There was a time when Microsoft Outlook was the undisputed king of Windows productivity — a fast, feature-packed native application that handled massive enterprise workflows without breaking a sweat.

Before combining everything onto a few Proxmox-powered cluster nodes, I ran dedicated hardware for specific packages, be it Home Assistant and Frigate. The former was running on a compact mini PC, and by compact, I mean ridiculously small. It had an Intel chip, barely any RAM, and almost no storage, making it perfect for running the smart home ... or so I thought. Though I enjoyed having no layers, no extra software, and no hypervisor at the time, I eventually outgrew the system it ran on. Bare metal can prove useful for many deployments, and it's never really the wrong choice to make for Home Assistant.

The Flipper Zero spent the past five years becoming the kind of device that people either own and love or have a strong opinion about despite never having touched one. It packaged NFC, sub-GHz radio, infrared, RFID, and a handful of hardware interfaces into a pocket-sized microcontroller toy that became unexpectedly serious in the hands of researchers, hobbyists, and the occasional teenager. It was hugely popular, and the company says that it generated over $150 million in sales with more than a million devices sold.

If you want to get started with both the ESP32 and ePaper displays, what better way to get accustomed to both than by a small, simple, yet endlessly fun little project? If you're on the hunt for something to make that doesn't take a ton of effort and gives you something cool to talk about, then this ESP32 fortune teller may just be what you're looking for. It has a ton of pre-made fortunes loaded on it, works offline, and best of all, it comes with additional features that elevate it past being just a novelty.

I adore Docker and its containerization ecosystem as much as the next tinkerer. Between its simple commands, Compose functionality, and massive community support, Docker is easy to pick up for beginners and reliable enough to serve veteran project-building enthusiasts. But as someone who started with Docker and moved on to other container runtimes over the course of my DIY project-building journey, I have to admit that it has certain quirks that make it a bit of a hassle for advanced container-hosting tasks.

DisplayPort has largely been the primary cable PC enthusiasts reach for, and for good reason. It has better bandwidth than the HDMI of its era, native VRR before HDMI caught up, and there's no royalty funny business or weird treatment of Linux drivers. When I upgraded from my 1440p IPS display to a 4K OLED, I reached for DisplayPort once more. I plugged it in, set my refresh rate on the "Gaming Mode" of my Samsung Odyssey G8 to 240Hz, and thought that'd be the end of it. Then I experienced weird static lines in the display and periodic black screens that weren't frequent enough to be very concerning, but just enough for me to search for a fix. After chasing ghosts of panel problems, cable replacements and entire GPU swaps, I found that the DisplayPort implementation itself wasn't up to snuff, and switching to HDMI was the only fix.

One of the coolest things people who build stuff can do is bring something from fiction into reality. We've seen plenty of Pip-Boys and even a fully 3D-printed wearable suit of Doomguy's armor that used in-game assets for extra accuracy. One recurring trend is when people remake robots from movies and books, because tinkering and robotics often go hand-in-hand.

Meta says it needs to “offset the other investments we're making.” | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta has reportedly notified thousands of employees that they've been laid off as the company attempts to compensate for its hefty AI investments. In an email from Meta management shared by Business Insider, impacted staffers were told that the planned headcount reduction was part of the company's "continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making."Reports of an upcoming wave of layoffs started circulating in March, though at that time Meta was believed to be cutting up to 20 percent of its total company headcount. According to a recent memo shared in May, the layoffs are now …Read the full story at The Verge.

Bambu Lab makes the best, most accessible 3D printers yet, but that reputation is suddenly under siege. It all started when Paweł Jarczak received a private message from the company on Reddit asking him to delete his code. Now the 3D printing community is lining up behind Jarczak to fund a war against Bambu - and the future of 3D printers could be at stake.Jarczak is a developer who shared a way to let people remote control their Bambu printers without using Bambu software. But Bambu wanted to lock down its system, despite relying on open-source code. That provoked a furious coalition of open-source advocates and YouTubers to respond."I' …Read the full story at The Verge.

The SpaceX IPO is here, and it's more than just an historic public offering that could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. It also reveals more ways in which Elon Musk's companies interact and overlap with each other, shuffling money around in ways that are often difficult to keep track of. This is evident in ways that are both obvious and less so. A CTRL-F search for "Tesla" yields 87 results, xAI is mentioned 356 times, and X 267 times. Even the Boring Company (7 times) and Neuralink (3) get a few mentions. Throughout its 330 pages of rocket launches and interplanetary wishes, you can trace the network of ways in which Musk's …Read the full story at The Verge.

You know, there's always a big rush from retail companies to meet the demands of popular retail days like Black Friday. But what if a company just made up a day and then began celebrating it with deals? I mean, nothing's stopping a business from announcing that today's a special kind of day and then offering discounts because of it.

AMD has announced the availability of the Ryzen AI Halo developer platform, powered by AI Max 300-series processors. This range of mini PCs isn't going to win awards for gaming prowess, nor are they designed as low-cost options for attaching behind workstation monitors.