Author: Awais
Welcome to 5 O’Clock Somewhere, our series in which BA’s network of culinary all-stars share their favorite drinks—along with everything you need to serve them in style.During the 2025 run of his Las Vegas residency, Usher became known for a particular bit. Wrapped in a furry overcoat, the singer would descend from the stage with a glass full of ruby red maraschino cherries. He would then hand-feed the fruit to select members of the audience.It’s a flirty, cheeky gesture that spawned numerous viral videos. But it also hints at something essential, but little-known, about Usher: He knows how to give…
In 2025, Google is removing reviews at unprecedented rates – and it is not accidental. Our industry analysis of 60,000 Google Business Profiles shows that deletions are being driven by a mix of: Automated moderation. Industry-wide risk factors. Increased enforcement against incentivized reviews. Local regulatory pressure. Together, these forces have significant implications for businesses and local search visibility. Review deletions are on the up globally Data collected from tens of thousands of Google Business Profile listings across multiple countries by GMBapi.com show a sharp increase in deleted reviews between January and July 2025. The surge began accelerating toward the end…
This Acer Nitro V deal is one of those rare moments where the price actually feels too good to be true.Now retailing for just $549 at Walmart (down from $929) this laptop undercuts most systems in its class by a wide margin, yet it still packs an RTX 5050 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a fast Intel Core i5 CPU.The Intel Core i5-13420H is quick, responsive, and built to handle far more than casual use. It boosts up to 5.2GHz and has enough muscle for streaming, editing, schoolwork, and everyday multitasking without ever feeling sluggish.Often, lower priced laptops come with…
When it comes to free TV streaming services, your wallet can catch a break. You can switch around between them as often as you’d like without parting with a penny. Despite the ads on most of these services, streaming TV for free offers plenty of benefits. You can watch live news broadcasts, on-demand shows and movies and stream content 24/7 on FAST channels. Whether you want reality TV, horror flicks, true crime or kids’ shows, services like Tubi and Pluto TV have older series and films, sort of like basic cable reruns. And some platforms offer their own original programming.…
Why It Works Cutting the meats and vegetables into small, uniform pieces allows the filling to fit cleanly inside the banana leaves, so each hallaca folds neatly and cooks consistently.Using warm broth reserved from simmering the meats to hydrate the masa flour, rather than water, adds savory depth to the masa while promoting even absorption.Steaming the hallacas rather than boiling them keeps moisture out of the banana leaves, allowing the masa to set gently and hold its shape with a tender, cohesive texture. Hallacas are a traditional Venezuelan holiday dish, deeply tied to Christmas and to the act of cooking…
A claim about YouTube thumbnails is getting attention on X: that showing your face is “probably killing your views,” and that removing yourself will make click-through rates jump. Nate Curtiss, Head of Content at 1of10 Media, pushed back, calling that kind of advice too absolute and pointing to a dataset that suggests the answer is more situational. The dispute matters because thumbnail advice often gets reduced to rules. YouTube’s own product signals suggest the platform is trying to reward what keeps viewers watching, not whatever earns the fastest click. Where The “Remove Your Face” Claim Comes From In a recent…
AI workflow automation tools connect apps, data, and departments to execute tasks automatically — reducing manual work and improving efficiency across organizations. Unlike traditional rule-based automation, these tools use artificial intelligence to predict next steps, learn from outcomes, and continuously optimize processes.
arXiv:2512.17773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Parametric Head Models (NPHMs) are a recent advancement over mesh-based 3d morphable models (3DMMs) to facilitate high-fidelity geometric detail. However, fitting NPHMs to visual inputs is notoriously challenging due to the expressive nature of their underlying latent space. To this end, we propose Pix2NPHM, a vision transformer (ViT) network that directly regresses NPHM parameters, given a single image as input. Compared to existing approaches, the neural parametric space allows our method to reconstruct more recognizable facial geometry and accurate facial expressions. For broad generalization, we exploit domain-specific ViTs as backbones, which are pretrained on…
Nintendo is in a giving state of mind this season, offering some holiday deals on games in the eShop, including a few recent Switch 2 titles. For instance, the Switch 2 version of Ball x Pit, which was one of our staff’s favorite games of 2025, is 20 percent off at $12. Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles is $40, down from the usual $50 on Switch 2, which is about as good a deal as you’ll get for a current-year game release.There are also a few older games that have gotten even steeper discounts. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition for…
Elementary OS isn’t as popular as it once was, but it’s still a well-designed desktop Linux distribution with an excellent suite of custom-built applications. Now, a new major version is available with multitasking improvements, 64-bit ARM support, and much more. The previous Elementary OS 8 update introduced a new Dock for opening and switching applications, replacing the Plank panel from previous versions. Some features from the Plank are coming back, like multiple dots for apps with multiple windows, and cycling through app windows when you drag a file over an app icon. There’s also now an option for background apps…