Modern cloud storage is expensive, and prices are only creeping up. Many users easily pay $15 a month, which equates to around $200 a year for a Google One tier with 2TB of shared space, only to watch family photos or 4K phone recordings and PC backups quickly push you towards the next tier, which feels like a never-ending cycle. Beyond the cost, other red flags include accidental term violations, automated account flags, and payment hiccups that can wipe outa decade's worth of personal photos, documents, and device backups overnight.

Over the course of nearly a decade, my husband and I have dutifully carried out a four-times-daily ritual of feeding a pair of lovely cat siblings who hate each other. This was mostly manageable for years, but in 2024, disaster struck for my small dependents: We had a child. Suddenly, the cats were no longer our first priority. Despite our best efforts, their dry-food snack times began slipping or getting missed altogether. It was time, we decided, to turn to the pet-tech industry and hope automated feeders could deliver the attention we couldn't.Four machines and a few hundred dollars later, our hope has proven mostly well founded- though …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have owned my Nvidia GPU for long enough to know that installing the drivers is nowhere near the end of the setup process. What I didn't realize when I first built my PC, though, was just how many little Nvidia Control Panel settings I would eventually discover months into owning the card.

Windows is designed to be helpful, but sometimes it can be a little too helpful. Such is the case of someone who discovered that, if they ran their laptop on the eco power plan for 15 days, Windows would automatically delete the GPU's drivers without telling them. And while it sounds like an annoying quirk, fixing it is surprisingly easy.

I've tried getting into audiobooks plenty of times. However, looking at that 12-hour remaining ticker gives me anxiety, and let's just say that getting through them just hasn't happened for me. That said, audio as a medium isn't the problem. I listen to plenty of podcasts. For that matter, I listen to a fair few audio dramas too.

After collaborating with 8BitDo on a gamepad two years ago, Genki launched the first controller the company designed from the ground up today. With an unorthodox design that positions its thumbsticks and buttons above a large 2.9-inch LCD screen, the Manta looks a lot chunkier than competing controllers. But what really sets it apart is a deeper focus on customizability with numerous settings that can be adjusted using the controller's screen plus buttons and thumbsticks that can be tailored to each player's preferences.The Genki Manta is launching today through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The earliest backers can preorder the con …Read the full story at The Verge.

Here’s Elon Musk showing off the Solar Roof plans back in 2016. | Image: Dieter Bohn / The Verge Tesla has discontinued Solar Roof, its solar panels designed to look like regular roofing tiles, Electrek reports. Sources "close to the program" told the publication that Tesla has informed its third-party installer network that Solar Roof is no longer available to order, and that only conventional solar panels will be supplied going forward.While Tesla hasn't officially announced that it's sunsetting the product, it's made several website changes that corroborate the reported discontinuation. The dedicated Solar Roof page (tesla.com/solarroof) that launched almost a decade ago now automatically redirects to Tesla's solar panel page inste …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of the automation in my home lab has always been handled by scripts. The problem is that scripts are rigid. If I want an automation to behave differently based on available storage, the state of a service, or the output of another command, I have to account for every condition while writing it.

A little while ago, Microsoft confirmed that it had accidentally rolled out a new OneDrive Photos app to everyone's PCs a little earlier than expected. The bad news was that enterprise PCs weren't able to actually use the app because they didn't have the proper permissions to use it. The really bad news is that uninstalling OneDrive Photos involved gutting the whole OneDrive app from your PC, which wasn't ideal.

He hates weigh-in days. My cat Pablo is a voluptuous boy. His primordial pouch, originally thought to protect cats' squishy insides, hangs low and wobbles to and fro. Once, when he was five or six, a vet sternly sat my spouse and me down, gravely stating, "He's simply too young to be this fat." Pablo didn't care, but we were traumatized. Now that he's 10, the vets have repeatedly scolded us. All 20 pounds of his rotundity, they say, cannot continue. The specter of diabetes and kidney problems, and the fact that his obesity combined with a too-small pee-pee hole increases his risk of urinary crystals, mean that a diet is urgent.I hear this every year. I keep say …Read the full story at The Verge.

Patreon is developing over 30 new and updated tools, but some of them might never fully roll out to users. | Image: Patreon Patreon has announced a number of new and overhauled features that are designed to "build a better network - and a better internet," according to CEO Jack Conte. The Patreon roadmap includes discovery algorithm updates, platform and security improvements, and new features for both creators and fans.In a lengthy blog post, Conte outlines each of the changes and says they aim to address how the last generation of tech companies "have enshittified" by positioning Patreon as a better example of online creative and community platforms:"The current version of the web is a failed promise for creators and fandoms. As creators, we can't even rea …Read the full story at The Verge.

As a Linux fan, I always enjoy celebrating when it scores a win over the big companies. However, not in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine a Linux laptop would outsell its Windows version by over ten to one. Fortunately, I don't have to dream, as Framework has confirmed that the Fedora preorders for its new Laptop 12 are currently skyrocketing versus the Windows version, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.