This Hanging Dryer Finally Solved My Smelly Shoe Problem

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I’m sticking to my marathon training schedule, nor’easter be damned. Normally, that means I’d come home with soaked shoes, prop them in front of a fan, and hope they dry out overnight. And normally, that means I head out with still-damp shoes the next day. Not only is this uncomfortable, but it makes my home smell like a locker room.

This weekend I had two training runs back to back in the rain, which meant my shoes had to be ready to go again almost immediately. This week’s upgrade is the gadget that made it work: this Hedgehog Hanger.

The Hedgehog Hanger is my upgrade of the week

The Hedgehog Hanger is a hanging shoe and glove dryer. You can easily hang it in a closet or wardrobe (there’s a stainless steel hook), plug it in, and slide your shoes onto its arms. Instead of just warming the air, it pushes airflow through the shoes. The brand says the patented turbine technology moves humidity out of the fabric, and that a pair of shoes or gloves dries in about 15 to 30 minutes.

I really like the control it gives you. The heat is adjustable, from room temperature up through a few warm settings, including lower ones meant for leather and more sensitive materials. That matters if you don’t want to blast a nice pair of shoes at full heat. There are five speed settings, and it goes up to a “tornado” mode for the fastest drying when you’re in a hurry.

The controls on the Hedgehog Dryer.
The controls on the Hedgehog Dryer.
Credit: Meredith Dietz

After my first run in the rain this weekend, I hung my wet shoes on the Hedgehog and let it do its thing. By the time I was ready for the next session, they were dry, fresh, and ready to wear. I didn’t have to rotate to a backup pair—or lace up soggy shoes and hope for the best.

If you’re a runner, hiker, or anyone who trains through bad weather, that turnaround time is the real selling point. Consistency is so much easier when wet gear isn’t a reason to skip a session. That said, I do wish it were a little more affordable: If you only deal with wet shoes a few times a year, $199 is a bit steep.

Still, if you train in all weather, live somewhere rainy or snowy, or have kids constantly tracking in soaked shoes and gloves, you’ll get a lot of use out of this gadget. Hey, even when it’s not plugged in, I’m grateful for the extra storage by my shoe rack.

This Hanging Dryer Finally Solved My Smelly Shoe Problem

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

I’m sticking to my marathon training schedule, nor’easter be damned. Normally, that means I’d come home with soaked shoes, prop them in front of a fan, and hope they dry out overnight. And normally, that means I head out with still-damp shoes the next day. Not only is this uncomfortable, but it makes my home smell like a locker room.

This weekend I had two training runs back to back in the rain, which meant my shoes had to be ready to go again almost immediately. This week’s upgrade is the gadget that made it work: this Hedgehog Hanger.

The Hedgehog Hanger is my upgrade of the week

The Hedgehog Hanger is a hanging shoe and glove dryer. You can easily hang it in a closet or wardrobe (there’s a stainless steel hook), plug it in, and slide your shoes onto its arms. Instead of just warming the air, it pushes airflow through the shoes. The brand says the patented turbine technology moves humidity out of the fabric, and that a pair of shoes or gloves dries in about 15 to 30 minutes.

I really like the control it gives you. The heat is adjustable, from room temperature up through a few warm settings, including lower ones meant for leather and more sensitive materials. That matters if you don’t want to blast a nice pair of shoes at full heat. There are five speed settings, and it goes up to a “tornado” mode for the fastest drying when you’re in a hurry.

The controls on the Hedgehog Dryer.
The controls on the Hedgehog Dryer.
Credit: Meredith Dietz

After my first run in the rain this weekend, I hung my wet shoes on the Hedgehog and let it do its thing. By the time I was ready for the next session, they were dry, fresh, and ready to wear. I didn’t have to rotate to a backup pair—or lace up soggy shoes and hope for the best.

If you’re a runner, hiker, or anyone who trains through bad weather, that turnaround time is the real selling point. Consistency is so much easier when wet gear isn’t a reason to skip a session. That said, I do wish it were a little more affordable: If you only deal with wet shoes a few times a year, $199 is a bit steep.

Still, if you train in all weather, live somewhere rainy or snowy, or have kids constantly tracking in soaked shoes and gloves, you’ll get a lot of use out of this gadget. Hey, even when it’s not plugged in, I’m grateful for the extra storage by my shoe rack.

Nvidia Unveils AI Agent Safety Platform With Hardware-Based Watchdog

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment. The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on BlueField-4 DPUs. Nvidia says Sentry can monitor agent activity independently and quarantine an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds.

Nvidia is pitching the platform against a backdrop of recent incidents in which frontier AI labs have reported agents escaping the evaluation environments meant to contain them, reaching systems they should not have accessed and, in some cases, misreporting what they did. OpenShell and related skills are available via Nvidia’s developer resources page and on GitHub.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia Unveils AI Agent Safety Platform With Hardware-Based Watchdog

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia on Monday announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines open source software and a reference system design to keep AI agents within set boundaries from testing through deployment. The chipmaker explained that the platform pairs the open-source OpenShell runtime with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on BlueField-4 DPUs. Nvidia says Sentry can monitor agent activity independently and quarantine an agent that crosses its boundaries within milliseconds.

Nvidia is pitching the platform against a backdrop of recent incidents in which frontier AI labs have reported agents escaping the evaluation environments meant to contain them, reaching systems they should not have accessed and, in some cases, misreporting what they did. OpenShell and related skills are available via Nvidia’s developer resources page and on GitHub.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

F1 in Azerbaijan: That was almost a close-run thing

Formula 1 raced on the streets of Baku, Azerbaijan, this past weekend. Although the race predates Liberty’s acquisition of the sport by a few months, it’s a rather good microcosm of the sport as it exists today. The track is a real challenge; it takes place on dusty city streets lined with concrete walls and through a medieval fortress gate, followed by a 1.4-mile (2.2 km) flat-out blast to the finish line, with gusts of wind from the Caspian Sea a block away. It’s interesting to look at Baku’s mix of modern and classical architecture sharing the stage with a massive hospitality and pit lane complex. And since it wouldn’t be F1 without some controversy, this year the race was held a day earlier than normal after F1 switched up its schedule to avoid clashing with Azerbaijan’s celebration of its recent war with Armenia—it’s almost as if Bernie Ecclestone had never left.

The proximity of the walls leaves very little margin for error at the speeds F1 cars go around Baku. Last year, qualifying was interrupted by no less than six red flags after crashes. This year was much less dramatic, unless you were championship leader Kimi Antonelli. The 20-year-old sophomore misjudged how much front grip he had going into turn 1, found more than expected, and clipped the corner of the wall with his left front tire. It happened in the first of the three knockout qualifying sessions, and while Antonelli had already banked a time good enough to proceed to the next session, the damage to his car meant he would take no further part and start the race from 16th.

A few weeks ago, at Monza, penalties for a power unit change saw Antonelli start the race from even further back (19th), which he followed a day later with a spectacular drive through the field to take the win away from his teammate George Russell. But there was some luck involved then; two standing starts (the second following Leclerc’s big crash on lap 2) allowed him to pass a lot of cars quickly, for one thing. In Baku he would have a much tougher task.

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Apple’s Next Vision Pro On ‘Life Support’ As Meta Raises The Stakes

Apple's Next Vision Pro On 'Life Support' As Meta Raises The Stakes
It’s been a little over two years since Apple launched its Vision Pro headset and it simply hasn’t become the mainstream success the company had hoped for, thanks to its high price tag and lack of developer support. The company continues to work on various versions of the headset that may have more mainstream appeal, but according to Bloomberg’s

OpenAI halts frontier-model training amid string of agent misalignment incidents

OpenAI says it has paused all internal training of “our most capable models” as it continues what CEO Sam Altman is calling “an extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation.”

The company revealed the pause in a report about a so-called misalignment incident in which an agent attempted to exploit a gap in Internet-access restrictions during a routine research task during training. OpenAI says that improper DNS filtering allowed the agent to attempt to break out of its sandbox and access the wider Internet when asked for biographical details about a blogger.

OpenAI says the agent was only able to access the company’s offline web cache and that it has implemented additional multi-layered blocking controls to prevent similar incidents in the future. Despite that, though, the company says it has decided to “pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use” for this frontier model “until we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system.”

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NVIDIA Rallies Over 100 Partners For Open Agent Safety Platform Launch

NVIDIA Rallies Over 100 Partners For Open Agent Safety Platform Launch
Regardless of what you think about AI, there are a multitude of users deploying a myriad of AI agents across many different industries and use cases. These neural networks are given a goal and a set of capabilities that they can use to accomplish that goal, but rogue agents given a broad set of tools can also use them to cause damage if left

NASA ‘troubleshooting’ transporter for space station’s robotic arm [Updated]

Recently, the astronauts on board the International Space Station performed a routine “walk-off” maneuver with the large, 58-foot-long robotic arm attached to the orbiting laboratory.

The robotic arm, known as Canadarm2 because it was supplied by the Canadian Space Agency, is something of a modern engineering miracle—it can effectively move around the exterior of the large space station like an inchworm because both ends are essentially identical.

However, after this particular walk-off maneuver, the robotic arm, along with the mobile transporter that guides it along the main truss of the space station, engineers noted some issues with operations.

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Forget The End: Minecraft Adds ‘The Sift’, Its First New Dimension In 15 Years

Forget The End: Minecraft Adds 'The Sift', Its First New Dimension In 15 Years
It’s been almost fifteen years since Minecraft version 1.0.0 added “The End” dimension in its Adventure Update, but now that Minecraft Dungeons II is expanding the universe, “The Sift” dimension will also be added. Visually, The Sift targets more bright pastel colors than your typical Minecraft biomes. In terms of gameplay, there are also

AI Data Center Developer Promises $10K Checks To Residents, Locals Call It A Bribe

AI Data Center Developer Promises $10K Checks To Residents, Locals Call It A Bribe
In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, a clash over the expansion of AI data centers has taken an extraordinary turn.

When NorthPoint Development proposed a 1,300-acre project in the Pocono foothills designed to host 15 data center buildings, it was met with fierce local resistance to the construction, but NorthPoint had an idea. In an exclusive