Windows has improved a lot over the years, both in performance and stability. You don't get as many errors as you used to, and better memory management makes the whole experience feel more streamlined. But it's not the perfect operating system. There are things you still need to change on a new Windows install, from removing bloatware to reconfiguring default settings. And one such default setting I disable on every Windows PC is Fast Startup.

Ella Stiller, Mike Colter, and Rachel Keller star in Cupertino. | CBS Cupertino brings the tech backlash to the CBS procedural - an initially awkward combination, but with rewarding results. The show starts off just slightly unsure, but quickly figures out what to do with these strange times, creating fictionalized dupes of the Zizians, Polymarket, Jeff Bezos' looksmaxxing obsession, OpenAI stealing Scarlett Johansson's voice, and the fight for AI guardrails, among other familiar tales, and using them to speak to the feeling of helplessness in the face of rapid change that extends well beyond the greater San Francisco area. It turns out the seemingly outdated tools of broadcast TV are a fantastic way to tackle …Read the full story at The Verge.

Proxmox is quite the solution for running virtualized services, including those part of a home lab. The allure of creating a home-based data center can be difficult to resist, especially when used enterprise hardware can be bought at a severe discount. ECC RAM, Multiple Ethernet ports. Remote management. These are the sort of features that aren't typically found elsewhere, but something like a Dell PowerEdge R21o II can tick all the right boxes.

A few months ago, when Kyutai released Pocket TTS, I was able to clone my own voice from a 5-second-long clip, which was an experience that left me wondering just how fragile the voice-based identity checks at banks and insurers had become. The barrier to access was so low that anyone with a PC and an internet connection could've followed the same steps and reached the same outcome.

Diagramming sounds like one of those tasks that should be quick, until you're trying to nudge the fourth box in place with arrows that refuse to line up, and 20 minutes have passed. Handing all that work to Claude is the obvious solution to the problem. This is exactly what I've been doing to get my diagram elements to line up perfectly in no time, and then I just save the files straight to my vault and open them in Obsidian Canvas or with the Excalidraw plugin.

Shopping for a 16GB GPU in 2026 has become a really grim affair. The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB "launched" at a price of $429, and now sells for around $800, and the RX 9060 XT is a bit better, but paying over $500 for a card that launched at $349 is also suboptimal. Right now, if you're looking for a brand-new card that has 16GB of VRAM and you're on a budget, those are basically your only two choices.

Jack Black in A Minecraft Movie. | Image: Warner Bros. Xbox is launching a new division, called "XP," that's dedicated to Xbox experiences that aren't video games, including films and TV adaptations, consumer products, live events, and partnerships with creators and brands. Different teams at Xbox already do this work, but it will all now fall under the centralized XP division.XP formalizes four "investment areas," according to a blog post by Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball:XBOX PICTURES: Bringing our worlds and characters to new audiences through film, television, and other forms of linear storytelling. XBOX PRODUCTS: Creating products that are authentic to the fandom that al …Read the full story at The Verge.

While much of the automotive world sits dumbfounded as China gobbles up all its customers, BMW continues to roll out extremely well-crafted, technologically advanced electric vehicles that impress in both drive quality and price. The latest is the BMW iX4, a coupe-shaped SUV that puts a sportier spin on the automaker's iX3.The iX4 is the third vehicle to be released on BMW's next-generation Neue Klasse platform, following the iX3 and i3 models. The iX4 50 xDrive will come first in March 2027, followed by an even more high-performance M60 xDrive version later in the year. The automaker is positioning this new lineup as its bulwark against t …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been using a soundbar instead of my TV's onboard speakers for years because, well, the latter is rarely a good option. When I got this TV back in 2020, its speakers were serviceable for a while. After all, I finished The Last of Us Part 2 without ever buying a soundbar. That said, the TV speakers started showing their limits as soon as I watched a few movies and TV shows. The volume was fine, but the sound separation left a lot to be desired.

You would have used Task Manager on your Windows PC countless times, whether to terminate a stuck application or reduce your startup app clutter. Windows 11's Task Manager has evolved considerably over the last three decades, but it can be traced back to the first version shipped with Windows NT 4.0 in 1996. It succeeded a more basic utility called "Task List" seen on earlier Windows versions.

Anthropic has been moving pretty quickly lately. Only yesterday did it announce a Google Workspace plugin that lets you invoke Claude in a sidebar to help you get your work done. Now, the company has announced that it's releasing the cheapest, fastest light model yet with Claude Haiku 5.5.

Teenage Engineering founder and CEO Jesper Kouthoofd told Highsnobiety that it plans to stop making synths. And yes, that includes the iconic OP-1, which put the company on the map. TE isn't just a music gear maker; it's also a sought-after design firm. It's collaborated with Ikea, Nothing, and Playdate, among others. But almost everything the company makes itself - the OP-1, the OP-XY, EP-133, TP-7, et cetera - is music or audio-focused. Which makes the supposed decision to abandon the market all the more confusing.Here's the relevant quote from Highsnobiety: Kouthoofd tells me that, as part of a reorganization last fall, he announced …Read the full story at The Verge.