Technologies

Home Depot’s Giant Skelly Has a Voice This Halloween Thanks to a New App

Fall has arrived, and spooky season starts now. Check out the latest version of Home Depot’s skeleton, which is half the size but has animated features and can talk.

With the fall equinox on Monday marking the end of summer, it’s time to start setting up your Halloween decorations (if you haven’t already). And this year, Home Depot’s infamous giant skeleton returns with an app that gives the new Ultra Skelly a voice and fresh moves to spook trick-or-treaters.

Make no bones about it: Skelly’s going high-tech this spooky season. The new animatronic version is shorter than the original, at 6.5 feet tall, but you can freak out your whole neighborhood with this skeleton’s rotating upper torso, moving mouth and 18 LCD eye variations (ew).

Skelly can now chat with visitors through five preset recordings and up to 30 seconds of custom recording, plus Bluetooth capabilities that let you interact in real time. And you can modulate your voice to make everything sound extra spooky.

Skelly was originally launched in 2020, when the pandemic forced people to celebrate Halloween at a distance. Perhaps because of its giant stature — it’s easy to spot, even when social distancing — the skeleton became a hit and has been resurrected every year since with upgrades and friends. This year, those friends include dragons, trolls, scarecrows and a Skelly Cat (not to be confused with Smelly Cat).

You can order Skelly and company now on the Home Depot website or app for $279.

Technologies

A Hacker Threat Is Hiding in Your Car’s Tire Pressure System

A new study reveals that a car’s tire pressure monitoring system can be easily accessed by hackers.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, Feb. 27

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Feb. 27.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Was today’s Mini Crossword too short for you? The New York Times now has a Midi Crossword, which is not as big as the original NYT Crossword, but longer than the Mini. Read on for the answers to today’s Mini Crossword. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Lacking locks
Answer: BALD

5A clue: One of the Great Lakes
Answer: ERIE

6A clue: Movie with the fake newspaper headline «Wonder Elephant Soars to Fame!»
Answer: DUMBO

8A clue: Live tweeter?
Answer: BIRD

9A clue: The slightest bit
Answer: ATAD

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Hard thing to leave on a cold day
Answer: BED

2D clue: Caribbean island northwest of Curaçao
Answer: ARUBA

3D clue: The sky, in a saying
Answer: LIMIT

4D clue: Actress Messing
Answer: DEBRA

7D clue: Like this clue number
Answer: ODD

Technologies

Smartphone Sales to Plummet 13% in 2026 Due to RAM Crisis, Says IDC

AI-fueled memory scarcity is hitting the phone market hard this year, particularly for inexpensive, low-end devices.

The projected shortage of memory chips worldwide will have a more serious impact on smartphone sales in 2026 than previously projected, according to new data from International Data Corporation Worldwide. Whereas the company just in November had estimated a drop of between 0.9% and 5.2% (the latter being its «pessimistic scenario»), now it sees a 12.9% decline this year, based on its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

«What we are witnessing is not a temporary squeeze, but a tsunami-like shock originating in the memory supply chain, with ripple effects spreading across the entire consumer electronics industry,» Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for Worldwide Client Devices at IDC, said in a statement.

The hardest-hit companies are expected to be those selling to the lower end of the market, which can’t absorb the higher component costs while maintaining profitable margins. As a result, Jeronimo says, many of those players will pass the added costs on to consumers.

That also includes regional markets like the Middle East and Africa that sell mostly inexpensive smartphones, which could see a steep 20.6% drop year-over-year.

By contrast, IDC expects Apple and Samsung to be better able to withstand the crisis. «As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens,» said Jeronimo.

Memory has become scarce due to the insatiable demand to feed generative AI. Essentially all of the memory set to be manufactured this year is already earmarked. What started as a demand for graphics processors has expanded to other components. For example, hard drive manufacturer Western Digital announced in early February that it had already sold out of its supply for 2026.

«We expect consolidation as smaller players exit, and low-end vendors face sharp shipment declines amid supply constraints and lower demand at higher price points,» said Nabila Popal, senior research director at IDC, projecting a 14% rise in the average selling price of smartphones to $523.

Popal expects memory prices to stabilize by the middle of 2027, but doesn’t see them coming down to earlier levels. The sub-$100 segment, made up of approximately 171 million devices, will be «permanently uneconomical,» she said. «In short, there is no return to business as usual for vendors and consumers.»