Living

It's hot. You're at work. Both of those things suck. Yet you can fix one of them if you put the perfect compact fan on your desk. Finding the right one is tricky—a cool breeze is a given—but you want something that's quiet and controlled enough to not disturb your office neighbors, and compact enough to belong on a desk in the first place. There are also, like, a million different kinds of desk fan. So we narrowed them down to a few core categories: The tower, the traditional spinner, an open style that looks like a windmill, and a borderline insane tube type from Japan. Let's start blowing. Each fan was placed roughly two feet from my face, and turned on. After coming in from a hot summer walk and climbing the 67 stairs up to the Gizmodo office, I sat there and let it blow me. The feeling of relief was a subjective call, but exact wind speeds were measured using a wind gauge. An anemometer, if you want to get technical. The SkyMate WeatherHawk tracked our breezes to t...

For a while now, ultraportables have been the only class of laptop that really matters. Sure, you can find more powerful machines for less money. But the mix of portability, speed, and beauty—along with the miniature muscle of Intel's Ivy Bridge chips—has made ultrabooks the best laptops to own for almost all of us. Problem was, this has been a class dominated by Apple. Not anymore. For the first time, there are multiple ultrabooks that even iSnobs couldn't justifiably roll their eyes at. And that's pretty exciting. We used these laptops as real people would use them. Yes, we ran synthetic benchmarks, punishing battery tests, and transfer speed evaluations. These things matter, but only insofar as they help separate a very close family of machines; these notebooks are more than a little similar to each other. All of the computers tested here have the signature benefits of an ultrabook—even the non "ultrabook" MacBook Air. Each is small, fast, and starts up and re...