If you use Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive, chances are you live within the Google ecosystem. If you own a MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, and have naturally gravitated toward Apple Mail, iCloud, and the rest of Apple's services, you're probably more invested in the Apple ecosystem. Similarly, if you rely on Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, and Microsoft 365, you're likely more comfortable within Microsoft's ecosystem.

Last week, we saw a very interesting trend in AI pop up: reverse-engineering smart TVs. The idea was that you sicced Claude Code on your TV, and it would dig its way in, remove bloatware, strip out the ads, and even replace the UI with one you prefer. Things came to a head when someone managed to breach Samsung's Tizen OS with Claude Code, which is no easy feat.

In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle, The Body, or Scott Walker's The Drift.This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores death, disease, and tragedy. But not just from some abstract perspective. There are visceral descriptions of the hanging of Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. He sings about 9/11, his stillborn twin brother, and the Srebrenica genocide. Lyrically, it's about as dark as an album …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia took the chip from its DGX Spark, put it in a Windows laptop, and called it RTX Spark. On paper, it's the local AI laptop I've wanted for years: up to 128GB of unified memory, CUDA, and a chip that was already here under a different name. I've spent the past week running models on a Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 with 64GB, along with games and other tasks.

Twenty dollars a month for Claude Pro doesn't really feel like that much when you consider how much you're getting out of it, and it's also a price point you simply get used to. Pro gets you Anthropic's bigger models plus a stack of app features, which is great if you're leaning on Opus all day. But a lot of everyday AI use is smaller, and getting a concept explained here and there doesn't need a flagship model, and probably not a $20 bill either.

A basic ESP32 board or an S3 remained my go-to choice for smart home build projects since most just needed a Wi-Fi connection. For anything that needed to join its own mesh instead of sitting on Wi-Fi, I’d pair that board with a separate Zigbee coordinator and a Thread border router I run. The idea was to make smart devices join their own mesh network, rather than dump them on Wi-Fi networks.

If you're an avid e-reader fan, there's a good chance you've got more devices than you need (and I don't blame you). However, as much as owning a fleet of e-readers feels great, how do you keep your books synced up between them? Well, one person managed to achieve a good sync between five devices using a self-hosted BookOrbit server and KOReader on each device, and it makes me want to try it, too.

Between important documents, photos, videos, and work files across my computers, I have tried different backup solutions over the years.

When Google raised the price of the Google TV Streamer to $150, it caught many home media enthusiasts off guard. Released more than two years ago, it has received few updates, and it can be buggy. It offers a couple of features that the seven-year-old Nvidia Shield TV Pro (which also saw a price increase) doesn't, but when I thought I'd retire my Shield TV, it didn't make sense.

As is tradition, iFixit has torn open the latest iPhone and laid its parts bare on a table. It found some interesting details about how Apple might be hiding the crease on the Duo's folding screen and gave it a 5/10 repairability score. That might not seem particularly high, but it's the best score the site has given to a foldable yet. The internal screen's matte nano-texture cover doesn't just make it more readable in bright sunlight; it also helps mask the crease by scattering reflections. When looking at the display under a microscope, iFixit also found oval-shaped subpixels arranged at various angles, which the site believes are design …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’re planning to grab a cheap mini-PC, NAS, or even an x86 single-board computer, chances are you’ll come across models bearing the Intel N100 sooner or later. On paper, this 3-year-old embedded processor has become a bit outdated in this day and age, with the N150 being its direct upgrade and the N350 and N355 providing superior computational capabilities in almost every possible way.

It was about to be a long night in Huntington, West Virginia.Mayor Patrick Farrell stood before 10 members of city council in a white dress shirt and dark blazer studded with an American flag pin. Behind him sat his constituents and residents from neighboring towns. Some had their arms crossed, while others held a steady glare in his direction. Less than a week before the July 13th meeting, a 33-year-old named Jackie Harper had been shot and killed in Huntington. It was the kind of crime Farrell had promised to get under control. But a breakthrough in the case just days after the killing suggested something promising to Farrell. Harper's s …Read the full story at The Verge.