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16 Jun 2025

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Facial recognition technology supported by big name retailers
Large retailers such as Briscoes, Bunnings and Mitre 10 support the use of facial recognition technology to combat repeat offenders but concerns continue over potential privacy breaches.

Facial recognition error sees woman accused of theft
An apparent mix-up with the technology led to Danielle Horan being wrongly accused of shoplifting.

Download mosh pits may cause hundreds of 999 calls
Technology like smart watches can think metal fans in mosh pits have been involved in a collision.

The Full Nerd: PCIe 6.0 inbound, ChatGPT rekt by Atari, & Alienware Lego-fied
Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. In it, we dive into the hottest topics from our YouTube show, plus interesting news from across the web. This week, we’re…clawing our way back to health. Attending the Nintendo Switch 2 launch at our local Nintendo Store felled both Adam and Will, delaying our usual Tuesday episode. But don’t worry: I still have plenty of juicy news bits to share with you below. Also our Micro Center tour videos are live! Plus, now that Adam and Will are feeling better, we’ll still have a stream—catch us on live on Friday morning (6/13). Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox every Friday? Sign up on our website! In this episode of The Full Nerd… With the plague having temporarily overtaken Adam and Will, I don’t have a Full Nerd episode to tease—but there are two Micro Center videos to share. (And a third is on the way.) Adam was very excited to meet YouTuber mryeester in person. Trust me, I have so many pictures. Will Smith / Foundry When you visit the opening of a store you’ve wanted in your area for ages, what do you do? Explore all day, of course. We wandered the aisles, talked to the people in lines, and even bought some goodies for ourselves. (You may recognize a couple of the interviewees.) For an extra Easter egg, drop by our Discord server—Adam posted an extra clip that’s pinned in the #general channel. “Is this the year of Linux?” has been a running joke (but also serious consideration) on our show for a bit, and so Adam decided to take the question to the people. He tried to find Linux users at Micro Center—which was surprisingly (or not surprisingly? –Brad) more difficult than expected. The happy surprise? Running into a friend of the show who turned out to be a 20-year Linux veteran! (That surprised shout you hear in the background when he tells us his tenure? That was me, forgetting how hot the mics are.) As for the video that completes the trifecta, we quizzed people on the hardware they rolled up to buy—as well as what they’re rocking now. Unlike the operating system discussion, a lot more of PC building’s diversity showed its colors here. My favorite quote? The Mac user who said he’d eventually have the “religious discussion” with his kid about what hardware to choose for a build. Can’t wait for our next live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s best nerd news Outside of the teeny one applied to my Raspberry Pi 4, I haven’t thought about thermal pads in years.Honeywell Sometimes, joy comes from delightful news. (For example, a RTX 5070 graphics card that houses a whole PC.) Other times, a non-zero amount of schadenfreude is the result. (I really dislike the overhyping of AI, and I like when that gets pointed out.) This week, I got to experience both kinds of feelings. Perhaps you will, too. This modded RTX 5070 graphics card hides a full-blown mini PC within: Bored with your usual small-form factor PC builds? Boutique desktop builder CherryTree’s got something for you—a hollowed out 5070 that holds a whole PC. Including RGB lights. RTX 5090 stock may improve, then get worse: July 9 is when high tariffs on Chinese goods go back into effect—and so MSI and Gigabyte are rushing to get as many cards to U.S. shores before that happens. But after that stock runs out, no one’s certain what U.S. fiscal policy will be…so if you want this flagship card, you may want to jump quickly in the next couple of months. Do you know these 5 new PC cooling advancements? I’ll admit, this rundown of 5 newer PC cooling technologies makes my standard air cooler seem like the equivalent of farming with a scythe. I can’t wait to see the pumpless water cooler in action. Researchers converted old phones into ‘tiny data centers,’ then used them to watch marine life: Reusing old tech in this novel way hits just right—I hate having devices lying around that I know could be still in service. Seems like automated monitoring is the best use case, so: Best peaceful animal livestreams, incoming? (I’d watch starfish scuttle around on an ocean floor. Or hedgehogs roll around. The world offers so many possibilities.) This new Alienware Lego kit is too “expensive”: The only way to acquire one of these Lego kit is to earn points through Alienware’s website and social media channels, but I will never earn 10,000 in a reasonable amount of time. Alienware, can’t I just throw money at this problem? Isn’t that why I have a job? This is so cool.ZealousidealWorry881/Reddit PCIe 6.0 products are finally on the way: Sure, the specifications for PCIe 7.0 got formally announced, but the real news is PCI 6.0 products will appear in 2025. Most likely, the first sightings will happen at the end of the year, but that’s still a welcome start. Forgot how nightmarish GPU boxes used to look? This book can fix that: Some things were meant to be left to be buried by the sands of time. I still have a GPU box from 2010 and let me tell you, it is tame compared to the horrors chronicled in this coffee table book. Is right now the worst timeline for being a PC gamer? This is a question we asked of Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, and the answer was a grim “Yes.” Between hardware and game prices going up, PC gamers may be best off hunkering down with what they’ve already got, including your gigantic backlog of free Epic Games downloads. This 80s-inspired, retro-futurist PC battlestation is pretty dope: Just look at the pictures and you’ll understand why my colleague Michael Crider was reduced to expressing his longing in all caps. (Like him, I also look forward to the video detailing the build process.) ‘Get rekt, ChatGPT’: OK, no one actually said this, but if a nearly 50-year old Atari game could talk, that’s what I imagine it’d say to ChatGPT after the AI chatbot wiped out at basic chess. Even Advanced AI Suffers ‘Accuracy Collapse’ in the Face of Complex Problems: Yes, I’m dogpiling a bit on AI. (I may have a low tolerance for current models and their…quirks. I would use a stronger word, but my boss reads this newsletter.) If this technology is to truly help improve our lives, its shortcomings should be recognized and addressed—so I’m glad a major tech company is weighing in with realistic concerns about AI’s abilities. That’s all for this week—we should be back on our regular schedule next Tuesday. Catch you all then! -Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.

One NZ Satellite IoT goes live for customers
One NZ launches nationwide Satellite Internet of Things (IoT) service, powered by Starlink Direct to Cell technology.

9 menial tasks ChatGPT can handle in seconds, saving you hours
ChatGPT is rapidly changing the world. The process is already happening, and it’s only going to accelerate as the technology improves, as more people gain access to it, and as more learn how to use it. What’s shocking is just how many tasks ChatGPT is already capable of managing for you. While the naysayers may still look down their noses at the potential of AI assistants, I’ve been using it to handle all kinds of menial tasks for me. Here are my favorite examples. Further reading: This tiny ChatGPT feature helps me tackle my days more productively Write your emails for you Dave Parrack / Foundry We’ve all been faced with the tricky task of writing an email—whether personal or professional—but not knowing quite how to word it. ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for you, penning the (hopefully) perfect email based on whatever information you feed it. Let’s assume the email you need to write is of a professional nature, and wording it poorly could negatively affect your career. By directing ChatGPT to write the email with a particular structure, content, and tone of voice, you can give yourself a huge head start. A winning tip for this is to never accept ChatGPT’s first attempt. Always read through it and look for areas of improvement, then request tweaks to ensure you get the best possible email. You can (and should) also rewrite the email in your own voice. Learn more about how ChatGPT coached my colleague to write better emails. Generate itineraries and schedules Dave Parrack / Foundry If you’re going on a trip but you’re the type of person who hates planning trips, then you should utilize ChatGPT’s ability to generate trip itineraries. The results can be customized to the nth degree depending on how much detail and instruction you’re willing to provide. As someone who likes to get away at least once a year but also wants to make the most of every trip, leaning on ChatGPT for an itinerary is essential for me. I’ll provide the location and the kinds of things I want to see and do, then let it handle the rest. Instead of spending days researching everything myself, ChatGPT does 80 percent of it for me. As with all of these tasks, you don’t need to accept ChatGPT’s first effort. Use different prompts to force the AI chatbot to shape the itinerary closer to what you want. You’d be surprised at how many cool ideas you’ll encounter this way—simply nix the ones you don’t like. Break down difficult concepts Dave Parrack / Foundry One of the best tasks to assign to ChatGPT is the explanation of difficult concepts. Ask ChatGPT to explain any concept you can think of and it will deliver more often than not. You can tailor the level of explanation you need, and even have it include visual elements. Let’s say, for example, that a higher-up at work regularly lectures everyone about the importance of networking. But maybe they never go into detail about what they mean, just constantly pushing the why without explaining the what. Well, just ask ChatGPT to explain networking! Okay, most of us know what “networking” is and the concept isn’t very hard to grasp. But you can do this with anything. Ask ChatGPT to explain augmented reality, multi-threaded processing, blockchain, large language models, what have you. It will provide you with a clear and simple breakdown, maybe even with analogies and images. Analyze and make tough decisions Dave Parrack / Foundry We all face tough decisions every so often. The next time you find yourself wrestling with a particularly tough one—and you just can’t decide one way or the other—try asking ChatGPT for guidance and advice. It may sound strange to trust any kind of decision to artificial intelligence, let alone an important one that has you stumped, but doing so actually makes a lot of sense. While human judgment can be clouded by emotions, AI can set that aside and prioritize logic. It should go without saying: you don’t have to accept ChatGPT’s answers. Use the AI to weigh the pros and cons, to help you understand what’s most important to you, and to suggest a direction. Who knows? If you find yourself not liking the answer given, that in itself might clarify what you actually want—and the right answer for you. This is the kind of stuff ChatGPT can do to improve your life. Plan complex projects and strategies Dave Parrack / Foundry Most jobs come with some level of project planning and management. Even I, as a freelance writer, need to plan tasks to get projects completed on time. And that’s where ChatGPT can prove invaluable, breaking projects up into smaller, more manageable parts. ChatGPT needs to know the nature of the project, the end goal, any constraints you may have, and what you have done so far. With that information, it can then break the project up with a step-by-step plan, and break it down further into phases (if required). If ChatGPT doesn’t initially split your project up in a way that suits you, try again. Change up the prompts and make the AI chatbot tune in to exactly what you’re looking for. It takes a bit of back and forth, but it can shorten your planning time from hours to mere minutes. Compile research notes Dave Parrack / Foundry If you need to research a given topic of interest, ChatGPT can save you the hassle of compiling that research. For example, ahead of a trip to Croatia, I wanted to know more about the Croatian War of Independence, so I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a brief summary of the conflict with bullet points to help me understand how it happened. After absorbing all that information, I asked ChatGPT to add a timeline of the major events, further helping me to understand how the conflict played out. ChatGPT then offered to provide me with battle maps and/or summaries, plus profiles of the main players. You can go even deeper with ChatGPT’s Deep Research feature, which is now available to free users, up to 5 Deep Research tasks per month. With Deep Research, ChatGPT conducts multi-step research to generate comprehensive reports (with citations!) based on large amounts of information across the internet. A Deep Research task can take up to 30 minutes to complete, but it’ll save you hours or even days. Summarize articles, meetings, and more Dave Parrack / Foundry There are only so many hours in the day, yet so many new articles published on the web day in and day out. When you come across extra-long reads, it can be helpful to run them through ChatGPT for a quick summary. Then, if the summary is lacking in any way, you can go back and plow through the article proper. As an example, I ran one of my own PCWorld articles (where I compared Bluesky and Threads as alternatives to X) through ChatGPT, which provided a brief summary of my points and broke down the best X alternative based on my reasons given. Interestingly, it also pulled elements from other articles. (Hmph.) If you don’t want that, you can tell ChatGPT to limit its summary to the contents of the link. This is a great trick to use for other long-form, text-heavy content that you just don’t have the time to crunch through. Think transcripts for interviews, lectures, videos, and Zoom meetings. The only caveat is to never share private details with ChatGPT, like company-specific data that’s protected by NDAs and the like. Create Q&A flashcards for learning Dave Parrack / Foundry Flashcards can be extremely useful for drilling a lot of information into your brain, such as when studying for an exam, onboarding in a new role, prepping for an interview, etc. And with ChatGPT, you no longer have to painstakingly create those flashcards yourself. All you have to do is tell the AI the details of what you’re studying. You can specify the format (such as Q&A or multiple choice), as well as various other elements. You can also choose to keep things broad or target specific sub-topics or concepts you want to focus on. You can even upload your own notes for ChatGPT to reference. You can also use Google’s NotebookLM app in a similar way. Provide interview practice Dave Parrack / Foundry Whether you’re a first-time jobseeker or have plenty of experience under your belt, it’s always a good idea to practice for your interviews when making career moves. Years ago, you might’ve had to ask a friend or family member to act as your mock interviewer. These days, ChatGPT can do it for you—and do it more effectively. Inform ChatGPT of the job title, industry, and level of position you’re interviewing for, what kind of interview it’ll be (e.g., screener, technical assessment, group/panel, one-on-one with CEO), and anything else you want it to take into consideration. ChatGPT will then conduct a mock interview with you, providing feedback along the way. When I tried this out myself, I was shocked by how capable ChatGPT can be at pretending to be a human in this context. And the feedback it provides for each answer you give is invaluable for knocking off your rough edges and improving your chances of success when you’re interviewed by a real hiring manager. Further reading: Non-gimmicky AI apps I actually use every day