Cloud-based automation services such as Zapier and Make let you connect different services together to automate tasks without having to build everything from scratch. If you'd rather not have all your personal automations running in the cloud, n8n gives you a different option.
When was the last time you thought about the devices that run your home network? You might have some devices that are officially too old to be using in 2025.
This one is for all the people who buy a router, set it up according to the default settings, and never look at it again. Unfortunately, default settings aren't really optimized to keep us safe and secure. Instead, they're designed to make the product work out-of-the-box for as many people as possible.
I'm approaching the limit of my free Google storage, and Gmail has started prompting me to pay for additional storage to keep using my account. While paying for more storage is a simple solution, it's not the only option.
IMDb is introducing "Digital Creator" as a new professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro, giving streamers, vloggers, influencers, video essayists, and other online creators a "dedicated way to represent [their] work and connect with audiences, industry peers, and potential employers," according to IMDb. Variety reports: The category includes sub-professions to further specify their work, including "Streamer," "Vlogger," "Video Essayist," "Video Creator," "Gaming Creator" and "Influencer."
The "Digital Creator" designation functions as a professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro. Creators can feature multiple professions on their page, so someone who is both a digital creator and an actor can "represent the full scope of their work in one place," per the company. No existing film or TV credits are required to establish a profile as a Digital Creator.
If you have a multi-gig NAS, one of the most obvious (and yet, somehow, still easy to miss) network bottlenecks is plugging it into a gigabit network. So, naturally, you look at your router, hunt down the 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps Ethernet port, and go for the fastest option available on your hardware. Makes sense.
How careful are you when it comes to your PC's Ethernet ports? Because I gotta say, I've abused my fair share of both ports and connectors. I've yanked cables sideways, left them plugged in for years (even though they would've benefited from an upgrade), moved hardware around without disconnecting them first, and generally just taken them for granted. Most of the time, I got away with it.
The web looks very different from when I first started using it. Browsers have changed, websites have become more complex, and I've picked up countless keyboard shortcuts along the way. Most have come and gone from my daily routine, but there's one I still turn to pretty much every day: Ctrl+Shift+D.
Android keeps a running list of every Wi-Fi network you've ever joined, and it never expires on its own. Most people are carrying dozens of entries they've long forgotten. That list is more revealing — and more useful to strangers — than it first appears.
If you want a fast, stable connection, and you want to do it properly, you go wired. We all know this, but just because wired is the right answer doesn't mean there's no wrong way to do it. If you traipse one long cable all around the house and out to the annex, you may hit a wall you didn't know existed. Ethernet has a hard distance ceiling, and once you pass it, things will start going wonky.
A Wi-Fi router can advertise hundreds of MBs, yet your Linux laptop may deliver a fraction of that speed. Before replacing the router, changing channels, or blaming the wireless adapter, there is one Linux setting worth checking.
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all suffered significant service disruptions within roughly the same few-hour window Thursday morning. OpenAI and Anthropic reported elevated errors and later restored service, while Grok remained impaired and third-party monitoring indicated a likely Gemini outage despite no public acknowledgment from Google. Ars Technica reports: Other major Internet services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare, have not reported any major issues as of press time Thursday, though issue reports on DownDetector did spike somewhat for all three this morning.
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.
Firefox for iPhone now includes a built-in ad blocker using EasyList, though first-party ads, search promotions and sponsored Firefox content can remain.
Firefox for iPhone now includes a built-in ad blocker using EasyList, though first-party ads, search promotions and sponsored Firefox content can remain.
If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in the tech world it’s that nothing is guaranteed. From AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, and MySpace, every tech empire seems to eventually fall to ruin. One method to reliably maintain information or online experiences that are lost to whims of computer users and markets is to backup, preserve, and host that information on one’s own computers, and the Kiwix project aims to help make offline backups of favorite websites.
The open-source tool started as a way for users to make their own offline backups of Wikipedia but eventually expanded into having the ability to backup many other sites as well. Wiki-type sites are generally the easiest, but it can also create backups of other sites like StackExchange so that when the Internet goes down or the site vanishes from the world, the information is preserved for use. There are plenty of guides online for setting up Kiwix as well, with it running easily on most Linux systems with or without the help of Docker, as well as versions available for Windows, Android, and Apple platforms.
Although the Kiwix software hosts the website backups, creating the backups needs to be done with another tool called Zimit to create the .zim files Kiwix uses. The Kiwix organization also hosts pre-downloaded .zim files of common websites so each user is not independently crawling Wikipedia on their own, a task that could take months on limited consumer hardware. As for what hardware to ultimately host it on, we might recommend an armageddon-proof machine like this one.
South Korea's viral "dopamine sites" recreate the ritual of buying without the purchase itself, and testing them revealed why the psychological hit still lands.
John Cook studies the 2009 Puget Sound Tech Universe map while recording this week’s GeekWire Podcast, with WTIA’s 2026 Washington Tech Universe map on the table behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet within a decade, leveraging production facilities in Redmond. Musk also explains the company’s data center ambitions, calling terrestrial infrastructure a trivial problem next to reusable rockets.
Plus: we bring two Washington tech universe posters into the studio, 17 years apart. The 2009 original turns up gems including Boeing’s unlikely connection to Classmates.com, the 1990s forerunner to Facebook. It also brings back memories of Teledesic, the Craig McCaw venture backed by Bill Gates that tried to beam internet from space decades before Starlink.
Finally, the GeekWire Trivia Challenge returns with a timely question about Google’s origins.
A Falcon 9 rocket arcs into the night sky during a February 2023 launch. Most of SpaceX’s launches carry Starlink satellites built at the company’s factory in Redmond, Wash. (SpaceX Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting started.
SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity division posted $1.7 billion in operating income for the second quarter, maintaining its status as the company’s only profitable business, according to numbers released Tuesday afternoon as part of its inaugural earnings report as a public company.
The AI division, built around the Grok model and the X social media and technology platform, lost $1.3 billion while spending $15.8 billion on capital projects. That capital spending amounted to more than three times Starlink’s quarterly revenue of $4.3 billion (up 66%).
Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, used the first SpaceX earnings call to make the case that investors are badly underestimating Starlink.
He said a new generation of satellites could increase Starlink revenue tenfold, and the network could deliver “a majority of the world’s internet” in less than 10 years. Musk said AI and robots will drive demand for bandwidth far beyond anything people generate on their own.
“I think Starlink is the only thing that can actually service that bandwidth,” he said.
Amazon is getting in the race, building its own satellite internet network at a factory in nearby Kirkland, Wash. Its Leo constellation has “close to 400 satellites in orbit, enough to begin initial satellite internet service this year,” CEO Andy Jassy told analysts last week.
Overall, SpaceX topped Wall Street expectations with revenue of $7.8 billion for the quarter, up 92% from $4.1 billion a year earlier. It also narrowed its net loss to $541 million from $1 billion.
SpaceX shares closed at $125.33, up 9.4% on the day, then fell nearly 5% in after-hours trading following the report, apparently on concerns about the company’s capital spending.
SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites at a Seattle-area factory that produced about 70 a week from December 2025 to April 2026, according to the company’s IPO filing. The output has put roughly 9,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites circling the planet.
For the second quarter, SpaceX reported 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the number a year earlier and an increase of 1.7 million from the first quarter. The revenue increase in the Starlink division (officially known as “Connectivity”) was driven by a 108% jump in enterprise and government business, which now accounts for more than 40% of the segment’s sales.
The subscriber total was just under the 12.19 million Wall Street had projected, but the segment’s revenue exceeded expectations by about $460 million, more than any other part of the company.
Starlink now brings in $66 a month per subscriber, down from $85 a year ago as it expands overseas and adds cheaper plans. The good news for SpaceX: the figure stopped falling, holding flat from the first quarter, despite the company’s warning to IPO investors that it would keep sliding.