Author: Awais
Was 2025 a boring year for smartphones? Thin phones flopped, big time. The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold elicited a collective yawn from my colleagues.Phones are boring! I hear them say as they gaze into Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses or get sucked into Steam Decks. Phones aren’t as new as those gadgets, but that doesn’t make this year boring. It was a very exciting year for phones, from an expert’s perspective.Apple changed the iPhone design, and every iPhone got better (Image credit: Jacob Krol/Future)It was a huge year for Apple, and a rare moment we got to see Apple being experimental.…
Why Make This You only need three ingredients to whip up these classic coconut macaroons.The recipe comes together in about 30 minutes for quick homemade treats.Naturally gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, and tree nut-free, these suit many diets. When I was a kid, I looked forward to Passover every year. My mom would stock up on all of the holiday staples, including matzo in its many forms, gefilte fish, horseradish with beets, white grape juice, and best of all, coconut macaroons. I loved (and still love) all of these traditional foods served during the festival, but the canisters of Manischewitz macaroons were…
In the previous article, we explored distance-based clustering with K-Means. further: to improve how the distance can be measured we add variance, in order to get the Mahalanobis distance. So, if k-Means is the unsupervised version of the Nearest Centroid classifier, then the natural question is: What is the unsupervised version of QDA? This means that like QDA, each cluster now has to be described not only by its mean, but also by its variance (and we also have to add covariance if the number of features is higher than 2). But here everything is learned without labels. So you…
Here’s some good news for the “Han shot first” crowd. The original cut of Star Wars (1977), the film known today as A New Hope, is coming back to theaters. We first learned in August that some version of the film would be screened again in 2027 for its 50th anniversary. But we know now this will indeed be the version everyone saw before George Lucas made those questionable, CGI-heavy changes in the 1997 Special Editions. The re-release arrives in theaters on February 19, 2027.In a short update posted Friday on the official Star Wars website, Lucasfilm all but clarified…
This potatoes au gratin recipe strikes that rare balance: decadent enough for a celebratory dinner, simple enough for a cozy weeknight. With thinly sliced russet potatoes soaked in a fragrant cream blended with garlic and thyme, then topped with a crust of Gruyère and Parmesan, this dish delivers rich, layered comfort in every mouthful. It’s the kind of side dish that tastes like home, but elevated.Whether you call it au gratin potatoes, potato gra-TAN, scalloped potatoes, or simply “that cheesy potato dish,” this version is designed to be reliably comforting, crowd-pleasing, and beautifully satisfying.Tips & FAQs for the best potatoes…
On episode 333 of PPC Live The Podcast, I speak to Nils Rooijmans, a renowned Google Ads script expert and top 10 PPC influencer, where she shares the experience of a costly error that serves as a valuable lesson for anyone managing paid search campaigns. The Setup: A quick account onboarding gone wrong The trouble began when one of Rooijmans’ existing clients acquired another company in the airport parking services industry. The acquired company was already running a small Google Ads account, and the client wanted Rooijmans to manage it without paying additional fees for proper onboarding. Against his better…
A research team in South Korea has developed a soft robot named Octoid that can mimic the movement and behavior of an octopus in its natural habitat. The robot’s “triple-in-one” system enables it to shift colors, move and capture prey in a way that is fascinatingly similar to the aquatic animal.While the scientific world has been working on modeling robots after octopuses for over a decade, this is the first time scientists have been able to combine the way an octopus moves and camouflages itself into a single robot.Octoid was built by researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and…
‘Tis the season for holiday parties and festivities, but a lost iPhone can quickly spoil the joyous cheer and vibe fast. Whether misplaced or stolen, modern iPhones have powerful features to help. Apple’s Find My feature, with its crowdsourced Find My Network, is your best ally. It sends your phone’s location to iCloud, even when the device is off. For added defense, Stolen Device Protection secures sensitive data, such as credit cards and passwords. If you have an iPhone 11 or newer (excluding the 2020 and 2022 iPhone SE), you have the ultra-wideband chip for offline finding. As long as Find My is…
Many years ago, I worked at a café, where I was responsible for making hundreds of cookies, muffins, and scones each week. A topic of conversation that us bakers (ever the persnickety bunch!) never tired of was how to make a perfectly round cookie. Of course, there are many variables that can affect how and why a cookie spreads, including the type and amount of chemical leavening used, the temperature of the cookie dough when it’s baked, and the shape of the scooped cookie dough. (The pastry chef I worked for was convinced that the bottom of the dough had…
The conversations shaping PPC this week focused on how AI interprets intent, how holiday demand played out across Shopping and Performance Max, and how Google is adding more automated language directly into ads. Google shared more clarity around AI Max, while Adalysis shared AI Max match type behavior, retail analysts broke down early Cyber Monday performance trends, and a potential new Google automated ad asset surfaced that raises questions about brand control. Here is what stands out for advertisers this week and where you should pay attention. AI Max Clarifications & New Insights On Match Types The conversation around AI…