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Hello once again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In. I didnt buy a new phone this year. Or a new laptop, tablet, or smartwatch. That hasnt been a hardship. Ive just been perfectly content with the gear I already ownboth a satisfying feeling and a boon to my pocketbook. Instead of being splashy budget busters, the new products that made me happiest in 2025 have been relatively inexpensive items that bring clever twists to seemingly mundane categories. This week, Im going to tell you about three Ive found especially rewarding. (Im citing their list prices, butthis being Black Friday weekall are widely available at steep discounts as I write this.) The mother of all power banks. Most of the innumerable external batteries Ive owned have been thoroughly unmemorable. Not Ankers $119 Laptop Power Bank, a recent gift from my wife, who bought it off TikTok. As its name indicates, the Laptop Power Banks massive 25,000mAh capacity is enough to charge a computer. It can also handle a tablet, such as my iPad Pro. Or a smartphone. Or other gadgets such as a digital camera. Or how about all of them at the same time? Even if you do charge four devices at once, you wont need to lug four USB cables. Along with two portsone USB-C, one full-size USB-Athe Anker has a built-in cable that retracts into its case, and another that doubles as a wrist strap. Most power banks use LEDs to give you, at best, a vague sense of how much juice is left; this one has a fancy color display with a gauge that indicates precisely how much power remains, a battery health indicator, and other useful stats. Now the Laptop Power Bank is decidedly chonkymore of a briefcase or backpack accessory than something youd slip in a pocket. If all youre looking to do is occasionally top off your phone, its way more battery than you need. But by providing enough power to last through the busiest of workdays, its liberated me from hunting for wall outlets at conferences and running my fingers along the undersides of airplane seats in hopes of finding a power jack there. I get a little thrill every time I use it. The best smartphone wallet Ive owned. I used to carry a wallet so hopelessly overstuffed that George Costanza himself might have pointed and laughed. That was until I managed to downsize to one of those magnetic wallets that stick to the back of a phone. I carry my drivers license, one credit card, an ATM card, the badge that gets me into my office building, and maybe a $20 bill or two, and thats about it. Its the one place in my life where I feel like a preternaturally organized person. But I havent been wild about most of the phone wallets Ive used. Some were too tight: Only two to three cards fit in, and they were almost impossible to extract. Others were too loose, so cards went flying whenever I dropped my phone. And they were all made of leather that tended to end up looking battered and disreputable. Peak Designs $50 Mobile Wallet is unlike any other phone wallet Ive triedand much, much better. Made of sturdy cloth, it handles as many cards as I ever carry, and protects them from accidental exits with a magnetic flap. Most ingeniously, tugging on the flap causes the cards to travel slightly out of the wallet, where its easy to pluck the one I want. Its like having it delivered by a butler. The Mobile Wallet pairs with Peaks Everyday Case, which also sells for about $50 and is equally worth it. Wrapped in a similar fabric-y material, its easy to get on and off my iPhone and remains in mint condition after months of use. The case features Peaks SlimLink, a mounting technology that secures the case to a variety of accessoriesincluding a mount I installed on my e-bike to let my iPhone double as a GoPro-style action camera. A book light I actually use. Early this year, I pledged to read more dead-tree booksespecially the ones piled in a Jenga-like stack on my nightstand. Im still behind, in part because I like to read in bed after my wife has dozed off. Ink and paper do not mix well with utter darkness. This problem was theoretically solved decades ago by tiny clip-on book lights. But theyve always struck me as plasticky, fragile, and inelegant. The fact that they use AAA batteries doesnt make them any more appealing. Not long ago, however, a new generation of snakelike, USB-C-rechargable book lights came to my attention. Instead of clipping one onto a tome, you drape it around your neck, then bend it to direct beams of light from both ends at the pages youre reading. The one I bought, Kikkerlands Hands-Free Book Light, lists for $35. Other options exist, including ones from a company called Glocusent. If theres a downside to wearing a book light twisted around your neck, its that it looks pretty goofy, as my wife has helpfully pointed out several times. But shes the only person whos seen me using mine. Did I mention that shes usually asleep when I have it on? Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. [A note on last weeks newsletter, which discussed my experiences with Googles Gemini 3 Pro LLM: A couple of the issues I cited involved the earlie Gemini 2.5 Flash model, which still powers the Gemini chatbots Fast mode. Ive updated the version of the newsletter on FastCompany.com to clarify this.] More top tech stories from Fast Company Inside the Trump administrations dicey play to block states from regulating AIThe controversial state-level preemption could be Trumps payment to the tech industry for helping bring him back to power in 2024. Read More Its not your job. Your social media feed is ruining your workdayNew research suggests your feed may be shaping your mood, productivity, and interactions at work far more than you realize. Read More Jeffrey Epsteins emails, now in a searchable, Gmail-style interfaceYou are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, jeevacation@gmail.com. Read More This project is using AI and satellite data to create the first definitive map of the entire continent of AfricaMost African countries lack accurate local base maps, stalling all sorts of government and business decisions. A new project aims to create this vital resource. Read More With new Opus 4.5 model, Anthropics Claude could remain the best AI coding toolClaude Code is already widely used by developersand with a new brain, it may fend off Googles new Antigravity tool. Read More How to introduce AI to a skeptical workplaceFor AI to provide the benefits that it can bring, you need your whole teams buy-in. Read More
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E-Commerce
If you loved the Lego Game Boy but couldnt get yourself to buy it because it was only a display piece that couldnt play actual Game Boy games, I’ve got great news for you: It’s no longer merely a clever block of bricks. Substance Labs, a merry band of Lego and gaming lovers based in Switzerland, have created a kit that retrofits the official brick-perfect Lego set into an unofficial pixel-perfect playable Game Boy. The name of this wündertronics is BrickBoy. Yes, its a Kickstarter project, so the usual may not deliver caveats apply. Substance Labs calls itself a team of creators and engineers who grew up building with Lego and gaming on the classics [who have] spent the last years working across hardware, software, and product design, from open-source projects to custom electronics. I need to believe they will deliver on their promise because I need to believe that dreams do come true sometimes. And apparently, given the more than $500,000 that they have collected so far from project supporters, many other people feel the same way. Substance Labs says the prototypes are built and tested. We have shipped a naked kit to early testers, creators, and magazines, the company says. Now we are ready to move into the next phase together with you. The technical implementation of the BrickBoy kit is modular, allowing users to install the electronic core into the Lego chassis in under 10 minutes without soldering or coding. The hardware fits directly inside the assembled model, activating a functional display and speaker system that runs freeware, home-brew titles, and legally obtained ROMs. While the base unit relies on digital files, an optional third-party cartridge reader add-on allows the system to interface with physical Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges. The nonfunctional Lego kit [Photo: Lego] Kits start at $115 for the essential edition, which will make your Lego model play original Game Boy games. A $196 collectors kit model plays every Game Boy title, including Classic, Color, and Advance, without any limitations. The Substance Labs designers say it has accelerable gameplay for faster sessions (so you can pace through long Pokémon games), a customizable backlight, Bluetooth audio, wireless game loading, and system updates. They have other versions, like the Gamer and Collector editions, which have additional features like Bluetooth audio and an “Exposition Mode” that keeps the unit powered and lit for display purposes. A 3D rendering of the Substance Labs Gamer Kit [Image: Substance Labs] I dont care much about the display purposes myself. My home might be the closest thing to the Lego Housecomplete with a Lego brick minefield all over the floor, thanks to my sonso I welcome the idea of turning all these Lego nostalgia sets into functional gear. The Danish company has been milking the 80s and 90s with sets like Lego Atari and Lego Pac-Man, which are cool and all, but do nothing but sit on a shelf gathering dust. The BrickBoy is a perfect example of how Lego could perhaps think of a way to make its sets actually usable objects. Not all of them would be possible to turn into a real thing, but models like the Game Boy, with its spot-on dimensions and proportions, are ideal. I get it, though. Theres probably not enough business to justify the engineering effort to mass-produce something like this. So Lego will leave it to the obsessives. Now Substance Labs better Miyamoto the hell out of this thing and hurry up with the deliveries, because I really need to get it for my son this holiday season. Hes already a Mario junkie, and he will become a Tetris addict too, just like his dad.
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E-Commerce
Ive worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years Ive earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years its been a little more. Im naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, theres always been enough to cover the basicsplus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that Im only one missed invoice from financial collapse. Although Im generally wary of self-diagnosis, the term money dysmorphiaa disconnect between how we feel about our finances and the realityfits me like a glove. From the rise of HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet) to the boom in income stacking, todays workplace trends illustrate just how messed up our relationship with finances has become. While money dysmorphia isnt a clinical term, its a shorthand that many workers now recognize. Credit Karma reports that 29% of Americans experience it, especially millennials and Gen Z, so Im in good company. But could the nature of solopreneurshipthe feast-or-famine cycles, the autonomy, the pressure to slay in your own lanemake us even more prone? Its absolutely heightened for solopreneurs, freelancers, and anyone with an unstable income, says Alex King, founder of financial education platform Generation Money. Without a fixed monthly salary, they normalize volatility and uncertainty, which can create a sense of inadequacy or inflated confidence in their finances. The numbers paint an intriguing picture. Advice site Freelancing Support reported that 41% of freelancers struggled with poor financial well-being in 2024, and a 2025 study found that three in four U.S. solopreneurs have less than six months worth of savingsor no safety net at all. Plenty of people have good reasons to be anxious. But a surprising portion are on solid ground: The number of six-figure solopreneurs has almost doubled since 2020, and research from the Minneapolis Fed shows that self-employed workers earn significantly more over their careers than those in traditional jobs. Everyones always thriving, innovating, scaling Kim Berndt, cofounder of the fashion tech collaboration lab We.art studio in Cologne, Germany, has been a solopreneur since 2017. After three years of not paying herself a salary, her numbers finally look stable. Emotionally, though, she feels anything but. Social media plays a significant role in warping her sense of financial reality. Its the biggest scam, because it creates the illusion that everyone is always thriving, innovating, scaling, she says. The two industries I straddletech and fashionglorify speed and visibility, yet theyre the Wild West when it comes to pay. Berndt has accepted that she may never feel stable, especially in an emerging field that many still dont understand and that offers little clarity around value. I chose self-employment, so I have to find ways to cope, she says. I identify with Berndts me-against-the-world mentality, so I was curious to hear what financial therapist Elana Feinsmith had to say about this predicament. I told her about the ripple effects of my own money dysmorphia: oscillating between avoiding my bank balance and obsessively checking it, hesitating to charge fairly, and feeling guilt and shame over basic spending. Finances are like an iceberg, she says. The numbers sit above the waterline, but below is where the dark, murky feelings live. She encourages me to examine not just the volatility of my work but also the money scripts I learned earlier in life. It doesnt take her long to extract that being the eldest daughter (surprise!) has something to do with it. Figure out the amount that would calm your nervous system, then project a few years down the line to see the real picture, she tells me. A panic alarm sounds in my headif only it were that simple. Feinsmith says that reaction is typical of money dysmorphia. It makes long-term planning seem impossible, and she sees clients grapple with it at every income level. Addressing the iceberg There are now 72.9 million independent workers in the U.S., and almost everyone wants to leave corporate jobs to start their own businesses, amid the fifth year of persistent inflation. King warns that these conditions are likely to breed more widespread money dysmorphia. But it doesnt have to define the solopreneur experience. Small structural changes can help close the gap between perception and reality. Have separate accounts for personal and business finances, King advises. Combining them distorts whether you feel rich one month and poor the next. Avoid months of paying yourself nothing, and dont overpay yourself when things go well. Ideally, work toward a baseline salary or a fixed minimum to cover costs. As the end of the year approaches, Im particularly beguiled by other freelancers 2025 roundups, where they highlight their wins, earnings, and learnings. Im all for championing the wins, but after ingesting a few, I fall into catastrophizing my own balance sheet. King points out that many of these updates confuse revenue with profit. Theyre not saying I made X amount, but then had to deduct what I spent on outreach, subscriptions, and training, because thats not sexy, he says. This year, Ill be approaching the freelance wrap-up posts with caution. And after consulting the experts, Im more convinced that theres no quick fix for financial dysmorphia. Yet just the idea of taking a pickax to my financial iceberg makes me feel calmer. Perhaps thats the best economic stability a solopreneur can ask for: not perfect peace of mind, but the confidence to keep moving anyway.
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E-Commerce
As the midterm election primaries inch closer, some candidates are focusing their campaigns on how theyll regulate artificial intelligence. On the right, populist Republicans are warning that the AI industry stands to undermine the Make America Great Again movement. On the left, theres worry about the sectors growing political and social power. Across the spectrum, theres near-universal concern about what the technology might be doing to children. The donor class is now getting involved: A super PAC called Leading the Future backed by OpenAI executive Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz plans to spend as much as $100 million in the midterms to support its preferred candidates. Another bipartisan super PAC, focused on pushing for a national framework on regulating AI, formed earlier this week. These fights come as the Trump administration pushes to limit the ability of states to regulate the technology. Alex Bores, who authored legislation on AI in New York state and is running to represent its 12th district, has become an early target for Leading the Futures political spending during the midterms. It’s a badge of honor, he says, comparing the effort to an F rating from the National Rifle Association. This is not tech versus everyone else, he tells Fast Company. This is one small subset of the tech ecosystem that, instead of engaging in collaborative discussions on bills and how we can work for all, has decided they want to drown out the voices of anyone who isn’t them by spending hundreds of millions. Fast Company chatted with Bores about AI in politics, his time working at Palantir, and what it might take to modernize the government. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. One of the things the draft executive order talks about is creating a federal approach to regulating AI by the Trump administration. How seriously do you take that? It’s a cliché in D.C. that when you want something to not get done, make a commission to study it. And so making a proposal to study a thingto maybe put a policy forwardis silly. I want to be clear, the correct answer to these questions is a federal standard. The only reason the states have been acting is because the federal government hasn’t. If they want to actually work on a federal standard, they will find partners across the aisle. What they are prioritizing is stopping any state from taking action, not actually solving problems. We’re in a moment when there’s a lot of criticism and debate about what the future of the Democratic Party should look like. In New York, a liberal stronghold, Im curious about where conversations about how we should handle emerging technologies and AI might sit in the remaking of the Democratic Partyand the push to focus on issues that speak to younger voters and disaffected voters who havent been so into what the Democrats have been offering. We should always be human first and human focused. The specific ways that plays out in AI policy are ones that speak to younger people. The biggest impact of AI on the job market right now is on entry-level jobs, and you’re seeing a rise in unemployment of people in that cohort looking for their first job. One of the most popular things we did in New York this year was phone-free schools and making it so that we could actually change how tech is used in the classroom and make sure that it’s been used for education and not for screening or scrolling on social media. [Earlier this year, the state instituted new rules on electronic devices during school hours.] We shouldnt shoot for one big grand bargain on AI, as if it’s a static issue. It is something that infuses everything we do, and we need to continually be updating our protections as the technology grows. Can you talk a little bit more about what you did at Palantir and your decision to leave? I was at Palantir for four and a half years. I spent the vast majority of that time on the federal civilian team, and so it was working with the government to better serve the American people. I worked with the Department of Justice to go after the opioid epidemic. . . . I worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs on better staffing their hospitals and better serving veterans. I worked with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] on understanding epidemics. I’m really proud of the work that I did there, because it was all about actually making government work better. Separate from tech, I think that’s the thing that the Democratic party and the country as a whole needs to see more of, is people who are willing to push through the obstacles and make sure that government is actually a force for good and serving people, and not just the political mudslinging that is most of what they see on TV. I left in 2019 when Palantir renewedor soon afterPalantir renewed their contract with ICE. Palantir had a contract with Homeland Security Investigations to help with fighting cross-border drug trafficking and human trafficking. During the first Trump administration, they started using that software for Enforcement and Removal Operationsfor what most people think of as deportation. That’s a different department within ICE. . . . That wasn’t something that was foreseen when the contract was signed in the Obama administration. And when Palantir renewed that contract, without cutting off that work or putting in protections that would step up in the future, that motivated me to leave. What do you make of the conversation surrounding Palantir right now? The company has insisted that its worked through multiple administrations, but the work with ICE, as well as with Israel, has sparked major criticisms of the company. I haven’t been there for six years, so I don’t have more detail on how they currently operate than anyone reading the news, but I’m proud of the work that I did there and very public with the reasons why I left. How hard is it to buy technology in government to make things faster, more efficient? Government modernizationupdating government software and providing better customer servicecontinues to be a big challenge. No one asks about government acquisition. This is amazing. It’s horribly inefficient, and that hurts the American people. It takes the government far too long to be able to sign a contract, so the costtherefore what the American people end up payingrises. It then benefits sort of the insiders who know how to do contracting more than the people who can deliver useful services, so then the American people don’t get the benefits from startups and others that might have cheaper, faster ways of solving problems. It is a problem at every level of government. One of the first bills I passed in New York, as an Assembly member, was making it easier for the government to actually use cloud computing instead of buying servers and always running on hardware, which slowed down getting services to New Yorkers. . . . A program called FedRAMP was supposed to make it easier to get tech to the government: You would do one security screening, be certified, and then be able to sell to each [federal] department, so they didn’t have to do their own [screening]. But it has become an incredibly onerous process that just makes it much more difficult to actualy work with the federal government. Should politicians be using generative AI in advertisements? I haven’t done it. But I have written the laws in New York that regulate it, and what we came to was it has to be disclosed. And if you use it to make deepfakes of a candidate, the candidate has the right to sue for injunctive relief with expedited review to pull that ad down if it’s going to deceive the public into something that actually happened. The problem of deepfakes is one that has a technical solution, and policymakers just haven’t kept up. Historically, we’re told it’s . . . just going to be a cat and mouse game where you have better detectors of deepfakes and then better AI generators [or that] we’ll never win that battle. But the industry has created a free, open-source metadata standards of data called C2PA that can be attached to any standard audio, video, or image file type that cryptographically proves whether that piece of content was taken from an actual device, was generated by AI, and/or how it’s been edited throughout the process. If you got to a place where 90%, 95% of people were using that standard, we’ve solved the problem of deepfakes, because anytime you don’t see that credential, you would immediately be suspicious of what’s being shown.
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E-Commerce
Social media has become inexorably intertwined with our daily lives, but not all platforms are equally popular. For every cultural phenomenon like TikTok, there’s a Mastodon. It would be easy, based on the news media’s borderline obsession with TikTok and X, to assume that those platforms are, if not the most used social media tools in America today, then very close to the top. They’re not. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle, according to a new study from Pew Research. Instead, it’s YouTube that is the most commonly used social media platform in the U.S.by a landslide. Pew reports that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube. (The platform is also the most widely used by U.S. teens.) Facebook ranks high in usage as well, with 71% of adults saying they use it. Roughly half of U.S. adults say they visit each of these platforms at least once a day. Another Meta holding, Instagram, comes in third with 50% of the 5,022 adults surveyed saying they use it. Things fall off from there, though. YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are the only platforms with usage figures above 50%. TikTok, which ranks fourth, is used by just 37% of the adult respondents (usage numbers by teens and tweens are almost certainly much higher). WhatsApp comes in at 32% and Reddit at 26%, which is just a fraction above Snapchat’s 25%. While X comes in with roughly 20% of respondents saying they use it, Meta’s Threads is used by just 8% of the people Pew surveyed, Bluesky by 4%, and Truth Social is last among the ranked sites, coming in at just 3%. Pew’s study looked beyond which sites are the most popular to also give a demographic breakdown of who’s using what. As you might expect, adults younger than 30 are more frequent users of social media than older adults, but that also can vary by platform. (For instance, while YouTube sees heavy usage from all age groups, Instagram is used by 80% of adults between 18 and 29, but only 19% of people 65 or older.) Here’s how usage breaks down by other demographic fields. Gender Women are much more likely to use platforms that lean toward communication and interaction. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are most used by that demographic, while men opt more for X and Reddit. Ethnicity While people of all races and ethnicities use social media, some groups favor certain platforms more than others. Pew reports that TikTok and WhatsApp are used more frequently by Black and Hispanic adults. Among the survey pool, Instagram is used regularly by 62% of Hispanics, 58% of Asians, and 54% of Black adults versus 45% of white adults. Education Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to use Reddit, WhatsApp, and Instagram, the study found. People with less education lean toward TikTok. Roughly 40% of American adults with a college degree say they use Reddit, compared to just 15% of people with a high school diploma or less. Political leanings You can probably figure this one out without the study. Democrats and left-leaning folks are more likely than Republicans to use WhatsApp, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads. When it comes to X and Truth Social, things are reversed. Just two years ago, though, things weren’t as cut-and-dried. In 2023, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use X (which was still Twitter until July 23 of that year).
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E-Commerce