp accounts.

However, multiple threat actors, including cybercriminals, have since adopted the technique in campaigns like GhostPairing to hijack accounts for scams and fraud.

The German authorities suggest that users avoid replying to Signal messages from alleged support accounts, as the messaging platform never contacts users directly.

Instead, recipients of these messages are recommended to block and report these accounts.

As an extra security step, Signal users can enable the ‘Registration Lock’ option under Settings > Account. Once active, Signal will ask for a PIN you set whenever someone tries to register your phone number with the application.

Without the PIN code, the Signal account registration on another device fails. Since the code is essential for registration, losing it can result in losing access to the account.

It is also strongly recommended that users regularly review the list of devices with access to your Signal account under Settings → Linked devices, and remove unrecognized devices.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

from the playing-make-believe dept

It’s been several years since we last did this, but I’d like to remind you all that the National Football League plays a lot of make believe when it comes to what its trademarks for the “Super Bowl” do and do not allow it to do in terms of enforcement. Thanks largely to media outlets that repeat the false narrative the NFL puts out there, far too many people think that businesses, or even members of the public, simply cannot use the phrase “Super Bowl” in any capacity whatsoever if there is any commercial component to it.

TV companies advertising their goods and telling you to “be prepared for the Super Bowl”? Can’t do it. A church holding a party for the game with invitations to the Super Bowl and a 5$ cover charge? Verboten. And this way of thinking is perpetuated by posts like this one from TVLine.

The term “Super Bowl” is an NFL trademark, and licensing that trademark is very, very expensive. After all, the NFL makes a lot of money from “Super Bowl” commercials – 30-second slots for this year’s game have cost upward of $10 million.

Of course, there are ways around not being able to mention the Super Bowl in commercials. Brands that aren’t willing or able to license the name will refer to it as “the big game” or something along those lines instead. What’s more, the brands that pay to license the name still have to work within strict parameters. According to L.A. Tech & Media Law, parties that purchase Super Bowl ad spots can only mention the name of the event for a limited period of time.

In the past, the league has sent cease-and-desists to bars and even churches that host Super Bowl parties and charge an admission fee. In short, if an entity of any kind uses the term for commercial gain, they can expect a letter from the NFL’s lawyers.

Advertisement

Yes, they can, but that shouldn’t be the entirety of the post. The NFL can send whatever letters they like. What matters is whether they are asserting rights they actually have or not. Otherwise, posts like this leave the public with an, at best, incomplete idea of what rights the NFL has and what rights it doesn’t.

The NFL certainly has a trademark on “Super Bowl.” That does not automagically mean it can fully control all uses of that mark, even where there is money involved. Fair use defenses still apply, of course, as does the general standard that the use had to either confuse the public as to the source of the product or service, or falsely imply an association between the company and the NFL. Not all uses, even commercial, will do that.

Stop giving the NFL power it doesn’t actually have. A restaurant putting out a sidewalk sign that says it will have the Super Bowl on its TVs is not trademark infringement by any sane reading of the law. An advertisement merely acknowledging the existence of the Super Bowl does not in and of itself make it infringing.

Yes, the NFL pulls overly protectionist crap with this trademark all the time. Yes, it would take coordinated pushback from more than one corporate entity with deep pockets to fight it. But it’s a fight worth fighting and, at the very least, none of us have to pretend that the NFL has rights it doesn’t have.

Filed Under: super bowl, trademark

Companies: nfl

Before the Internet, there was a certain value to knowing how to find out about things. Reference librarians could help you locate specialized data like the Thomas Register, the EE and IC Masters for electronics, or even an encyclopedia or CRC handbook. But if you wanted up-to-date info on any country of the world, you’d often turn to the CIA. The originally classified document was what the CIA knew about every country in the world. Well, at least what they’d admit to knowing, anyway. But now, the Factbook is gone.

The publication started in 1962 as the classified “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook,” it went public in 1971 and became “The World Factbook” in the 1980s. While it is gone, you can rewind it, including a snapshot taken just before it went dark on Archive.org.

Browsing the archives, it looks like the last update was in September of 2025. It would be interesting to see a project like Wikipedia take the dataset, house it, and update it, although you can presume the CIA was better equipped. The data is public domain, after all.

Want to know things about Croatia? Unfortunately, the archive seems to have missed some parts of some pages. However, there are other mirrors, including some that have snapshots of the data in one form or another. Of course, these are not always the absolute latest (the link has data from 2023). But we would guess the main languages (Croatian and Serbian) haven’t changed. You can also find the internet country suffix (.hr) and rankings (for example, in 2020, Croatia ranked 29th in the world for the number of broadband internet subscribers scaled for population and 75th in total broadband usage.

We are sorry to see such a useful reference go, but reference books are definitely an endangered species these days.