Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Intuit says, “We are reimagining Mint as part of Intuit Credit Karma.” Many Mint users, however, hate the move. Nevertheless, Intuit will discontinue its personal finance application, Mint, as of Jan. 1, 2024. Mint has been a mainstay in the budgeting and financial tracking community since its inception in 2006. Mea culpa. I’m with the users. When I started tracking my personal finances on a computer, I used VisiCalc. Over the years, I’ve used other programs, but I was an early user of Mint. Wh…

GPT-4, OpenAI’s most powerful large language model (LLM), has been available for months through a subscription to ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 a month. If you’re looking for more accurate responses to your queries, AI-generated images, web browsing, data analysis, and access to different GPT-4 bots all in one place, GPT-4 has proven itself superior to the publicly available GPT-3.5.Also: How to use ChatGPT Plus: From web browsing to pluginsDon’t get me wrong -- GPT-4 can still make blunders, w…

It sounds more like science fiction than reality, but Swiss newspaper Aargauer Zeitung reports that approximately three million smart toothbrushes were hijacked by hackers to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. These innocuous bathroom gadgets -- transformed into soldiers in a botnet army -- knocked out a Swiss company for several hours, costing millions of euros in damages.No, we’re not kidding. Also: Do you love or fear your smart home devices? For most Americans, it’s bothW…

ZDNET’s key takeawaysI checked out , , , , and , and Monarch Money, at $99 a year, is my top pick. Pros: Easy to set up, with powerful tools for analyzing your finances and building a budget. Cons: The most expensive personal financial program.I spent my Thanksgiving week looking at personal finance programs, but since Intuit decided to bury Mint -- its popular and free money tracking and budget program -- I didn’t have a choice. Mint was supposed to stop working on January 1, 2024. Intui…

ZDNET’s key takeawaysI checked out , , , , and , and Monarch Money, at $99 a year, is my top pick. Pros: Easy to set up, with powerful tools for analyzing your finances and building a budget. Cons: The most expensive personal financial program.I spent my Thanksgiving week looking at personal finance programs, but since Intuit decided to bury Mint -- its popular and free money tracking and budget program -- I didn’t have a choice. Mint was supposed to stop working on January 1, 2024. Intui…

I have 2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of fiber internet in my home for $120 a month. I’m lucky. I have access to that kind of broadband and the money to pay for it. Many people aren’t that fortunate. On Wednesday, May 1, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a critical initiative to provide affordable broadband, ran out of money. That means 23 million households -- roughly 60 million Americans -- will have to choose between paying for internet or paying for food, rent, and other utilities.Al…

We all know that some perfectly good Windows 10 PCs can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. But did you know that Canalys Insights estimated there are 240 million Windows 10 PCs doomed to the trash heap because they can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 after Microsoft dumps Windows 10 support on October 14, 2025? Wow. That’s a lot of trashed PCs. And, it may be worse than that. By IT asset management firm Lansweeper’s count, 40% of all enterprise workstations can’t make the upgrade, which would put the num…

Over the past 10 years, Kubernetes has become central to how modern computing is orchestrated. You won’t see it, but there’s very little you can do today with any sophisticated website or cloud service that doesn’t have Kubernetes managing background work. So, what is it, and why does it matter so much?The story starts with Docker making it easy to run applications in containers. Before that, companies ran most of their applications using virtual machines (VMs) on servers, data centers, and the…

ZDNET’s key takeaways is $99 a year but you can get it for 50% off until June 30th with code MINT50, plus there’s a 30-day free trial.Pros: It’s easy to set up, with powerful tools for analyzing your finances and building a budget. Cons: It’s one of the more expensive personal financial program I tested.I spent last Thanksgiving week looking at personal finance programs. Why? When Intuit decided to bury Mint, its popular and free money-tracking and budgeting program, I didn’t have a choice. I…

If that five-year-old laptop that runs at a turtle’s pace is killing your back-to-school mood, it might be time for an upgrade. Students have many options when it comes to affordable laptops for studying and getting their work done, including lightweight Chromebooks, which cost significantly less than most Windows machines or Apple’s Mac offerings and are streamlined with ChromeOS.Also: The best Chromebooks for workThe lighter OS makes it easy to navigate to popular apps like Google Docs, Google…