Why I love my little round Dell USB-C mobile adapter
Barbara Krasnoff is officially the reviews editor for The Verge, but although she has done a great deal of reviewing in her time, she doesn’t tend to do a lot of it in her current position. “I was originally hired here to write and edit to-do articles,” she explains. “Now, I spend most of my time editing, overseeing various projects, and coaxing staffers to write about their favorite stuff.” Where did you first hear about the Dell mobile adapter? I didn’t actually hear about it — I saw it at a trade event here in New York City a few years ago. Dell was showing off some of its new products, and one of the accessories was this little puck-looking item with several ports around its periphery. But the neatest thing was that it had its own USB-C connector on a short cable that revealed itself when you spun the base in a clockwise direction. Then, when...
Barbara Krasnoff is officially the reviews editor for The Verge, but although she has done a great deal of reviewing in her time, she doesn’t tend to do a lot of it in her current position. “I was originally hired here to write and edit to-do articles,” she explains. “Now, I spend most of my time editing, overseeing various projects, and coaxing staffers to write about their favorite stuff.”Where did you first hear about the Dell mobile adapter?I didn’t actually hear about it — I saw it at a trade event here in New York City a few years ago. Dell was showing off some of its new products, and one of the accessories was this little puck-looking item with several ports around its periphery. But the neatest thing was that it had its own USB-C connector on a short cable that revealed itself when you spun the base in a clockwise direction. Then, when you spun it counterclockwise, the cable pulled neatly back into the base. It looked both ingenious and useful, and as soon as it was available, I bought one for myself. Why did you want one?My first laptops had lots of ports, but as the computers got thinner, the ports began to disappear. Eventually, most of the laptops I used only had one or two USB-C ports for anything I wanted to physically connect to my device. This little adapter lets me use a variety of different connectors, including some that belong to my older devices.What do you like about it?As I mentioned before, it includes a number of different ports, some of which are no longer in use but I prefer to have on hand. The model I have, the DA300, comes with an ethernet port, a USB-C and USB-A port, an HDMI port, a VGA port, and a DisplayPort. There are other, newer models with a different selection of ports. I also think the whole spin-the-disk-and-the-cable-disappears thing is a lot of fun.Is there anything about it that you dislike, or that you think could be improved?A slot for a microSD card would have been handy. And a color other than black might have been nice. Just FYI: Dell has replaced my model with the DA305, which trades the VGA port for a second USB-A port and switches up the USB from 3.1 to 3.2. Amazon still seems to be carrying the DA300, but I’m not sure how long that’s going to last.Who would you recommend it to?There are a lot of good desk-based adapters out there, but this one is great for popping into your backpack just in case you need it.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s models attacked real companies during safety tests, and most victims never noticed
The most capable AI models on the planet have started breaking into companies that never agreed to be part of any test, and in most cases, nobody at those companies noticed until a person at one of those companies reached out to let them know. In the span of just...
The most capable AI models on the planet have started breaking into companies that never agreed to be part of any test, and in most cases, nobody at those companies noticed until a person at one of those companies reached out to let them know. In the span of just a couple of weeks, three separate organisations disclosed that models undergoing cybersecurity evaluations had escaped or wandered out of their test environments and attacked real systems on the open internet, despite nobody instructing them to. Each one believed, or talked itself into believing, that it was still playing a game.
Michael Johnson Chicago
Published by: aplhsindia.in
My favorite Notion alternative isn’t Obsidian, it’s something I can actually self-host
When people talk about replacing Notion, Obsidian is usually the first app that comes up. I tried it too, and while it's an excellent note-taking app, it wasn't the replacement I was actually looking for. I wanted something that felt closer to Notion while giving me complete control over where...
When people talk about replacing Notion, Obsidian is usually the first app that comes up. I tried it too, and while it's an excellent note-taking app, it wasn't the replacement I was actually looking for. I wanted something that felt closer to Notion while giving me complete control over where my data lived. That search eventually led me to AFFiNE. After using it for a while, I realized it offered a better balance between flexibility, ownership, and everyday usability for my workflow. AFFiNE has become my favorite Notion alternative, rather than the one most people expect.
Daphné Le Gall France
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Why does Apple keep banning Telegram, but never X?
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in...
For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple's moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to many people's m …Read the full story at The Verge.
Michael Johnson Chicago
Published by: aplhsindia.in
I turned a nearly 10-year-old laptop into the most useful machine in my home lab
Despite spending my teenage years drooling over enterprise-tier hardware, my current home lab mostly consists of consumer-grade systems, with the only outlier being a Xeon workstation from 2016. In fact, running a few Proxmox experiments on my old gaming PC proved that I don’t need top-of-the-line specs to access its...
Despite spending my teenage years drooling over enterprise-tier hardware, my current home lab mostly consists of consumer-grade systems, with the only outlier being a Xeon workstation from 2016. In fact, running a few Proxmox experiments on my old gaming PC proved that I don’t need top-of-the-line specs to access its virtualization features, and today, I’ve got everything from mini-PCs and thin clients to x86 single-board computers fueling my tinkering escapades to some extent.
Lada Malyarenko Ukraine
Published by: aplhsindia.in
I ran a local LLM entirely off a NAS, and it turned my storage box into an AI-hosting workstation
Ever since I got into hosting my own large language models, I’ve tinkered with AI inference engines across multiple devices. So far, my RTX 3080 Ti remains my primary choice for deploying the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for coding-heavy tasks using MoE offloading, though I’ve also had decent experience using Gemma-4-26B-A4B and GPT-OSS-20B...
Ever since I got into hosting my own large language models, I’ve tinkered with AI inference engines across multiple devices. So far, my RTX 3080 Ti remains my primary choice for deploying the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for coding-heavy tasks using MoE offloading, though I’ve also had decent experience using Gemma-4-26B-A4B and GPT-OSS-20B on old Pascal-era graphics cards.
Inès Faure France
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Robocopy is still the fastest way to copy thousands of files on Windows, and I wasted years not using it
Windows is a bundle of both CLI and GUI tools. We use the GUI ones more because they serve a broader use case and are convenient to use. For file copying and moving, I hadn't ventured much outside the usual Ctrl + C and V, and the on-screen copy and...
Windows is a bundle of both CLI and GUI tools. We use the GUI ones more because they serve a broader use case and are convenient to use. For file copying and moving, I hadn't ventured much outside the usual Ctrl + C and V, and the on-screen copy and paste options in the context menu. The options work fine for multiple files and large files, and with the new dialog boxes and graphical representation of copying speed, it's hard to complain.
Jeremy Ginnish Canada
Published by: aplhsindia.in
This ESP32 handheld is a retro emulator, FM synth, and Guitar Hero clone controller all in one
One of the best parts of being an adult is realising you have the money and the know-how to acquire all the things you coveted as a child. But what if you could make a device that put everything you ever wanted into one handy portable device you can take...
One of the best parts of being an adult is realising you have the money and the know-how to acquire all the things you coveted as a child. But what if you could make a device that put everything you ever wanted into one handy portable device you can take wherever you want? That's exactly what one Redditor did when they made an ESP32-S3 handheld that combines several uses into a single device.
Rodrigo Ramírez Spain
Published by: aplhsindia.in
I bought cheap server hardware for my home lab, and the electricity bill taught me an expensive lesson
Having built my first home server using components cobbled together from older builds, I realized fairly quickly that an experimental workstation doesn’t need cutting-edge specs to drive my virtualization projects. As time went on, I started grabbing outdated machines from flea markets, and with a little coat of Proxmox, they...
Having built my first home server using components cobbled together from older builds, I realized fairly quickly that an experimental workstation doesn’t need cutting-edge specs to drive my virtualization projects. As time went on, I started grabbing outdated machines from flea markets, and with a little coat of Proxmox, they became reliable nodes for my home lab, self-hosting, and DevOps experiments.
Laura Almonte Mexico
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Trying to explain One Night Only’s tech-enforced s** dystopia
From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise - in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year - to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. I'm here to...
From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise - in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year - to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. I'm here to report that it does not do that. No, the film is very much about life under Sex Purge Law, but where you might expect questions of politics or religion or fear or humanity, there are instead questions of boning. Questions like "Who should I do sex to and why?" are explored in an episodic format that sees two special hot people (Monica Barbaro and Call …Read the full story at The Verge.
Martín Herrera Spain
Published by: aplhsindia.in
Meta ordered to pay an additional $567 million in public nuisance ruling
Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing...
Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico."This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …Read the full story at The Verge.
Oskar Hovden Norway
Published by: aplhsindia.in
You, too, can 3D-print this mechanical bouncing DVD logo for unlimited fun
The problem with watching the DVD logo bounce around the screen is that, at some point, someone's going to actually want to watch a movie on that screen. But what if you had a homemade mechanical device that endlessly bounced a DVD logo around a screen so you could celebrate...
The problem with watching the DVD logo bounce around the screen is that, at some point, someone's going to actually want to watch a movie on that screen. But what if you had a homemade mechanical device that endlessly bounced a DVD logo around a screen so you could celebrate corner hits forever? Well, that's exactly what this 3D-printable project lets you do.
Eino Korpela Finland
Published by: aplhsindia.in
My USB devices weren’t charging until I tried a USB Type-A port instead
It's not news at this point that USB hasn't exactly been able to deliver on its lofty promises and goals. The "Universal" part of that acronym doesn't always hold up when it comes to power and data transfer speeds.
It's not news at this point that USB hasn't exactly been able to deliver on its lofty promises and goals. The "Universal" part of that acronym doesn't always hold up when it comes to power and data transfer speeds.