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Entertainment in 2026 is a bit of a double-edged sword. Excellent films and television shows are widely available in ways that would have sounded like science fiction just 20 years agobut at a steep price. A single movie ticket costs an average of $16, while the average American household spends over $42 per month on streaming services, which adds up to $504 per year. And if youre anything like me, you may not even be getting your moneys worth on those streaming services. Often when I sit down to watch something, I scroll through the options on Netflix, only to go to bed an hour later without having watched anything. In many cases, that decision paralysis reflects my desire to recreate the feeling of watching something I loved, which is impossible. (What do you mean theres no show or movie that will give me the same emotions I felt watching Outlander for the first time?) However, there is an easy and free solution to this entertainment conundrum: your local library. Your library card will help you access books, ebooks, DVDs, audiobooks, and other media that can help you get your entertainment on for freeand can offer you similar stories to the movies and television shows that have captured your imagination. If youre looking to lower your entertainment costs, here are some recommendations for what to pick up at your local library. If you loved Sinners With sixteen Oscar nominationsthe most in Academy Award historyRyan Cooglers Jim Crow-era horror film offers some insightful allegories of racism and cultural appropriation within a tense and emotional vampire flick. If youd like more vampire lore or gore with a side of cultural commentary, you might check these out from your library: My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due: Originally published in 1997, this is the first book in Dues African Immortals four-part series. When Jessica, an African-American journalist for the Miami Herald, marries David, her Mr. Perfect, she has no idea he is actually a 450-year-old immortal who traded his soul for unending life. Initially, she shrugs off warning signs, such as the fact that he seems strangely youthful and his injuries heal too quickly, but David eventually tells her the truth when his immortal brothers come to retrieve him. When the people around Jessica start dying violently, David plans to make her and their daughter immortal, whether they want it or not. Fledgling by Octavia Butler: Butlers final novel before her death in 2006, Fledgling tells the story of Shori, a girl with amnesia who discovers that she is in fact a 53-year-old genetically modified vampire. Despite her memory loss, she must work to discover who has made her what she is and find a way to save herself and those she cares for. Dread Nation by Justina Ireland: Rather than vampires, Irelands 2018 YA novel imagines that zombies began walking the battlefields of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead rose, and as a Black child, she is required to attend a combat school to learn how to protect the living from the walking dead. Get Out, Us, and Nope, directed by Jordan Peele: Ryan Coogler specifically credited Jordan Peele as one of the filmmakers who influenced his work on Sinners. While none of Peeles three masterpieces specifically deal with vampires or other traditional monsters, each one does look at horror tropes through the lens of race and culture similar to how Coogler does in Sinners. If youve lost count of your Heated Rivalry reheats The global phenomenon written and directed by Jacob Tierney and based on the bestselling book series by Rachel Reid has made it clear that romance is not dead, although it does involve more ginger ale, loon calls, and concussions than anticipated. If you havent already read the entire Game Changers series (and you may have had trouble getting copies at your local library), Reid has also written two standalone novels, Time to Shine and The Shots You Take. But there is a long and storied history of queer sports romance that you can check out from your local library while waiting for season two of Heated Rivalry and book seven of Game Changers: Gravity by Tal Bauer: This friends-to-lovers hockey romance finds self-proclaimed middle-of-the-road player Hunter Lacey starstruck when he meets his hero, 26-year-old Bryce Michel at the All Star Game. But the two men have instant chemistry on and off the ice. If you like your hockey romance to feature plenty of time on the ice, this is the book for you. Wake Up, Nat & Darcy by Kate Cochrane: In this second-chance hockey romance, Darcy LaCroix and Natalie Carpenter were once college teammates, friends, and lovers. But that was years ago, before Darcy broke Nats heart and they became bitter rivals. After being cut from the U.S. womens hockey team, Nat takes a guest hosting gig on Wake Up, USAs winter games coveragewith Darcy as her co-host. The snark and banter between Nat and Darcy is reminiscent of the playful and sometimes biting chirps shared between Shane and Ilya in Heated Rivalry
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Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You dont have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you dont have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! A printable, personal, pocketable calendar To make your own single-page printed calendar, use NeatoCal. NeatoCal is a free web page that prints out a full-year calendar on a single 11-by-8.5-inch piece of paper. Printing the basic calendar takes maybe 10 seconds, but you can also spend a few minutes customizing it to your liking. Calendars are free to print with no sign-ups needed, and the underlying code is open-source. The default NeatoCal is a 12-month calendar for 2026, with one column for each month and the weekends highlighted in gray. Youre supposed to print it in landscape mode, and theres a little space for writing next to each day. NeatoCals default 12-month view is clean and simple. The real power of NeatoCal, however, is in all the ways you can customize it. Visit the project page, and youll see a list of ways to modify the calendar by adding some code to the end of the page address. For example, lets say you want to print a calendar for 2027. Instead of visiting the main calendar page at this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ . . . youd head to this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?year=2027 Or lets say you want to print out a quarterly calendar instead of a full year. For that, we can use some code for specifying three months instead of 12: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3 What happens when you want to print a calendar for Q2? For that, well use some code to offset the start date by a specified number of months: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?n_month=3&start_month=3 Notice how the above example uses an ampersand (the & symbol) to combine the code for total number of months and the number of months to offset. With a bit of easy customization, you can make your printed calendar look any way you want. The full list of URL parameters reveals all kinds of neat possibilities. You can add moon phases, adjust fonts, change the highlight colors, and tweak the abbreviation length for days and months. Theres even a calendar that highlights alternating weeks instead of weekends: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=hallon-almanackan My favorite feature of all, though, is the ability to import events from ICS calendar files via this address: https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?ics Want to add events from your Google Calendar? Head to the Google Calendar website, click the vertical ellipses () next to your main calendar, head to Settings and Sharing, then select Export calendar. This will download a ZIP file containing an .ICS file, which you can drag and drop into the page linked above. If youre feeling especially crafty, you can also use this tool to create an ICS file with one-off or repeating events. Or you can use an AI tool like Claude to turn a list of plain text events into a downloadable ICS file. This is how I was able to create a printable calendar with every Yankee game in 2026: NeatoCal can even create custom calendars with specific events included. Once youve designed a calendar to your liking, just hit Ctrl+P or Cmd+P in your browser to bring up the print dialog (or use the Share command to find the Print option from a mobile device), make sure it all fits properly on one page, and start printing. Stick it to your fridge, pin it on your cubicle, or fold it up into your wallet and start enjoying the analog clendar lifestyle again. NeatoCal works in any web browser, ideally on a device that can send pages to a printer. The site is free to use with no limits or sign-ins. The developer says that everything is loaded locally in your own web browser, though as an open-source project, you can also download and self-host your own version. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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This week, Apples newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptops starting cost of just $599a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer. Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neos product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more. Yet if youve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should know that there are plenty of additional Mac apps that can elevate your productivity. Here are four cool and unexpected ones you should check out to take your MacBook Neo productivity to the next level. Magnet keeps your workspace organized on the MacBook Neo’s small screen One reason Apple can keep the price of the Neo so low is that it has the smallest display of any MacBook. At just 13 inches, the Neo has a smaller screen than both the 13.6-inch MacBook Air and 14-inch MacBook Pro. But smaller screen sizes mean that you have less desktop real estate to manage your overlapping windows, so things can get crowded fast. [Screenshot: Bootcode A.S.] Enter Magnet. This useful app helps you organize your desktop workspace in a snap. Magnet instantly moves your apps into a tiled pattern of your choice. For example, if you have a web browser, an email client, and a chatbot open, you can quickly arrange them into three neat windows on your screen. Or, you can use Magnet to snap one app to the left half of your screen, while the other two apps each fill one-quarter of the right side. The tiled arrangements are up to you. Magnet perfectly aligns window sizes with a click, so you dont have to waste time resizing your app windows manually, leaving more time for productivity. Glide sharpens your reading focus Small screens like Neo’s can also make it harder to focus on your content, especially when reading long text documents. Sentences in a document or web page can blend together over time, and if we look away for a moment, it might take a few moments to find the sentence we were reading, breaking our concentration. [Screenshot: Applorium Ltd] Thats where Glide comes in. The app dims your entire screen except for a narrow band running across its full width. This band functions as a rectangular spotlight that highlights your text and follows your cursor. The idea is to make it hover over the line you’re reading, which helps you focus. It also acts as a helpful visual cue of where you left off in the document when you return to your computer after stepping away. Perplexity is the AI chatbot Apple Intelligence should have been Apple markets the MacBook Neo as a great computer for using its Apple Intelligence tools. The problem, though, is that Apple Intelligence is a pretty disappointing AI platform. Everything from its writing to its image generation tools is fairly lackluster compared to other AI options. [Screenshot: Perplexity AI, Inc.] But the biggest drawback of Apple Intelligence is that you cant use it like most people are accustomed to using AI: in a chatbot format. Sure, you can ask Apple Intelligence questions via voice or text, but the platform doesnt provide a history of your conversations, and the answers it gives, frankly, arent very good. Thats why Neo owners should download the Perplexity app. This is the chatbot Apple didnt include with the Neo. Its also notably better than competitors like ChatGPT at research tasks, such as the kind you do for school or work, because it cites where it found the answers it provides to you. Soulver 3 is the calculator for people who prefer words over math In both work and school, we often perform tasks that involve calculations. The new MacBook Neo has a Calculator app, but its quite basic. It also relies on your knowing the correct formulas to get accurate answers. If you don’t know how to formulate the equation for, say, the price of a $3,500 widget order after a 17% discount is applied, the standard Calculator app is useless anyway. [Screenshot: Acqualia Software] If you struggle with formatting equations, Soulver 3 is a game-changer. The app is part notepad, part calculator, which allows you to input equations using natural language prompts. For example, with the scenario above, it doesnt matter if I dont know the exact formula for calculating a percentage discount. I can simply type 17% off $3,500 into Soulver 3, and it will return the answer ($2,905.00). Even in an era of artificial intelligence, Soulver 3 is one of the most useful apps your Neo can offer, since LLM chatbots remain pretty bad at performing math computations.
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