Diesel averaged a record $6.529 a gallon on September 21, and Washington is arguing over whether to stop exporting it. An estimate built from EIA storage data gives the Gulf Coast room for about 24 days of stranded exports. After that, refiners must cut runs or reshuffle what they make.
Read Now →
The pages readers come back to: answer-first guides on the things you own or are about to buy, built from spec sheets and filings, with the date we last checked them.
Every Starlink dish sold today heats itself to melt snow, from the Mini's 1 inch an hour to the Performance kit's 3.5. Here is what the Snow Melt setting actually does, what it costs in watts on a battery, why the Mini really does have it, and the fix ladder for a dish that is buried anyway.
Apple announced the iPhone Duo on September 9: a foldable with a 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch inner one, the A20 Pro chip and a $1,999 starting price. Pre-orders open October 16 and phones arrive October 23, five weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro.
The iPhone 18 Pro can sign every pixel its main camera captures and keep an unalterable reference copy beside the photo. It is a real advance in proving a photo was not edited, and it still proves less than the word "authenticity" suggests. It is opt-in, cannot be captured in the EU at launch, and sits outside the open standard Google, Samsung and Leica chose.
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22, 2026. Anthropic says it performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, at $4 and $20 per million input and output tokens, 40% of Fable's rate. Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans get higher five-hour limits.
The creepy AI Cat in the Hat stalking driveways on TikTok has never been found in real life. The kids who post him with a school's name attached are being found fast. At least 15 minors in 10 states have been arrested or face charges in two weeks, several with felonies, under school-threat laws written after real shootings that do not care whether it was a joke.
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, to a small group first and to paid ChatGPT plans, the API and AWS in the coming days. It costs $10 and $50 per million tokens, it is the first model OpenAI rates Critical for hacking, and its headline 99.9% benchmark score falls to 62.7% on the benchmark's own standard setup.
Tesla's own support page gives the check: Controls > Software, then Additional Vehicle Information. Without the car, the dates do most of the work: Hardware 3 (HW3) from spring 2019, Hardware 4 (HW4) in the Model S and X from early 2023, Fremont Model Ys from late May 2023, and the restyled Model 3 from 2024.
A Tesla has no snow mode button. What it has is a pair of traction settings under Controls > Dynamics whose names depend on which manual your car runs, a short list of approved snow chains, and a written procedure for rocking the car out of a drift. Here is all of it, model by model, from the manuals.
Every Tesla ownership guide on this site, grouped by the question that brings people here: something is wrong, charging, winter, battery health, what it costs, buying new or used, and software. Each entry says which question the guide settles and where its numbers come from, so you can go straight to the page you need.
The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate a quarter point on September 16 to a range of 3.75% to 4%, its first increase since 2023, in a unanimous vote under the chair Trump chose to bring rates down. Credit cards and home equity lines reprice within a billing cycle. The Fed did it with core CPI at its lowest since 2021, and its own forecast pencils in one more hike this year.
The EIA's weekly survey put US diesel at $5.967 a gallon for the week of September 7, above the June 2022 record of $5.810. Regular gasoline is $4.157 and nowhere near its own record. Diesel moves nearly everything you buy, so the gap between the two fuels is the number to watch.
The 60-day US-Iran memorandum lapsed on August 17 with no final deal and no formal talks. Iran told Reuters it will go "fully offensive" unless the June terms are implemented within weeks, Trump threatened to bomb Oman, and the Strait of Hormuz saw three tankers in a day against 130 before the war.
Memory-chip shortages pushed the Echo Dot Max and the Raspberry Pi 5 over the $100 line in 2026 and made Roku's sticks pricier. These seven tech gifts still fit under it, at the maker's own list price: AirTag 2, Roku Streaming Stick Plus, Anker Nano power bank, JBL Go 4, DualSense, instax mini 13 and the Logitech MX Master 3S.
Apple sells three Apple Watch lines after its September 9, 2026 event: the $249 SE 3, the $399 Series 12 and the $799 Ultra 4. Most iPhone owners should buy the SE 3. The Series 12 earns its extra $150 for the health sensors and the nicer watch; the Ultra 4 only for multi-day battery, diving and satellite.
Apple sells seven iPhones after its September 2026 event, from the $699 iPhone 17e to the $1,999 iPhone Duo, and no standard iPhone 18. For most people the answer is still the iPhone 17, now $929 unlocked. Here is who should pay more, who should pay less, and the one model to skip.
