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Gaming Peripheral Apps, Ranked From Worst to Worst

by admin June 21, 2025

Imagine this: You build a solid gaming PC, with a Corsair CPU cooler and a GPU that probably cost two months’ rent. You pick up a feature-packed keyboard from Asus and the most comfortable mouse Razer has ever made, and an ultra lightweight headset from HyperX. You want to program a couple of macros on the keyboard, check the battery life on the mouse, and change the auto-shutoff on the headset from 5 minutes to 20 minutes.

Does this seem like a task that requires a program that constantly runs 20+ background processes, uses 72% of your GPU, and secretly hoards 10GB of space on your hard drive? No? It doesn’t? Well, that’s technically correct — you don’t need a program; you need several of them, each of which eats up a lot of system resources and has its own unique set of issues.

But I’m sure you already knew this, if you’ve ever had to install any software for any gaming peripheral, ever. However, since you need to buy into at least one of these software suite-supported ecosystems (assuming you want one of the best gaming mice, gaming keyboards, gaming headsets, etc.) it seems worth exploring which company has the best software ecosystem to keep your rig running as smoothly as possible.

✳ Asus Armoury Crate

Armoury Crate is Asus’ software suite supporting its ROG-branded components and peripherals, including motherboards, monitors, graphics cards, keyboards, headsets, mice, desktops, laptops, coolers, etc. You can use Armoury Crate to update firmware, configure and calibrate hardware/peripheral settings, and customize RGB using Aura Sync (which is now part of Armoury Crate).

The best thing I can say about Armoury Crate is that it doesn’t bother me as often… because I always uninstall it, immediately, the second I no longer need it.

Case in point: I’m writing this on an Asus ROG monitor with Aura Sync enabled, and Armoury Crate sees nothing — doesn’t recognize it, can’t control it, nothing. (And yes, my Armoury Crate is up to date, my drivers are up to date, the monitor is listed as supported in Asus’ Armoury Crate FAQ, etc.) And this is actually an improvement — most of my experience with Armoury Crate in the past has been having it crash instantly upon launch.

In addition to often not recognizing the products it supports, or managing to stay launched for more than 3 seconds, Armoury Crate is just kind of a mess. The interface is confusing (and full of unnecessary movable tiles) and laggy — switching between tabs and clicking through menus is a chore. It also takes up over 1GB on my system for some reason and has suspiciously scheduled a bunch of logon tasks I didn’t ask for.

The cherry on top is that you’ll probably need to use the Armoury Crate Uninstall Tool to uninstall it — nothing says “easy to uninstall” like a dedicated uninstaller provided as a separate download. If you have an Asus motherboard, you also may need to change some settings, because Asus likes to put the Armoury Crate auto-installer in the BIOS.

Of course, that’s assuming Armoury Crate even recognizes your motherboard — Tom’s Hardware Senior Editor Andrew E. Freedman spent a month unable to turn off the RGB in his PC (when the PC was off) because the software wouldn’t recognize his motherboard. “Eventually uninstalling it and reinstalling it — using their official uninstaller — worked,” Andrew said. “But I couldn’t tell you why.”

Asus has taken note, however, and has been attempting to make a better Armoury Crate experience. Or at least, that’s what they’ve been telling me. Some peripherals now support Armoury Crate Gear, which is a “lightweight” peripheral-only version of Armoury Crate.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

However, whether this software is actually “lightweight” is questionable — it is lighter-weight than Armoury Crate, but it’s still taking up more of my PC’s performance than just about every other peripheral app — and that’s just for one device! I also can’t really tell, at the moment, if Armoury Crate Gear is separate for each peripheral device it supports, or if it’s part of one suite, or if it merges with the original Armoury Crate when you have both installed — Asus has gone out of its way to make this all extra-confusing.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Also, while this Armoury Crate Gear doesn’t install all the extra unnecessary apps you don’t need, it does continue to let you know about them: Every time I click on something in Armoury Crate Gear, it directs me to a “feature library” where I can, conveniently, install all that extra stuff I didn’t want.

✳ Corsair iCue

I asked my colleagues which peripheral software they disliked most, and while it wasn’t unanimous, and was clearly based primarily on whichever peripheral software had crashed or crippled their system within the last hour, one of the programs that was mentioned multiple times was Corsair’s iCue (currently: iCue 5).

Because what’s more infuriating than trying to download a simple app that will let you change your fan lighting and ending up with the resource-draining, performance-sucking, unsuspectingly huge piece of software that is iCue ?

While Corsair does make peripherals, it’s better known for its components — specifically, CPU coolers, fans, RAM, and cases. So while iCue does let you configure hardware, update firmware, and all that, we mainly turn to it for one thing: RGB. That’s it. Seriously. All we really want is to be able to change the color of the RGB lighting on our fans, maybe program some sort of pastel spectrum animation on the pump — and that’s it.

Now, iCue does let you do this, assuming you can figure out how to use the app’s lighting effects section to create the look you want, without getting overwhelmed by the various lighting profiles, colors, animations, and effects — not to mention using fan order to set up effects that move fluidly throughout your system. But it also uses a lot of, well, everything: resources, memory, space.

It’s hard to determine exactly how much space an app takes up in Windows 11.The OS lists reported app sizes in its settings menu, but this doesn’t tell the whole story (especially since not all apps report their size to Microsoft). But rest assured that iCue is somehow huge for an RGB-controlling companion app — its installer alone is approximately 1GB — and is not sorry. In the installed apps menu in Windows 11, iCue reports its size as 3.54GB. I used SpaceSniffer to confirm that on my system, iCue is taking up around 1.1GB in Program files, and is occupying another 2.35GB in ProgramData.

I can spare the 3.54GB, but I’ll admit that I’m pretty curious to know why iCue needs so much space just to change the colors of, like, seven lights. I know iCue also monitors hardware (unsolicitedly — I didn’t ask for this from my RGB software, Corsair), and this explains some of the app’s heavier resource usage, but not its size.

Taking a look at the Corsair folder in ProgramData reveals that approximately all of the space iCue uses here comes from…game integration — game/app developer-created presets to sync your system’s RGB lighting with the game you’re playing. It looks like there are around 30+ supported games (including a 1.64GB “common” folder for generic game integrations). Of the 30+ games supported, I played one, a couple of years ago — Subnautica Below Zero — but it’s very accommodating of Corsair to go ahead and store 2.35GB of RGB profiles on my PC, anyway.

But squatting in your ProgramData folder probably isn’t even the most draining thing iCue does. Anecdotally speaking, iCue is frequently responsible for using a ton of resources, crashing your system, crippling updates, and…basically everything else.

While I was writing this article — on cue (haha) — iCue apparently corrupted the AMD driver dll of Tom’s Hardware Deals Writer Stewart Bendle, who then had to run Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) — twice — before he was able to boot to Windows without it crashing within 20 seconds.

The next time your PC feels sluggish, your first step should be to uninstall iCue and Armoury Crate, and bask in the striking performance gain — you may not even need to do anything else.

✳ Logitech G Hub

Logitech has been in the peripherals game for a long time. And instead of creating one app back in 1994 and adding onto it piece by piece over years and years and years until it became an unrecognizable mishmash of settings, Logitech did the seemingly smart thing and created new apps for new products and lines.

Except now Logitech has something like 12 similar but different apps with overlapping support for different peripheral lines (which are somewhat haphazardly defined in the first place), meaning you’ll need at least three different Logitech apps to configure your keyboard, mouse, webcam, and headset. And somehow, none of these apps will be as functional or as intuitive as Logitech’s legacy apps.

But since we’re looking at gaming peripheral software, let’s focus on Logitech G Hub, which is designed to support Logitech G products: gaming keyboards, mice, headsets, controllers, and some random streaming gear (webcams, mics, and lights). G Hub is where you’ll go to configure hardware settings, program buttons and keybinds, adjust audio/mic settings (including Blue Vo!ce software), and play with RGB lighting colors and effects.

At a glance, G Hub actually looks pretty good. But don’t be fooled by its slick, deceptively straightforward-looking interface. With G Hub, Logitech has conveniently taken all of the settings you once knew how to change and turned them into something unnecessarily convoluted and zero percent intuitive.

After all, why would you want to reprogram keys using something simple, like…your keyboard…when you can instead scroll through several long lists of keys, actions, commands, system…commands, and approximately 3000 other options you didn’t know you never wanted to see? I’m sure there are some people who want to bind pre-recorded Blue Voice sound samples to their mouse buttons — but probably not so many that this warrants an entire built-in menu (especially one that may not even work — I had to wipe G Hub from my PC and reinstall it, twice, before half of the Blue Vo!ce software options even worked in G Hub).

My bigger issue with G Hub, however, is that your hardware is somehow entirely dependent on it. There’s no warning, of course — Logitech graciously allows you to discover this on your own, when G Hub suddenly shuts down and cripples all of your peripherals.

Just the other day, as I was casually playing Elder Scrolls Online using a Logitech G keyboard, G Hub abruptly quit and suddenly none of the assignable keys registered anything. And I don’t mean that my carefully-configured custom keybinds stopped working. I mean the assignable keys on this keyboard — the function keys — apparently have no default keybinds without G Hub; they’re just…empty. G Hub shut down and took my entire function row with it.

While it’s possible to use Logitech G peripherals without G Hub by saving settings to a device’s onboard memory, this only works if you turn the onboard memory on in G Hub — and then quit G Hub while it’s turned on. One might assume that a profile saved to a device’s onboard memory would remain on said device until overwritten. But if you turn off onboard memory in G Hub (which you’ll need to do to adjust any settings), G Hub immediately overwrites your saved profile with the original, default profile, e.g. one with an entirely empty function row, until you turn onboard memory back on.

G Hub also makes some other strange design choices, such as the fact that you can only program a mouse’s G-Shift while in G-Shift mode. Let me explain: G-Shift is Logitech’s gaming-oriented second layer functionality — accessible with the G-Shift key/button (user-programmed) — built into Logitech G mice and keyboards. (It’s Logitech’s version of Razer’s HyperShift, SteelSeries’ SS key, etc.)

To program G-Shift, open up G Hub and click the G-Shift toggle at the bottom of the screen. This puts your device in G-Shift mode, which is actually…terrible, because the entire point of G-Shift mode is to be able to program secondary functionality. For example: Why would you need your left mouse button — one of the most accessible buttons — to have primary click functionality in both default mode and G-Shift mode? You wouldn’t, unless an app forced you to remain in G-Shift mode while programming G-shift mode. If you unbind primary click in G-Shift you will no longer be able to click anything, because you’re stuck in G-Shift mode. This has been an issue for years, and I still can’t figure out why.

You can try to fix this by unplugging the mouse, but I’ve found that this happens to be the one time G Hub immediately saves all changes directly to your hardware. In this case, your best bet is to use a different mouse to rebind your primary click (you can also use Mouse Keys, a Windows accessibility feature that lets you control your mouse with your keyboard). Or, if you must, you can also uninstall and reinstall G Hub. If that seems like a ridiculous amount of effort given you accidentally clicked one button, that’s because it is.

✳ Razer Synapse

Razer’s Synapse is the brand’s one-stop (sort of) software suite supporting all of its products: keyboards, headsets, mice, webcams, mics, mouse pads, speakers, monitors, desktops, laptops, etc. You can download Synapse from Razer’s website — but you don’t have to, because Razer pioneered everyone’s favorite, not-at-all-infuriating, and previously exploitable practice of prompting an auto-installation of Synapse whenever you plug in a Razer peripheral. Yes, every time. Forever.

And don’t worry, installing Synapse won’t rid you of Synapse pop-ups, because Synapse updates approximately once every 15 minutes and prompts you to do fun things like restart your PC, login to your Razer account, or install a bunch of other Razer apps. You know — for fun!

Synapse is pretty robust — maybe too robust — and lets you remap keys and buttons, calibrate performance (on a pretty detailed level), and adjust some lighting settings. However, if you want to customize your lighting beyond one of Razer’s preset effects, you’ll need to use a separate “app” (which is now just a separate app, no longer listed as a standalone module? Or something) inside Synapse.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

The current version of Synapse is Synapse 4, which (despite what Razer says) looks a lot like Synapse 3. It still requires you to login, as logging into a Razer account is a critical part of remapping your mouse buttons, and it still features a dashboard with modules, though some modules (like the Chroma modules) have been incorporated elsewhere in Synapse but still seem to function as separate apps (I’m really not sure, at this point).

Now, instead of opening up the Chroma Studio app from the module list, you open it up from the lighting tab inside each peripheral module. But, of course, it opens in a separate window (because it’s still a separate app), with several tabs that include other modules that used to be in the main Synapse dashboard, such as Chroma Visualizer and Chroma Connect.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Also, the issue of Chroma Studio saving your final lineup of effects into a profile but not saving the custom settings you used for the profile persists. You can make a profile in Chroma Studio with multiple lighting layers and effects, but you can’t adjust this once you’ve saved it without recreating layers from scratch. It’s bizarre and frustrating and will potentially make you quit RGB completely and embrace darkness.

Like most peripheral software, Synapse attempts to combine several years worth of hastily coded updates and side projects into one streamlined, central app. And, if you ignore the fact that it’s actually 15 different processes running in the background, it succeeds (sort of).

But Synapse’s real goal is clearly world PC domination via the most tenacious installer/updater ever created. Synapse has a ton of FOMO — not only will its installer sometimes anxiously pop up in the middle of Windows updates, it also hoards all of the update files it downloads…forever.

The Windows Installer folder on my laptop currently takes up around 10GB, 9.68GB of which belongs to Razer. Now, Synapse is not the only app that’s ever done this, and there are tools to clean the Installer folder. I’m working on it, but so far Synapse’s stockpile of installers has resisted PatchCleaner, CCleaner, and the Microsoft install/uninstall troubleshooter.

Oh, and the best thing about this is that Synapse updates so frequently, it apparently gets exhausted and quits — basically every single time I try to do something that requires Synapse to be running, nothing happens. So I’ll click on Razer’s icon in the System Tray and, yup — “Synapse is not running.”

✳ SteelSeries GG

SteelSeries GG is a software suite that combines SteelSeries’ peripheral settings app (Engine) with several things that are…not peripheral settings. Here’s a pro-tip: If you’re a hardware company trying to design supporting software that won’t be considered bloatware, don’t throw additional apps into the installation.

In addition to SteelSeries Engine — which lets you scan for firmware updates, configure and customize hardware settings, and includes an illumination section where you can adjust and sync RGB (and also create custom effects) — SteelSeries GG also contains Sonar (an audio app with a gamer-oriented EQ) and Moments (a game capture app). SteelSeries’ Engine is a little clunky (like…all of these apps) — and its focus on details can make it pretty overwhelming for anyone who doesn’t want to spend a lot of time getting to know it.

While you can argue that Sonar is an audio configuration app (it is), and therefore makes sense as part of GG…there’s still no reason to make it a compulsory download for someone plugging in a keyboard or a mouse. And I actually like playing around with Sonar — when it works.

But I’ve been using it with both SteelSeries and non-SteelSeries products for several months and it will frequently just…not work. It doesn’t seem to be consistent in any way — sometimes I’ll turn my headset on and I won’t hear anything no matter what my settings are until I force-quit the entire GG suite; other times I’ll be in the middle of listening to something and my sound will just go out for several seconds before resuming. Earlier today I was talking to one of my colleagues before our morning meeting, and he said I was barely audible — until I switched my mic input away from Sonar.

Sonar can be fun to play around with, but it’s just not reliable enough when I need my audio to work. And it’s not super intuitive when it is working as designed — it tries to wrestle control of every audio-enabled device I plug in, from speakers to headsets to webcams. It’s definitely an app I’d prefer to opt-into instead of (not having the option of) opting out. (Engine includes audio settings and an EQ for SteelSeries’ headsets and speakers, anyway, so Sonar really should be purely optional.)

✳ Turtle Beach Swarm II

In Turtle Beach’s Defense, the company adopted Swarm after it fully absorbed Roccat in 2024. Prior to this, Turtle Beach had even worse software, somehow — I recall needing one app just to update the firmware, and another app to adjust the settings on a headset.

Roccat’s Swarm was always kind of a mess, in the Armoury Crate way — trying way too hard to look cool (literally, like the UI of Warcraft III), and packed with features nobody has ever needed or wanted or even thought they wanted. I remember it featuring a keyboard typing sound effect that you could turn on in the software — why?! Not only was this for an actual, physical keyboard — which has its own real-time typing sound effects — but the typing sound was, naturally, delayed just enough that it was infuriating.

Image 1 of 3

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

60% of the time, works every time.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

But now Roccat’s Swarm is Turtle Beach’s Swarm II, and while it looks a lot better, it just… doesn’t work. Perhaps this isn’t really as much of a software issue as it is a firmware issue, but as I had to go through the software to make firmware updates, the software remains at the forefront of my mind. The software itself does what you’d expect — lets you adjust various peripheral settings, including some fairly basic improvements for headsets and mics, etc. Or, well, it lets you adjust those things about half of the time. When I tested the Atlas Air, I found my settings saved automatically to the headset as I made changes in the app — unless they didn’t, which they sometimes… didn’t.

Swarm II downloads updates automatically, but it doesn’t install them. Or let you know they exist. (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

On the plus side, unlike Razer Synapse, Swarm II doesn’t prod you for updates constantly. Instead, it waits until you plug in a new peripheral and then requires all 700 updates at one time — sequentially, of course. So you’ll need to spend a good half hour updating and restarting and updating and restarting your PC just to use one headset, because Turtle Beach loves to push out firmware updates for not only the headset, but every part of the headset, such as both of the Stealth 700 Gen 3’s dongles.

What we need

First — I didn’t mention a number of apps, including (but not limited to): HyperX NGenuity, Cooler Master MasterPlus+, MSI Center, ThermalTake TT RGB Plus, etc. — but rest assured, they all have plenty of issues and remain competitive in the race to the bottom.

I won’t pretend like I truly understand the challenges of creating a piece of usable support software, especially one that needs to be updated every time a new product is released. And while there are third-party apps, such as SignalRGB and OpenRGB, attempting to create stripped-down, manufacturer-agnostic solutions, it’s clearly not perfectly cut-and-dry. But — as someone who tests peripherals and therefore always has at least 17 different pieces of bloated, laggy, space-hoarding software fighting for control on my PC, I have some general tips for improvement:

👉 Just the software

When I plug a new mouse or keyboard in, I want it to work. That’s all.

I don’t want to be bombarded with prompts to install optional software — let alone, optional, unnecessary software that demands hard drive space, resources, and an internet connection and an account. And I definitely don’t want this to happen every time I plug it in (peripherals are, by definition, devices that are easy to plug in and remove from a PC). If I need to change a setting or customize something, I will download the software.

👉 …And stop auto-updating

There’s no peripheral software update so critical that I need an app running 24/7 in the background, ready to update on a dime. Actually, now that I think about it, peripheral software updates aren’t just “not critical,” they’re almost entirely unnecessary unless I want to manually update a setting myself.

I shouldn’t have to restart my PC, get online, or sign up for an account to change some settings. I also shouldn’t have to tell you this.

👉 Don’t fix what ain’t broke

I don’t know why Logitech took a look at G Hub and thought, “instead of making remapping keys basic and boring, let’s turn it into a fun, maze-like adventure!” I’m just here to change some settings — I don’t mind if it’s a boring, basic process (in fact, I prefer it).

Of all the 764 different Logitech webcam apps I’ve tried, there’s one I always come back to: Logitech Webcam Software. It’s extremely basic, dated-looking, and definitely not perfect (nor has it been supported in, like, 10 years). But it’s the only Logitech webcam app with all of the manual sliders in one place, and that’s all I really want. I don’t need a sexy, fun settings menu. I just need the settings.

👉 I don’t need an ecosystem

I’m not sure why every company thinks they need to have a full software suite of apps and modules, complete with a customizable dashboard with 7 different themes and the option to upload your own background image and a user interface that looks like a cross between Minority Report and Star Craft. I’ve never opened any peripheral software thinking, “wow, I hope this looks cool and futuristic so I can leave it open on my desktop to admire.”

I already have an operating system, and ways to monitor my hardware, and an app that animates my wallpaper — I don’t expect or need (or want) my mouse software to replace that. There’s no need to divert clearly limited software development resources toward projects like the Razer Virtual Ring Light, which is an app that turns your monitor into a “source of illumination” (my monitor is already a source of illumination; I can just open up a blank Word doc).

I’ll acknowledge there are many challenges to making software that supports a decade’s worth of gaming peripherals, but I don’t think the solution is completely irrelevant software.

But what about web-based apps?

Many custom mechanical keyboards use the open-source QMK / VIA firmware/software suite for remapping and lighting customization, and while this is a useful tool for the keyboard enthusiast side, it definitely has limitations for the gaming side. But I’ve recently seen several gaming companies (mostly smaller, boutique ones, such as Arbiter) with web-based peripheral apps, and I’m not totally sure how I feel about this.

On one hand, it’s great to not have to download a bloated, resource-sucking app packed with features I didn’t want. On the other hand, I’m a little worried about what happens if this web-based app stops being supported for some reason, or the host goes down, or I’m offline and I desperately need to change my keyboard macros (unlikely, but you never know). I suppose that’s not a major concern right now, as those scenarios seem unlikely to happen in the near future (and some functions usually exist on the keyboard itself, like on-the-fly macro recording). Just because gaming companies wish you bought new peripherals every six months doesn’t mean that’s what most people actually do.

I have a mouse I bought around 10 years ago from Redragon that came with an incredibly basic (but usable) device-specific piece of software. It didn’t let me do nearly as much as the peripheral apps of today let you do, but it did let me remap buttons (it was one of those 19-button mice that I can’t get enough of, so this was important) and turn off the lighting. And I can still use that software, which is extremely lightweight, a decade later.

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June 21, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Meta is cracking down on AI ‘nudify’ apps

by admin June 12, 2025

Meta is finally cracking down on “nudify” apps that use AI to generate nonconsensual nude and explicit images of celebrities, influencers and others. The company is suing one app maker that’s frequently advertised such apps on Facebook and Instagram, and taking new steps to prevent ads for similar services.

The crackdown comes months after several researchers and journalists have raised the alarm about such apps. A recent report from CBS News identified at least “hundreds” of ads on Meta’s platform promoting apps that allow users to “remove clothing” from images of celebrities and others. One app in particular, called Crush AI, has apparently been a prolific advertiser on Facebook and Instagram. Researcher Alexios Mantzarlis, Director of Cornell Tech’s Security, Trust and Safety Initiative, reported back in January that Crush AI had run more than 8,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram since last fall.

Now, Meta says it has filed a lawsuit against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the Hong Kong-based company behind Crush AI and other nudify apps. “This follows multiple attempts by Joy Timeline HK Limited to circumvent Meta’s ad review process and continue placing these ads, after they were repeatedly removed for breaking our rules,” the company wrote in a blog post. Joy Timeline HK Limited didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta also says it’s taking new steps to prevent apps like these from advertising on its platform. “We’ve developed new technology specifically designed to identify these types of ads — even when the ads themselves don’t include nudity — and use matching technology to help us find and remove copycat ads more quickly,” Meta wrote. “We’ve worked with external experts and our own specialist teams to expand the list of safety-related terms, phrases and emojis that our systems are trained to detect within these ads.” The social network says it also plans to work with other tech platforms, including app store owners, to share relevant details about entities that abuse its platform.

Nudify apps aren’t the only entities that have exploited Meta’s advertising platform to run ads featuring celebrity deepfakes. Meta has also struggled to contain shady advertisers that use AI-manipulated video of public figures to promote scams. The company’s independent Oversight Board, which weighs in on content moderation issues affecting Facebook and Instagram, recently criticized Meta for under-enforcing its rules prohibiting such ads.

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June 12, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

The Best Read-It-Later Apps for Curating Your Longreads

by admin June 8, 2025

It’s not easy keeping up with everything that’s written on the web, especially not if you’ve got a dozen open browser tabs vying for your attention. This is where read-it-later apps come in.

These apps let you siphon off articles you want to get back to later, at a more leisurely pace, when the work of the day is done. You can catch up on your reading in bed, on the subway, over breakfast, or whenever you like.

Sadly, we just lost one of the more capable read-it-later apps: Mozilla is shutting down Pocket as it focuses its efforts on its Firefox browser, and Pocket data will be permanently deleted on October 8. If you’re looking for a new home for your archive of articles, or you’re keen to see what read-it-later apps are capable of doing for the first time, you’ll find our pick for the best options below.

Instapaper

Instapaper offers a clean, calm interface.

Courtesy of David Nield

Instapaper is one of the oldest and most comprehensive read-it-later apps out there, and it does a fine job of turning chaotic webpages into calm, orderly blocks of text that look like they’re displayed on an e-reader. Articles can be added straight from your browser, pasted in manually, or added via email, and there are apps for reading saved articles in the web browser and on your mobile devices.

There are lots of neat little features hidden away in Instapaper, like the ability to organize articles with folders and tags. If you decide you like Instapaper enough, there’s a paid tier too: For $6 a month it adds features including the option to have articles read out to you, a “’speed read”’ mode that displays one word at a time, and the ability to send articles to an Amazon Kindle.

Instapaper (freemium) for web, Android, iOS

Feedly

Use Feedly to track your favorite sites on the web.

Courtesy of David Nield

Feedly can help you keep up with everything being published on your favorite sites, and curate a read-it-later list of articles you want to get back to when you have the time. You get a host of features for sorting the incoming deluge of posts, from filters and keyword searches to folders for organization and a choice of list layouts across your devices.

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June 8, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

The best apps for reading, tracking and listening to books

by admin June 8, 2025

Ask me what I’m reading at any given moment and I’ll probably rattle off at least three titles, not to mention comics and the occasional textbook I may also be chipping away at in the background. Reading multiple books simultaneously might sound chaotic (at least, people always tell me it is), but there is a degree of organization to it all: each book in my pile of current reads is in a different format. I’ll have one physical, paper book, an ebook and an audiobook in progress at a time, so I always have something on hand to read no matter where I am.

While I used to carry around a dedicated ereader, I’ve shifted more toward using my phone for the job these days, especially since getting a foldable. Consequently, I’ve tried out a bunch of different apps for reading and logging my books. These are the ones I like most.

Libro.fm

Audiobooks have really grown on me over the last few years, almost entirely replacing podcasts as the thing I’ll throw on when I’m cleaning, taking a walk or going for a long drive. While I tried to make do at first by only borrowing audiobooks from the library, I quickly found that the extremely limited selection from my library system coupled with really long wait times just wouldn’t cut it if I wanted to stay up on new releases. After researching all the options, I settled on Libro.fm, an audiobook platform that shares a portion of profits (about half, according to a 2022 interview) with independent bookstores. And even better, you get to pick which bookstore to support with your purchases.

I wasn’t expecting to find my favorite local bookstore — a tiny shop in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley — on Libro.fm, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned up in the search. With that, and the fact that all audiobooks from Libro.fm are Digital Rights Management (DRM) free, so you can actually download the files and do with them as you please, I was sold. You have a few options for buying audiobooks through Libro.fm: you can subscribe for $15 per month, which gives you one audiobook credit and a 30 percent discount on all purchases; you can buy credit bundles to save on purchases without a subscription; and you can purchase individual titles at their full, non-member price. There are also plenty of free books to choose from.

Bookshop.org app

The moment I found out that Bookshop.org had launched ebooks and an app to read them on, I made the site my sole destination for buying digital books and haven’t looked back. Just like Libro.fm, Bookshop.org lets you choose a local bookseller to support with your purchases. It’s been doing this for physical book sales for the last five years — and according to its tally has raised over $38 million for independent bookstores in that time — but until now, there hasn’t been a similar option for ebooks. The new app is a no-frills ereader app where you can browse the Bookshop.org catalog to save titles to your wishlist (purchases have to be made on the site) and read all the ebooks you’ve bought. There are some things I’d love to see it gain in the future, like comics and the option to display pages side by side for reading book-style on a foldable, but it’s a great start as it is, especially if your primary concern is supporting small businesses.

Right now Bookshop.org’s ebook service doesn’t sync with any of the mainstream ereader devices, so you’re locked into reading on Android, iOS or a web browser, but the company said it’s working on Kobo integration and we could see that happen before the end of this year.

Libby

Libby, aka the library app, is my app of choice for older, less in-demand ebooks and audiobooks, or for when I don’t have anything particular in mind and just want to browse the catalog to see what jumps out at me. It lets you link multiple library cards, meaning you potentially have a huge pool to pull from, and since you’re borrowing books rather than buying them, it’s entirely free. Libby also connects with Kindle, and you can have your titles automatically sent to your ereader. Some Kobo devices support OverDrive (the distributor behind Libby) too.

While using an app may not be quite as satisfying as perusing the stacks IRL, I really like Libby’s tag system, which lets you organize your borrowed books and To Be Read titles in whatever way works best for you. You can have a dedicated TBR tag, or create several different tags to group things by genre, mood, etc. Libby is also a great place to find magazines.

Moon+ Reader (Android only)

Moon+ Reader is the best app I’ve used yet for instances where I have the actual file for a book or document. It supports a ton of different file types — including ePUB, PDF, AZW3, MOBI and many more — and allows you to highlight and annotate text, in addition to offering auto scroll and text-to-speech so the text can be read aloud to you. It’s really customizable, too. You can choose things like font, font color, background, margin width, line spacing and more for each document, and save the final build as a theme so you can use it again later. Designwise, the app feels almost like a relic of a bygone digital era, organizing all of your books in a skeuomorphic virtual bookshelf, and I love it. There are a few style options for the bookshelf too, or you can turn off the bookshelf and just see your books in a standard grid.

There’s both a free and paid version of the Moon+ Reader, and this is a situation where getting the paid version (Moon+ Reader Pro) is actually worth it. It’s a one-time purchase of $10, and going that route will get rid of ads and open up more customization options. In addition to importing your own files into the app, Moon+ Reader has Project Gutenberg integrated so you can directly access that library of over 75,000 free books.

The Storygraph

Naturally, I need a way to keep up with all the reading I’m doing, and that’s where The StoryGraph comes in. The StoryGraph is a data-focused app for keeping track of everything you’re currently reading, everything you’ve read and the ever-growing list of titles you want to read. It even allows you to mark books as “did not finish.” I love that I can have five in-progress books logged at a time, and can even update each entry to note how far along I am, which is nice for those I’m dragging my feet on completing.

When you leave a review, you have the option to be really detailed about it, going beyond a star rating and a blurb. Reviewers can indicate whether the book would appeal to readers who like a particular mood, with over a dozen options. You rate the pace and answer basic questions about the plot and characters, like whether there’s character development or if the characters are even likeable. There’s also the option to add content warnings.

Where The StoryGraph really shines, though, is in the stats. There are tons of actual graphs built into the experience to show you a comprehensive breakdown of your reading habits, from the genres, moods and pacing you prefer, to how much fiction you’ve read versus nonfiction. You can set challenges for yourself, like a yearly reading goal, and you’ll be shown a Reading Wrap-up at the end of the year. It’ll tell you how long it takes you to finish a book on average, and compare your reading stats to previous years.

There is a mild social component to the app, but it’s tucked away in its own tab and not shoved in your face, which I appreciate as someone who tends to shy away from those things. If you want, though, you can participate in or create readalongs, start buddy reads and book clubs (and even write out a code of conduct for the latter) or just see what other people with similar interests to yours are reading. The StoryGraph team also really seems to take users’ feedback into consideration, and is constantly adding new things to the app and tweaking existing ones to improve the experience, which is always nice to see.

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June 8, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Popular AI apps get caught in the crosshairs of Anthropic and OpenAI

by admin June 7, 2025

Battlelines are being drawn between the major AI labs and the popular applications that rely on them.

This week, both Anthropic and OpenAI took shots at two leading AI apps: Windsurf, one of the most popular vibe coding tools, and Granola, a buzzy AI app for taking meeting notes.

”With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models,” Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan wrote on X this week, noting that “we wanted to pay them for the full capacity.” An additional statement on Windsurf’s website said: “We are concerned that Anthropic’s conduct will harm many in the industry, not just Windsurf.”

Here, Mohan’s company is collateral damage in Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAI, which has reportedly been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion. The deal hasn’t been confirmed, but even the spectre of it happening was enough for Anthropic to cut off one of the most popular apps that it powers. After a spokesperson told TechCrunch’s Maxwell Zeff that Anthropic was “prioritizing capacity for sustainable partnerships,” co-founder Jared Kaplan put it more bluntly.

“We really are just trying to enable our customers who are going to sustainably be working with us in the future,” Kaplan told Zeff. “I think it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI sent its own warning shot this week to the budding AI app ecosystem. It announced a “record mode” for ChatGPT — initially only for enterprise accounts — that transcribes calls and generates meeting notes. This is the core use case of Granola, one of my favorite AI tools that recently raised $43 million in additional funding and released a mobile app.

Given how quickly Granola has evolved to do more than summarize meetings, I suspect that the company isn’t at risk of extinction. Still, it will be harder to grow when hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users eventually have access to its main functionality.

It’s unclear how the tension between the product ambitions of OpenAI and Anthropic and the needs of their API customers will settle out. When I interviewed Anthropic’s chief product officer, Mike Krieger, back in March, the company had just announced its own Claude coding competitor to Windsurf and Cursor, which coincidentally raised $900 million this week. I asked Krieger the obvious question: how does Anthropic think about competing with its API customers? He didn’t really have an answer.

“I think this is a really delicate question for all of the labs and one that I’m trying to approach really thoughtfully,” Krieger told me at the time. “Hopefully, we’ll all be able to navigate the occasionally closer adjacencies.”

AI investor Zak Kukoff put it well this week: “At some point model providers are going to need to decide if they want to be stable platforms or compete for every vertical.”

Ultimately, this week served as a wake-up call for the many startups building businesses on the backs of AI models; if you are successful enough, you run the risk of being copied by your model provider. A lot of companies are thinking through this risk right now, especially as OpenAI builds a new team to help its API customers “translate abstract ideas into production applications.”

“You have to wonder if the recent moves by the big AI labs to more directly compete with the app layer will be one giant tailwind for incumbents like Google, Amazon, MSFT, etc.,” Michael Mignano, a Granola board member, wrote this week. “If developers can’t trust the labs, maybe it’s better to trust the big guys like they did for cloud?”

A different take on AI and job loss

This week, I heard two CEOs contradict the growing fear that AI will destroy jobs en masse, at least when it comes to engineering roles.

The first was Sundar Pichai, whom I watched speak at Bloomberg’s tech conference in San Francisco. He downplayed Dario Amodei’s doomerism fear about job loss, correctly pointing out that “we’ve made predictions like that for the last 20 years about technology and automation, and it hasn’t quite played out that way.” He went so far as to say, “I expect we will grow from our current engineering base into next year,” because AI “allows us to do more.”

The next day, I walked down the street to the Moscone Center to see Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who had just spoken to a room of 4,000 developers with AI pioneer Andrew Ng. I asked Ramaswamy if AI had changed his hiring plans, and he said he agreed with a ranking of hiring desirability for engineers that Ng had just described onstage, with the top being experienced engineers who leverage AI tools, followed by early-career engineers who are all-in on AI. He noted that new graduates who avoid AI tools are at the bottom of the desirability ranking and may struggle to find jobs.

If anything, it’s the middle of the workforce — those who are in the middle of their careers and hesitant to adopt AI tools — that is the most in danger of near-term displacement, Ramaswamy argued. “Companies tend to accrete middle management, so there’s very much a push to get more people who are doing. How do we get them as leveraged as possible? Snowflake has historically been a little top-heavy on the engineering side, so we are balancing that out.”

“Oh, man, the girls are fighting, aren’t they?” – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commenting on what was the best day on Twitter in years.

“Maybe there’s a world where you have one AI in the sky. Maybe you actually have a bunch of domain-specific agents that require a bunch of specific work to make it happen. I think the evidence has really been shifting towards this menagerie of different models.” – OpenAI’s Greg Brockman speaking at the AI Engineer’s World Fair.

“Give it a year. We’ll be doing a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate.” – Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas onstage at Bloomberg’s tech conference.

“We were accidentally cash flow positive in Q1, which was cool.” – Substack CEO Chris Best speaking at The Information’s creator economy summit.

As part of a broader leadership reshuffling, Microsoft’s CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Roslansky, is now also leading the Office portfolio of products.
After a short stint as a distinguished AI engineer at Meta, Rohan Anil is leaving to join Anthropic. Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, is also joining the board of Anthropic’s controlling trust.
Tesla’s head of Optimus, Milan Kovac, is leaving to spend “time with family,” according to Elon Musk.
Christian Szegedy, a co-founder of xAI, is leaving to be the chief scientist of an AI startup called Morph.
Gary Briggs will serve as the interim chief marketing officer of OpenAI while Kate Rouch takes medical leave.
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, who was also an early Google executive, is joining Uber’s board. Andrew Macdonald is also being promoted to become the company’s president and chief operating officer.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.

As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’ll be attending WWDC next week as well, or if you have a story idea to share. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.

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June 7, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Here are three new apps building out the open social web

by admin June 5, 2025

For the past couple of years, the virtual FediForum conference has offered a glimpse at what’s new in the open social web, with last year’s big news being Threads’ foray into the fediverse. This year’s presentation was no different, with several developers showing off new apps that will help to expand the ecosystem of decentralized social networks.

During FediForum, Bonfire announced that they’re releasing Bonfire Social 1.0 as the first “flavor” of the platform. Bonfire Social comes with a “a pre-configured bundle of Bonfire extensions that defines which features are included,” like custom feeds, profiles, and threaded discussions, along with the ability to share posts and follow other users.

The makers of Bonfire are working on other “flavors” of the platform, including Bonfire Community, which is geared toward private groups and organizations, as well as Open Science, a platform designed for collaboration between academic communities. Bonfire Social federates with Mastodon, Peertube, Mobilizon, and others. You can install Bonfire Social now or check out the demo.

Another new service announced at FediForum is Channel.org, which is designed to help you curate the content you see across the open social web. Users can tailor their feed by tracking specific hashtags and users, including bridged Bluesky accounts and RSS parrots. Other users can follow the channels you create, which are distributed across the Fediverse, Bluesky, and over RSS. You can filter out certain keywords and mute accounts not related to the topics you want to follow, and there are also built-in filters that block NSFW content and hate speech.

Channel.org is built on a customized Mastodon server run by the Newsmast Foundation, a fediverse-focused charity based in the UK, and it sounds like a neat way to create an ultra-curated social feed. The service is currently available in an invite-only beta, but you can sign up for the waitlist to receive updates. You can check out some examples of channels from Channel.org’s website.

One of the other notable services highlighted today was Bounce, an app that allows you to move your Bluesky account to Mastodon, all without losing any of your followers. The app is built by A New Social, the creators of the Bridgy Fed tool that Bounce uses to connect your Bluesky account to Mastodon. Once your account is bridged, Bounce can then transfer personal data servers using the “move” capability offered by ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, letting you retain your Bluesky followers — and the people you follow — when heading to Mastodon.

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June 5, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

The cursed world of AI kiss and hug apps

by admin June 5, 2025

Doomscroll on TikTok long enough, and you’ll come across an ad for AI video apps. In one ad, a stereotypically nerdy girl puckishly smirks as she uploads a picture of herself and her much more handsome crush. Boom — suddenly, thanks to AI, they’re smooching. In another, I’m shown a woman in a blouse and jeans. Do I want to know what she looks like in a blue bikini? Psst. There’s an app for that. The ad then shows me the woman in said blue bikini.

These apps aren’t peddling the digital nudes many people associate with AI deepfakes, which are proliferating in their own right on app stores. Slapped together by opportunistic developers and sprinkled with subscription fees and microtransactions, they’re all pitching tools to help you make benign fantasies a bit more tangible — but the results feel more cursed than magical.

AI video ads link out to apps with titles like Boom.AI, VideoAI, and DreamVid, made by companies you’ve probably never heard of — a short perusal of Apple’s App Store brings up roughly two dozen options. Despite their titillating promotional material, they feature plenty of innocuous video templates. By uploading one or two photos and hitting a “generate” button, you can change your hair color, hold up a sign, or hug Goku from Dragon Ball Z. But for every one of those, there are several other subtly disturbing or sort of gross ones. In the DreamVid app, there’s an Enhance option that lets you give a person bigger breasts. In the preview, a blonde with a B cup is shown getting an automatic boob job, smiling playfully as she jiggles her new DD size. The AI Dancing category in the same app has scantily clad women suggestively swaying their hips.

It’s a mix that feels calculated. Just when you think there’s too many bikinis and breasts, you’ll see templates featuring cuddly AI cats, Studio Ghibli-style filters, and wholesome grandmas to hug. At the same time, when you look at DreamVid’s AI outfit-of-the-day option, six of 12 outfits are some form of bikini or bathing suit. The rest include skimpy maid outfits, lingerie, a schoolgirl uniform, and gothic lolita cosplay. Only the wedding dress and cheongsam are relatively benign. None of them are aimed at creating pictures of men.

You can faceswap anyone onto these dancing models, or kiss a celebrity (or cartoon character?) Screenshot: DreamVid, Boom.AI

In the ads, the videos generated are in that hazy category of “real enough” to make you uncomfortable yet curious enough to download. Try it yourself and you’ll see the telltale AI cracks appear. Kissing looks awkward — like how a toddler imagines kissing, faces and lips rhythmically smooshing together. (The few that attempt French kissing prove AI really doesn’t know what to do with tongues yet.) Hugs look stiff, with dubious limb and hand placements. If the photos don’t line up, hilarious zoom effects ensue as AI tries to match up bodies. Clothing, hair, accessories, and facial features often morph in and out of existence mid-video.

AI systems have a long-standing racial bias issue, and pairing up subjects of different races seems to confuse these apps. My non-Asian celebrity crushes sometimes spontaneously developed Asian features when I joined them in a video. Other times, the app morphed my features into more Eurocentric ones to match my spouse. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that multiple AI apps insist that kissing parties should generally be the same race. I do, however, feel insulted when it generates a video of my spouse proposing to me — but has them turn away and propose to a random, spontaneously appearing white woman instead.

None of this comes for free. The majority of apps charge microtransaction fees and subscriptions that range from $2.99 to $7.99 per week or $49.99 to $69.99 annually, providing limited credits that you can spend to generate videos. It’s a financial model similar to that of AI nudes apps, even if the content is different.

If you’re curious about where those funds are going, one deep dive into the Videa: AI Video Maker app traced its origins to a company called Pure Yazlim Limited Sirketi that’s based out of Istanbul, Turkey. Boom.AI is run by a company called NineG, which describes itself as “non-gaming app publishing” on its barebones website. Its app store listing also touts the Mozart AI song generator, art generator Plum AI, an AI font creator, and, randomly, Reel TV — a Quibi-esque app for short dramas. DreamVid is run by Shenzhen iMyFone Technology Co.Ltd., which also has a suite of what seems to be productivity and utility apps, plus a Studio Ghibi generator. The Verge reached out to both NineG and iMyFone but didn’t receive a response.

In exchange, you get something infinitely simpler and more permissive than all-purpose video generators like OpenAI’s Sora. You can theoretically produce a kiss on Sora, but only after crafting a text prompt describing what you want, uploading photos for the tool to work with, and clicking through pop-ups asking if you’re over 18 and have consent to use the material you’re uploading — and even then, Sora flagged me smooching Edward Cullen as a potential policy violation. Google’s Veo is much the same. I tried the Edward Cullen kiss test, and Veo refused, saying it would reject prompts that are sexually suggestive, nonconsensual acts, or those that promote harmful stereotypes. On these other apps, you don’t even need to come up with the idea — just upload a couple of pictures, and the system will deliver what you want.

Simple apps for creating deepfaked nudes have produced numerous instances of clear harm, including widespread harassment of women and teen girls. Some of these incidents have led to lawsuits and arrests. There are also legal efforts to crack down on AI-generated nudes and unauthorized “digital replicas” of real people, including the recently signed Take It Down Act, the No Fakes Act, and a bill passed by the New York State Senate.

These apps are unlikely to fall under the purview of anti-deepfake porn laws, though the frequent appearances of celebrities — Boom.AI offered templates that let you make out with both Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen and Timothee Chalamet — make their status under digital replica rules shakier. For now, they sit in a murky zone between app store and platform moderation policies. Major tech companies have lagged on removing even sexually explicit AI generators, and the status of anything milder on their platforms seems nebulous.

Google spokesperson Danielle Cohen tells The Verge that the Google Play Store doesn’t allow apps that contain content or services that could be intended as sexually gratifying, and companies aren’t allowed to use sexually explicit ads (including AI-generated ones) to direct people to their Play Store listings.

Apple’s App Store guidelines state apps shouldn’t contain content that is “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy.” Provided examples include “mean-spirited” content, as well as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” There are no rules about ads for these apps.

I sent Meta an example of an ad for a kiss and hug AI app I found on Instagram Reels. In response, Meta spokesperson Faith Eischen told The Verge, “We have clear rules against nudity and sexual exploitation, including non-consensual intimate imagery — both real and AI-generated — and we’ve removed the shared piece of content for breaking our rules.” Eischen also noted that Meta removes such ads when notified, disables accounts responsible for them, and blocks links to sites hosting such apps.

The Verge reached out to TikTok about its policies but didn’t receive a response.

While it’s fraught to create sexually charged images of celebrities, it overlaps with the existing territory of fan art and meme-ification. Many of these apps’ functions, though, tread in more uncomfortable territory. While it might not be overly pornographic, it’s creepy to deepfake yourself kissing someone. It would be even creepier to do it to a friend or acquaintance who didn’t consent to it. But it’s also not really clear what the average user is looking for — most reviews are simply complaining about the microtransactions.

Moderating this sort of content is kind of like whack-a-mole. Boom.AI had plenty of “use AI to kiss your crush” ads several weeks ago. Now, all the ones I bookmarked have disappeared from social media. Within the app itself, I can no longer generate any kind of kissing video. Instead, the app moved on to ads of a suburban mom twerking, before they, too, were subsequently removed.

Experimenting with AI video apps wasn’t always creepy. Few people would object if everyone was using them to generate heartwarming videos of kids hugging their grandparents; you could argue that it’s weird to want to do this, but it’s not inherently wrong or illegal.

But the fun or arguably helpful use cases are mixed in almost inextricably with the creepy stuff. Changing my hair is a pretty unobjectionable process, but it’s unsettling to swap my own face onto a model “dancing” while wearing cat ears, a plunging crop top that shows off her midriff and bra, hot pants, and lacy garters. (Leonardo DiCaprio’s face on the model is perhaps less disturbing than simply unhinged.) Conversely, I’ve had genderqueer friends say they privately used AI templates that let them see what they’d look like as a different gender, and it helped them figure out their feelings. Even the kissing templates could have fairly innocuous uses — you could be a fiction writer seeking inspiration for a romance novel. In that case, what’s the difference between drawing your own fan art and using an AI video generator? Perhaps, you’re trying to process something and need a little visual help — and that’s how I ended up deepfaking my dead parents.

In a plot stolen straight from The Farewell, my mom died before my grandmother, and my family decided not to tell her out of fear she’d drop dead from shock. But whereas that film dealt in regular white lies, my family decided to update its deception for the modern era. When my grandma started lamenting that my mom had stopped calling, a cousin asked me if there was any chance that I, a tech reporter, could use AI to create video messages of my mother. That would, my cousin said, give my dementia-addled grandma some sense of peace. At the time, I told her it wasn’t possible.

Three years later, I finally generated the deepfake she requested while testing these apps. It was eerie how much it looked like my mom, except when she smiled. My real mother was self-conscious of her underbite. AI mom’s teeth were perfect. All I could see were the ways that AI had failed to capture my mother’s essence. I thought my cousin would feel the same way. Instead, the text I got in response was four hearts interspersed with several exclamation marks and crying face emojis. For her, the horrible deepfake was comforting. My mom would’ve hated this AI version of herself, and yet in the days after creating it, I found myself replaying it over and over — if only because spotting what the AI got wrong reminded me that I hadn’t forgotten the real her.

I found myself replaying it over and over — if only because spotting what the AI got wrong reminded me that I hadn’t forgotten the real her.

After that, I deepfaked my dad hugging me at my wedding. Some little girls dream of their fathers walking them down the aisle. Mine died before that day ever came, and I didn’t make it to his deathbed in time for a proper goodbye. I wondered if deepfaking dad would give me a sense of closure. I used the last good photo I had of him, taken a few days before he passed, and a solo photo of me from my wedding.

The AI did a horrible job. For one, it interpreted my dad’s beanie as a thick shock of black hair. In my family, we teased him for his thin combover and fivehead — which, in his broken English, he insisted was proof he was a true “egghead.” I tried again and got a slightly better result. Still, the pattern on his sweater changed. His facial features morphed into someone who looked close, but ultimately wasn’t my dad. Even so, it made me cry. The AI got so many things wrong, but it was good enough to sketch the shape of my longing. This, too, I sent to my cousin, who replied back with even more crying emoji.

AI evangelists tout this as a positive use case for AI. Wouldn’t it be nice to reanimate your dead loved ones? Before deepfaking my parents, I’d have scoffed and said this is a dystopian premise that denies the humanity of our mortality. But all I can say now is that grief is a strange beast. I’d be lying if I said that I found comfort in these deepfakes, but I can’t deny that a part of me was moved. I’m also no longer inclined to describe this as a bad way to use AI; it’s just weird.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether these apps are inherently harmful or what platforms should do when they appear. Maybe it’s a matter of asking what we’re hoping to see of ourselves reflected in them.

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June 5, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

These 3 free web apps helped me stop procrastinating

by admin May 27, 2025

I don’t know if I would call myself a big procrastinator, but I’m not immune to it — none of us really are. Those days when you just don’t feel like doing anything much are almost inevitable, but unfortunately, the busy world we live in and our rapid work schedules don’t account for such days. Whether you feel like it or not, work still needs to get done, one way or another.

At times, when my schedule’s packed and I’m exhausted, I find myself procrastinating instead of getting work done. Instead of getting mad at myself, I found three web apps that helped me get more productive when I needed it most.

Todoist

Todoist is a super simple web app that, if I’m going to be honest, no one truly needs. Its core functionality can be replaced by a piece of paper or things like Google Calendar. After all, it’s exactly what it sounds like — a to-do list.

Although I said that no one needs Todoist, that doesn’t mean that using it didn’t completely transform my work routines. These days, I never go a single work day without Todoist, and I haven’t paid a penny for it. (Putting it that way makes me feel a bit guilty. I very well might try the paid version — the free app has been nothing short of wonderful.)

Todoist lets you plan out your day and your week. You can assign little tasks to yourself, shift them around from day to day, and assign them different priority levels. You can also set them up to only be due at a certain time of day.

You can choose to either focus on one day at a time or take a look at your upcoming tasks, browsing through one week at a time. Each task can receive a label or a filter, making it easier to find certain types. You can duplicate tasks, although I find that to be the only chore-like part of using the app; it takes a bit of time and isn’t super intuitive.

Todoist also offers integration with various extensions, such as Google Calendar, making for a more seamless experience. There’s even an AI assistant (of course) which I haven’t really needed to try. I kind of love the barebones aspect of Todoist, and the simplicity that it provides.

Todoist keeps me accountable. If I end the day with a task (or five) staring me in the face, you can bet I feel a little more motivated to finish them ASAP. The app can also send you email reminders, which, again, adds to the whole accountability aspect of it.

Could I reasonably replace Todoist with a planner and a pen? Yes. Would I want to? No way. I love Todoist, and I will keep recommending it to anyone who cares to listen.

Pomofocus

Those who have ever struggled with staying productive probably know of the Pomodoro method. It’s a time management technique that helps you break up your work into smaller, hyper-focused intervals. Between each interval, you get a short break, at which point you can freely indulge in all the mindless scrolling/chatting/watching YouTube that you probably want to indulge in outside of your break. The usual intervals are 25 minutes of work and five minutes of relaxation.

Again, the Pomodoro method is nothing new, but Pomofocus makes it simple and easy to follow (or customize). You can start the timer without any annoying sign-up process; just press start and begin your work.

Pomofocus lets you pick between short and long breaks (which I find helpful if I need a bit more than five minutes, but it’s also a bit too easy to lose focus if your break lasts too long during these intervals, at least for me). I like that you can assign yourself tasks with an estimate of how many “pomodoros” each will take, then work through them in the app.

Pomofocus doesn’t force you to do anything. Your Pomodoro timer can be paused or skipped at any given time, so it does mostly come down to self-discipline. I enjoy it for similar reasons as Todoist: Simplicity and ease of access. It’s not going to force you to get your work done, though. I’ve recommended Pomofocus to several friends, and many of them just end up procrastinating through their Pomodoro timer.

I Miss My Cafe

If you’ve ever brought your laptop to a coffee shop for the sole purpose of working, you probably know what that can do for your productivity.

There’s something comforting about the constant buzz of a coffee shop. The baristas, the customers, the machines whipping up lattes, and a faint playlist that you can often barely hear over the sound of the ambience of the place. It’s also a lot harder (at least for me) to procrastinate when I’m surrounded by people. That part can’t be achieved through an app (well, not directly, although things like Focusmate do exist), but you can always recreate your favorite parts of working in a coffee shop through the use of I Miss My Cafe.

I Miss My Cafe is a web app that connects to Spotify to let you create your perfect background noise mix for work. There are thousands of “rainy day” mixes on YouTube, but those cannot be customized. Here, you control the volume and the type of ambience that plays over the playlist. I like that it lets you choose between something noisier and something quieter; it’s very easy to make it suit your current needs.

These three web apps helped me combat procrastination. However, the one thing I’ve learned through all my attempts is that if you’re procrastinating, there’s probably a reason for it. If I’m rested and not too stressed, I get my work done one way or another — but on days when I’m neither, it helps to lean into these three apps combined with a healthy dash of self-discipline.

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May 27, 2025 0 comments