Spring has sprung, which means allergy season has begun. According to the Allergy and Asthma Network, May is the worst month for allergy sufferers in most regions of the US due to elevated pollen counts.

“Allergies to airborne allergens such as pollen can cause symptoms including sneezing, a runny nose, nasal congestion, an itchiness in the nose and throat and red, watery eyes,” explains Dr. Stephanie Kayode, a consultant allergist at Allergy Care London, describing signs of hay fever or allergic rhinitis. “These symptoms occur because pollen allergens provoke inflammation and swelling within the nose, eyes and throat when inhaled.”

When pollen enters our homes, it can cause allergy symptoms even when you’re inside and away from the plants that release pollen, such as trees and grasses. I reached out to allergists to learn how we can allergy-proof our homes and ward off allergies before pollen levels peak.

1. Bring out your air purifier

If your air purifier has been sitting in the back of your closet collecting dust (yikes, another allergen), now is the perfect time to wipe it down and bring it out. 

“Indoor air purifiers, particularly those with high-efficiency particulate air filters, are effective at removing pollens and air pollutants from the air we breathe in our homes, thus improving allergy symptoms,” says Kayode. Air purifiers with higher airflow rates tend to be more effective for this purpose because they filter more air. 

HEPA filters are designed to capture airborne particles, such as pollen, dust, mold and even bacteria and some viruses, as we discovered when the CNET Labs team tested 12 air purifier models to find the best model for preventing illness. 

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Capturing air pollutants other than pollen can help reduce allergies, as Kayode explains, because these pollutants can damage our airways and even alter pollen to make it more allergenic. This means that similar or lower pollen levels can cause more severe allergic reactions.

“Using a filter that’s an appropriate size for your space is important, and some people place them by entryways for maximum effectiveness,” adds Meagan W. Shepherd, founder of The Allergy Aesthetic and owner of Shepherd Allergy.

Placing an air purifier in a high-traffic area, such as a bedroom or living room, can be especially beneficial. However, you’ll want to ensure you replace your filters when needed, as dirty or clogged filters can actually become sources of pollutants and allergens. 

2. Schedule an HVAC tune-up

HEPA filters aren’t just recommended for air purifiers. Your HVAC systems should use them, too, and they should be changed every three months or as needed. You can check your manufacturer’s instructions for this info.

“Make sure to schedule a tune-up before spring starts, and clear debris from around the outer unit,” Shepherd states. “Make sure the condensate drain lines [which remove excess moisture] aren’t clogged.” 

If applicable, set indoor humidity to 40%-50%. You can also do this if you have a humidifier. 

3. Monitor pollen forecasts

You can keep track of pollen forecasts with apps including Allergy Plus, My Pollen Forecast and Zyrtec AllergyCast. Kayode recommends doing this and limiting outdoor activities when the pollen count is high. This typically happens in the summer and early morning, when warm air makes pollen rise. 

On cooler, rainy days, pollen counts are usually lower because rain washes pollen out of the air. 

4. Prevent the outside from getting inside

While it’s impossible to avoid pollen completely, there are certain steps you can take to lessen your indoor exposure. For one, Shepherd advises keeping windows and doors closed. If you keep track of the pollen forecast, ensure you do so on high-pollen days. 

“Change clothes after coming indoors, and keep your hair tied back or wear a hat when outdoors,” Shepherd says. Kayode adds that you can also wear sunglasses to reduce pollen exposure to your eyes. 

If you hang laundry outside to dry, you should shake it out before bringing it inside. 

Depending on how bad your allergies are, you may even want to arrange for someone else to mow your lawn or opt for a robot lawn mower to avoid pollen exposure.

Even when you get into your car, you can exercise precautions. “When getting into a hot car, turn on the recirculation system with the AC so cabin air is reused without drawing more pollen into the car,” says Shepherd. You can also keep your car’s windows closed to ward off pollen, Kayode adds.

5. Be extra cautious after thunderstorms

While rain washes pollen out of the air, a particularly powerful thunderstorm combined with a high temperature can have unwanted aftereffects, worsening hay fever. 

“Thunderstorms can stir up pollen from the ground and cause bursts of pollen fragments in the air, which are highly allergenic,” explains Kayode. “During hot days, pollen builds up and is released into the air during storms, increasing the risk of severe hay fever and asthma symptoms.”

6. Keep your medicine cabinet stocked

If you notice allergy symptoms or want to prevent them, you can use a saline nasal rinse to clear inhaled pollen from your nasal passages. My doctor recommended I use the Arm and Hammer Simply Saline Nasal Care Daily Mist for this reason. 

If that’s not enough and your symptoms are interfering with your daily life, Kayode advises you to consult your doctor to discuss starting allergy medications, such as antihistamine tablets and steroid nasal sprays. Your doctor may suggest taking a daytime antihistamine proactively, especially on days with a projected high pollen count. 

The bottom line

While you can’t completely avoid pollen, there are steps you can take to limit your exposure and minimize allergies when inside your home. Using a HEPA filter in both your air purifier and HVAC system can help — just make sure to change the filter and perform timely maintenance. 

If nothing helps and your allergies are running (and ruining) your life, it’s time to schedule an appointment with your doctor.

Apple has run into “more issues than expected” with its foldable iPhone, which may delay its release, according to the Japanese business newspaper Nikkei. Multiple sources report issues that apparently occurred during early test production phases and may delay first shipments by months.

Component suppliers have supposedly been notified that the foldable iPhone’s production schedule will be delayedand Apple is working to address the problems. Apple was reportedly prioritizing the foldable iPhone and other premium models for its September event this year, due to constrained supplies — that whole thing. One fewer iPhone model might reduce the company’s demand for pricey components.

We’re still waiting: A foldable iPhone has been rumored since 201andd rival Samsung released its first one back in 2019. The Galaxy phone maker has faced its own struggles: The very cool Galaxy Z TriFold was , seemingly being sold at a loss after its launch late last year.

— Mat Smith

The other big stories (and deals) this morning

The federal government wants sole authority over prediction markets.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is suing Illinois, Arizona and Connecticut for attempting to outlaw or regulate prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. These markets allow people to bet on the outcomes of events (for example, who will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028). There’s been some particularly on recent global military campaigns.

The CFTC believes it has sole jurisdiction to regulate these platforms and that states attempting to classify them as illegal gambling are overstepping their authority. “The CFTC will continue to safeguard its exclusive regulatory authority over these markets and defend market participants against overzealous state regulators,” CFTC chair Michael S. Selig said in a statement.

Continue reading.

Mel Brooks, Rick Moranis and other original cast members are back.

Amazon MGM Studios announced the upcoming Spaceballs movie will hit theaters on April 23, 2027, right around the 40th anniversary of the first film. The movie is being directed by Josh Greenbaum and written by Josh Gad, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, according to Deadline.

Continue reading.

We don’t need telescopes.

On their way around the Moon, the Artemis II crew managed to grab a few photos.NASA has begun sharing the images, including the one above: Earth through the Orion capsule’s window. It kinda looks like the old iPhone wallpaper. Sorry, I just ruined it.

Continue reading.

from the this-is-a-very-bad-idea dept

Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.

So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.

Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.

That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.

The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”

You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.

As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:

“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”

Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.

And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.

Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.

So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.

This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.

They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.

The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.

Filed Under: chris coons, copyright, copyrighted law, incorporated by reference, john cornyn, mazie hirono, open standards, standards, thom tillis

Companies: public.resource.org, upcodes

When NASA allowed Artemis II astronauts to take their smartphones with them, we already knew it could lead to some epic phone shots of the moon. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman took one such photo on his iPhone, just as the Orion spacecraft his crew was on approached the moon for a lunar flyby. The astronauts turned off all the lights inside the cabin to be able to take better pictures. In the livestream, Wiseman showed the camera a photo he took on his iPhone 17 Pro.

As 9to5Mac notes, he said on the livestream that he took the picture on his iPhone camera with an 8x zoom. NASA reportedly said that the image showed the Chebyshev crater, a lunar impact sight located on the far side of the moon, or the side we don’t see from our planet. Artemis II launched on April 1 for a 10-day journey, with four astronauts onboard the mission’s Orion spacecraft. On April 6, it flew farther away from Earth than any mission before it after it arrived in lunar space, reaching a distance of 252,756 miles from our planet and breaking the record set by Apollo 13. The crew finished the lunar flyby at around 9:35PM on April 6 and is now making its way back to Earth.

We’ll likely see more images of the dark side of the moon over the next few days as NASA releases them. The Artemis II crew is expected to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on April 10.

To RGB or not to RGB, that is the quandary TCL finds itself in with its 2026 line-up.

TCL is the self-anointed Mini LED king. It’s made it its mission in life to sell more Mini LEDs than the competition and by all accounts, it has achieved that goal.

You would presume then, that it would like to sell all types of Mini LED but at its NXT Roadshow event in Paris, it sent out a rather confusing message, one that suggests that it’s not particularly fussed about RGB TVs.

RGB gets no respect

I’ve only seen a few RGB TVs so I’m not going to pray at the altar and say they’re the next coming of the TV Gods. But they may represent an inflection point, a new level of Mini LED performance that’s available at both premium and more affordable price points from the get-go.

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It could, effectively, replace your standard Mini LED and I wonder if TCL is ever so slightly perturbed by this.

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You’ve got Hisense who seem ecstatic about the potential of RGB. Sony are cautious like someone who has a big secret but doesn’t want to tell anyone just yet. Samsung sees RGB as its next mountain to conquer.

Philips and LG come across laissez-faire about RGB, believing that OLED is still the picture king. TCL doesn’t even like OLED – they’re all about Mini LED and out of all the TV manufacturers their stance is one I can’t comprehend. They seem disinterested to the point of being underwhelmed.

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The press release for the 2026 models raves about Super QD Mini-LEDs. But RGB TVs? They get two sentences with no mention of the model numbers.

The chasm between the excitement of SQD Mini-LED versus RGB Mini-LED could not be larger.

There’s an implication that TCL doesn’t believe the technology is quite there yet, something to be refined for its day in the limelight in a couple years’ time once the technology has matured. But if that’s the case, it makes very little sense to me.

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While others will be making strides in improving RGB TV tech, TCL will be focusing on its SQD TVs. But will SQD be a long-term concern? I’m not sure there’s a long shelf life with these models.

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TCL will be the only company that makes them – they are, in effect, a branding exercise in the same way that Samsung’s Neo QLEDs were Mini LED with a fancy name.

The whole TV market is moving towards RGB in some way, which seems to be the future, at least for the next few years, and TCL seem non-plussed about it.

Perhaps this speaks to TCL’s confidence, a reflection of its current standing in the market where it can throw a disdainful look at RGB. This endorsement of SQD is a strength not a weakness, a sign that TCL goes its own way and won’t be made to follow the same path as others.

But if RGB takes off it might find itself having to play catch-up.

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It’s a risk, I think, that TCL is not exerting more of a influence on RGB Mini LED. If RGB does take off, TCL will be stuck between supporting its flagship SQD TVs while trying to boost its RGB models. Producing two models could mean they cannibalize each other’s sales.

Or RGB could struggle to take off and TCL would be right, as long as SQD makes an impact. Somehow, I don’t think that will happen.

2026 will mark the true test of TCL’s standing in the market. It’s not playing catch-up as much in the UK anymore, it’s tussling with the experienced players in the same ring. But not grappling with RGB TV tech could see them susceptible to an unexpected knockdown.

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Samsung’s latest Weather update puts the focus where it matters right now, pollen. With allergy season ramping up, the app now shows what’s actually in the air so you can react before symptoms hit.

Version 1.7.30.8 changes how that data appears. Instead of a generic icon, you now get separate categories for tree, grass, and ragweed, making it easier to read conditions without digging deeper.

If you deal with seasonal allergies, the type of trigger matters as much as the intensity, and now that detail sits front and center.

Samsung also reworks how severity shows up, replacing a color scale with text labels. It’s simpler to read at a glance, though some users may find the loss of color cues less precise.

Clearer pollen info at a glance

The biggest shift is how the app presents daily readings. Instead of a single symbol, it splits conditions into tree, grass, and ragweed, giving you a clearer picture of what’s driving symptoms.

That added detail helps with everyday decisions. Tree and grass pollen peak at different times, so seeing them broken out lets you plan ahead with more confidence. If ragweed is high but grass is low, you’ll know what’s likely to trigger a reaction.

More than just pollen changes

This version also brings a few smaller refinements across the app. Moon phase icons have been refreshed, giving nighttime forecasts a cleaner and more consistent look.

Radar gets a practical tweak as well, with new shortcuts that link out to more detailed forecasting tools. That gives you faster access when you want more than the basic overview.

None of these changes overhaul the app, but together they make it feel more polished. Samsung is leaning into incremental improvements that add value without forcing you to relearn anything.

Who gets it and when

Version 1.7.30.8 is rolling out now, but availability is staggered. It’s currently tied to devices running One UI 8.5, so not everyone will see it right away.

Pollen tracking itself isn’t new. Earlier versions like One UI 8.0 still support it, just without the updated visuals, so you’re only missing the redesign if the update hasn’t reached you yet.

The rollout may take a few weeks to reach all devices through the Galaxy Store. If you rely on the app daily, it’s worth checking for updates soon, especially as allergy season picks up.

You’ve picked a website template, but now it looks like a hundred other sites. That’s the problem with templates. They’re convenient, but they feel generic right out of the box.

You want something that represents your brand. Not a cookie-cutter design that screams “I used template #47.” The good news? Templates are starting points, not final destinations. With the right approach, you can transform any template into a custom-looking site. We’ll show you exactly how.

Should you use a template for your new website?

Long sessions in front of conventional LCD monitors can leave you with tired eyes and a throbbing headache. The Modos Flow aims to change that by combining the convenience of paper with the speed of doing serious work on a computer. This 13.3-inch portable display delivers excellent text and images with a smooth motion that will have many individuals switching to it from their primary laptop screen when they need to focus.

The screen has a 3200 by 2400 pixel display in black and white mode, resulting in a very crisp 300 pixels per inch. When you turn to colour, the resolution decreases to 1600 by 1200 with a less sharp 150 pixels per inch, but it still appears good for most documents and online pages. They also have a built-in frontlight that allows you to adjust the brightness and color to match the room you’re in without causing glare. Furthermore, it works well in direct sunlight since the reflecting surface does not bleach out like glossy LCD screens.

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• Full HD Portable Monitor – MNN 15.6inch portable laptop monitor with 1920*1080 resolution, advanced IPS matte screen support 178° full viewing angle…
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The refresh rate is 60 frames per second with fewer than 100 milliseconds of lag, which is fairly standard for a typical monitor but is really fast for an e-ink panel. You can also choose from four different viewing modes based on what you’re doing. Browsing mode prevents webpages from being disorganized and having excessive ghosting. Typing mode sharpens everything up, allowing you to focus on your work. Watching mode handles video playback better than some previous e-ink panels, although it still has limitations with fast-paced action. Reading mode simply prioritises contrast and lowers the noise surrounding your text.

You can use the touchscreen directly on the surface, but if you need something more precise, a stylus is provided for notes and annotations. You also get two USB-C ports that handle power and video, but firmware updates are expected to reduce the number of cables to one. The device works with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux laptops right out of the box, and it consumes significantly less power than a laptop screen, which should help you save battery life.

The monitor is constructed of metal, so it feels substantial and sturdy, but it only weighs about 700 grams without the cover. The cover is also quite flexible and may be used as a stand, as well as folded flat for transport. If you want to install it to your desk or a monitor arm, you can utilize the VESA mounting holes in the back. You’ll also find three buttons on the side that allow you to quickly modify the brightness, contrast, and mode with a short press or a longer hold.

Crowdfunding is set to begin soon on Kickstarter, following the success of their last Modos Paper Monitor development kit. If you are an early backer, you may view the pledge options on the campaign page to find out when you can expect to get one. Price is yet to be confirmed, however it should be relatively comparable to other portable monitors on the market.
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