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1 Feb 2025

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This high-speed 20K power bank for laptops is a steal at just $36
One thing I always carry with me is a large-capacity power bank because I never want to be caught with a dead phone, laptop, or earbuds. If you don’t have one of your own, now’s your chance to snag one — this 20K Iniu power bank is only $36 right now on Amazon. With its 20,000mAh capacity, this Iniu portable charger has enough juice to fully recharge a MacBook Air or Steam Deck and still have some left over. Or it can recharge your Samsung S23 or iPhone 15 over three times and still keep going with a bit more. It’s universally compatible and works with phones, tablets, laptops, earbuds, smartwatches, and more. It doesn’t just have a large capacity — while still being TSA-compliant for flights, mind you — but it charges quickly, with a max output of 65W through its primary USB-C port (when used alone). With both USB-C ports charging simultaneously, it can output 45W and 20W, respectively. A third USB-A port can push 18W of charging to a third device. Not to mention that this thing is pretty compact, at least compared to other large-capacity power banks in its class. At 5.87 inches long, 2.87 inches wide, and 1.06 inches thick, you can easily carry it around with you in a bag or even deep pockets. It’s a solid deal, no doubt about it. Grab this 20K power bank for cheap on Amazon while you can — it won’t stay this price forever. Get peace of mind for your portable devices for just $36Buy now at Amazon

Three Israeli hostages, including dual US citizen, set for release in Gaza
Yarden Bibas, the father of two young children who were also kidnapped by Hamas, is among the latest hostages to be released.

Score this 2-pack of 100W USB-C cables for just $8 right now
Is there such a thing as having too many charging cables? I don’t think so! In fact, given how fast today’s power banks and charging plugs have gotten, it’s probably time to upgrade your cables. And now’s a great time to do it because these Ugreen USB-C cables are on sale at Amazon. Normally priced at $12, this two-pack is now down to just $8 — on par with a single dolled-up Starbucks drink. These are USB-C-to-USB-C cables, each supporting 100W of power throughput, so you’ll be able to charge up your phone, laptop, and other devices in the blink of an eye. (Assuming you have an equally fast power bank or wall plug.) But these cables are great for data transfers, too. They’re capable of up to 480Mbps speeds, which is fast enough to transfer 1GB in under a minute. And they’re each 3.3 feet long, ideal for connecting devices on your workstation or plugging in your phone while in bed. The braided nylon sleeve keeps them resistant to wear and tear, so you can expect longer-than-typical lifespans out of these. If your devices aren’t charging quickly or if your files aren’t transferring fast enough, the bottleneck might be your cables. This is a great price for two fast-charging USB-C cables, so snatch this deal while you still can. (Need even longer cables? The 6.6-foot variant and 10-foot variant are also on sale, albeit for a slightly lesser discount.) Two fast-charging USB-C cables for just $8? That's a great dealBuy now at Amazon

The secret to saving big on streaming services: Be ruthlessly disloyal
Remember when you first signed up for Netflix streaming? It was nice. A few bucks a month for tons of good movies, some pretty decent original shows, zero ads, and you could finally ditch the nightmare that was cable. Fast forward to 2025, and streaming is the nightmare. It splits up everything you want to watch across a dozen different platforms, all of which now have ads just so they can make you pay to remove them. They remove content constantly, they’re full to bursting with things you don’t care about or need (Hades the video game, a dozen horrible Christmas movies every year, and NFL games on the same ticket, what?) and the price is always, always, always going up. From the consumer perspective, streaming video services are objectively worse than they were a decade ago. Frankly, these services are absolutely milking and bilking their users. There’s no real alternative at this point, at least if you want to watch new shows or the occasional streaming-exclusive movie that isn’t terrible. But there are ways to maximize your enjoyment and minimize your money spent. Step one: quit. Quit early, quit often This isn’t a new idea — I first heard about it from my colleague Eric Ravenscraft years ago, and we’ve advocated for it on TechHive more than once. But it bears repeating. The streaming services don’t have any loyalty to you, and you’ll gain nothing by being loyal to them. Quit your subscriptions constantly, month by month if you want, and move on to the next one. Heck, we’ve said that cancelling your subscription immediately is the one trick all cord cutters should know. The watch-and-bail setup is pretty simple. You sign up for any singular streaming service for just one month, taking advantage of any deals or promotions they’re offering to entice new suckers customers. You go through whatever you want to watch on that service which is exclusive to that service alone. Then you bail, and move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat, try to never be subscribed to more than one at a time. ibreakstock / Shutterstock.com There are some obvious advantages here. Shows and movies financed or produced by one service tend to stay on that service and not move around. Netflix made House of Cards, so you can’t watch House of Cards on Disney+. Hulu made The Handmaid’s Tale, so you can’t watch it on Max. So watch only the exclusive stuff one one service while you have it. These aren’t universally true — Paramount+, “the home of Star Trek,” unceremoniously dumped Prodigy, and Netflix picked it up for its second season. Disney clawed back Daredevil and other Marvel series when it started making its own for Disney+. But in any given month you can generally rely on the exclusive content that’s already on a service to stick around for at least a month. Have a plan The way to maximize this process is to go in with a plan. I keep a list of all the upcoming shows (including returning seasons) that I want to see on any particular service, so when one of them gets three or four piled up, I switch to it and binge as much as my schedule will allow. For example, right now I’ve got Castlevania: Nocturne season 2 and A Man on the Inside qued up on my Netflix list. I’ll wait for at least one more show or movie to catch my eye (like, say, the Knives Out threequel) before I plan my next Netflix month. Streaminganbieter rafapress/Shutterstock.com Also, it doesn’t hurt to memorize the general landing places for movies, if you’re waiting on them to transition from theaters to streaming. Some are obvious: Disney movies (including Marvel, Star Wars, et cetera) will come to Disney+, Paramount movies will come to Paramount+, two to four months after they leave theaters. Warner Bros. movies will eventually land on Max, the service that it owns. Some (but not all) Universal Pictures movies will come to Peacock, as that’s an NBC-Universal brand. Sony Pictures is the only major Hollywood studio without an accompanying streaming service at the moment. And of course, any movie released to theaters explicitly by Netflix, Apple, or Amazon will make their way to those respective services before long. Keep an eye out for deals Obviously this approach will save you some money by keeping your subscriptions down to one or two a month. I like to use that savings to upgrade to ads, which again, are only there to make you pay more so they’ll go away. Enshittification strikes again. But even beyond maximizing your allotment of time and money, you can game this system to be better for you. Streaming services are constantly hungry for new users. They’ll try to entice them with a free week or month of trial service before they charge, or several months at a discount rate. Keep an eye out for those discounts — for example, at the time of writing Hulu will offer you a month of service for free, and Apple TV+ is doing a week. Watch the usual deal sites for these opportunities, especially if one of your singular service lists is getting long. Hulu Sometimes these are restricted to truly “new” users, i.e., if you’ve signed up and unsubscribed before you’re not eligible. You can sometimes get around this by making a new account: use a burner email (or a slightly tweaked one) and a method of payment you haven’t associated with that service before. If you can swing it, these freebies are a great way to watch just one show or movie that’s exclusive to a service you otherwise don’t care about. Infrequently there are some pretty good deals on year-long plans. I’m currently part way through a Paramount+ year-long package — I got it for $30, plus another $30 upgrade to remove ads. That’s half off the price, only $5 a month total, and I watch enough Star Trek releases throughout the year that it makes sense. (At least for the moment — damn you, Paramount, for canceling Lower Decks.) Bundles of media are less appealing to me, if only because they tend to offer diminishing returns. Hulu and ESPN are both owned by Disney, so there’s a package combined with Disney+, naturally. But each overlapping circle of that Venn diagram narrows the appeal to users. It might be different for you, of course, especially if you’re sharing services among a big family. Manufactured headaches The streaming services are aware of these bouncing customers, and trying to minimize that behavior as much as possible. That’s why the “drop all the episodes at once” binge model that Netflix pioneered is no longer the de facto standard. You’ll need a minimum of three months subscribed to get through a new ten-episode season on a weekly schedule. The solution is to wait until all the episodes are posted…but that requires some temperance, and leaves you out of “the conversation” and at risk of spoilers. Again, patience is your friend if you’re trying to maximize your money. A newer wrench in this system is live sports. Previously the exclusive domain of “live TV” bundles, a la Hulu+ Live TV or YouTube Live, streaming services are increasingly claiming major sports events for their own walled gardens. Netflix got an exclusive on NFL games on Christmas day last year, with no way to catch them over-the-air, and many Thursday night games are now exclusive to Amazon Prime Video. …just don’t ask about Monday, or Thursday, or Saturday, or Christmas. NFL That’s going to be extremely frustrating if you’re subscribed to the ludicrously expensive Sunday Ticket on YouTube, plus ESPN for Monday Night games…you get the picture. Enshittification in action. There’s no real way to counter this from a penny-pinching perspective, though you can always go to a sports bar or a friend’s home (or invite them to log in at your place) to catch a singular game you don’t want to pay for. God, this just sucks If this all seems like a lot of complication and effort just to save some money, it is! That might be the point — the easiest thing to do is just spend more money and make fewer choices. A lot of people are so sick of it they’re just going back to old-fashioned physical media, and who could blame them? The silver lining here is that you have more choices for entertainment than ever before, frustrating as they might be. There are smaller, niche services like Dropout.TV, Crunchyroll, or Brown Sugar which are also more affordable. There are practically endless hours of things to watch on YouTube, and a lot of options to keep from paying Google’s ever-increasing premium to block ads. And if you don’t mind ads, and you’re not picky, there are completely free options like Crackle and Tubi. Droput is great and it’s cheap.Dropout There’s a stunning variety of video games in every shape and shade, and even ways to get them cheaply like Xbox Game Pass. You could also just, you know, do something not on a screen. I suppose that’s theoretically an option. They still make books, right? All joking aside, both your time and your money are limited, no matter how much you have of either. Remember that if a service isn’t earning your money, you should stop giving it to them. I recommend an “entertainment audit” once a year, during which you evaluate what you’re paying for in relation to what you’re using, and seeing if you really want to keep it up. Things are better than they were when your only choices were regular TV and cable. But not by much. And with other factors putting the squeeze on consumers even in affluent countries, I think streaming services that keep offering less and less while they charge more and more are going to meet some of the same harsh realities that the rest of us are dealing with sooner rather than later. Further reading: The best streaming devices of 2025