Your calendars is the default page Calendar 2 shows you, but it’s not all this device can do. There are several tabs you can click through: Lists, Tasks, Rewards, Meals, Recipes, and Photos, then Sleep and Settings. Besides Sleep and Settings, which both relate to different settings on your device, these pages will take some work to become truly useful. Some of these features are also blocked by a paywall. You’ll need a Plus Plan subscription, which costs $79 a year or $8 a month, to get access to Rewards, Meals, and Skylight’s in-app AI tool, Sidekick.

Meals is easy to start casually using to plan out your meals for the week, but if you have a bunch of homemade recipes you love, you can manually add them to the Recipes tab. Why bother with adding an entire recipe? Because then, when you add that recipe to your meal list for the week, the Skylight will ask if it should also add the ingredients to your grocery list over on the Lists tab. I didn’t love that every time I added one of my recipes manually it would ask if I wanted to add the ingredients to my shopping list, but it’s a reasonable flow of actions and one that could be more useful if I converted to Skylight being my sole grocery shopping list.

I really like the visual aspect of both my family’s calendar and the Meals page. I quickly typed in “Giant Meatball” for one of our dinners to represent a Costco dinner in our fridge and was able to assign it to Friday’s dinner. You can either add items to your meal plan on Calendar 2 itself or in the Skylight app, which provides access to all the same pages you see on the device. The Calendar 2 doesn’t seem to memorize any quick meals I write in, though; I’d have to save them to Recipes to use continually or mark them as a repeating meal on a specific day. I also love that if there’s an event on both my husband’s calendar and mine, the Skylight will only have it on the screen once and will put both colors for our calendars to indicate it’s a shared event.

The Tasks page also works fine if you want a list of tasks for each family member, but even for tasks I set a certain time for, I didn’t see any alerts on the device or my phone. Once I opened the Tasks page, I could see that I was two days late to “Bring Form to Dentist Appointment,” but I think these pages would be easy to ignore. It’s something you’d have to build as a habit and shouldn’t be relied on for a timed task you’d like to complete. Meanwhile, Rewards is linked to tasks, letting you set how many stars you need to earn by completing tasks to earn a reward you’ll set for yourself or other members of your house, such as your kids.

The Paywalled Garden

Photograph: Nena Farrell

My biggest complaint with Skylight is its paywall. Its calendar devices require the Plus Plan ($79 a month or $8 a year) to use all features, including the photo screen saver, which I think is a huge bonus for the device. While Skylight isn’t my favorite digital photo frame, and the 15-inch frame doesn’t have the perfect orientation for showing photos, having the screen saver option turns the device into a great multiuse screen that the entire family can enjoy.

Tax Day is April 15 this year, meaning you have less than a month to file without penalty or needing to file for an extension. The cost of filing with a tax service increases the longer you wait, and if you’re anything like me—and have complicated taxes—you’ve procrastinated. Take this as your sign to file now. TurboTax currently has a deal running for federal and state filing combined for only $150 for Expert Full Service for new customers, but this deal is only good through March 18.

TurboTax has three tiers of services for filers: DIY, where you file yourself with step-by-step instructions; Expert Assist, where you can get help from tax experts throughout the process and have the expert review it before submitting; and Expert Full Service, where you can get your taxes done completely by a local tax expert. Prices vary for each tier, but Expert Full Service is not inexpensive—federal starts at $89 to $129, and the final price varies based on the complexity of your taxes. Plus, state taxes are an additional fee of $59 per state, so if you have a lot of forms and/or states, this flat fee deal could translate to significant savings.

On that note, if you’re a small business owner or have a complicated tax situation, Expert Full Service is probably worth a look. Having an expert file for you is best for those with S Corporations and partnerships; TurboTax will even match you with a small-business tax expert who knows your industry to maximize your deductions. With this service, you can choose to hand off your taxes online or in person. The tax expert will then handle everything about your taxes, sign, and file for you. Plus, you’ll only need to pay the $150 after your taxes are filed.

This offer only applies if a TurboTax expert didn’t file for you last year. If not, the final price varies based on the complexity of your taxes and forms, and state is charged separately.

To get this deal, start filing with TurboTax Expert Full Service or select “prefer to hand off to an expert” when prompted. If you’re eligible (meaning you didn’t have a TurboTax expert file taxes for a 2024 personal tax return), your discount will be applied at checkout when you file by 11:59 pm ET March 18.

Still not sure which service is best for you? Check out my guide to How to Pay Your Taxes Online, and my guide to the Best Tax Services this year. If you want to go with TurboTax but aren’t sure which tier is the best for your tax situation, I tested TurboTax’s DIY service and have found a bunch of TurboTax coupons, which may help to save coin when it’s time to file.

Everpure has announced Evergreen One for AI, a performance-backed consumption model for artificial intelligence (AI) that extends to use of its FlashBlade//Exa high-performance storage. Meanwhile, the company – known as Pure Storage until recently – has announced the beta release of its Datastream automated AI pipeline appliance. 

Evergreen One for AI differs from existing flexible capacity offers in the Everpure range by providing use of FlashBlade//Exa and service-level agreements (SLA) based on graphics processing unit (GPU) count. The aim here is to ensure that the storage environment provides the throughput to keep GPU resources fully utilised.

FlashBlade//Exa, Everpure’s highest-performance platform, was previously excluded from the Evergreen One consumption model. 

Exa aims at AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads that demand extremely high throughput, likely in customers between large enterprise users of AI and the hyperscalers.

At its launch, FlashBlade//Exa introduced an architecture to the Pure product line in which metadata and bulk storage are disaggregated with different hardware and protocols in use.

Kaycee Lai, vice-president for AI with Everpure, said Evergreen One for AI shifted the financial and operational risk away from the customer. “Specifically, we have an offering which we call Evergreen One for AI,” he said. “The big difference for AI is that we set the performance level of the offering based on the number of GPUs that you have … it is an SLA-backed performance guarantee.”

Evergreen One and Flex are Pure Storage’s pay-as-you-go procurement models, while Forever involves upfront purchase with built-in upgrades.