I've been a heavy Spotify user for years now, and while I appreciate the desktop app (and the level of customization available to me through tools like Spicetify), there's a part of me that misses the days of Windows Media Player. Not just the visualizer, although that was a huge draw for me as a teenager, but the speed, too. Spotify isn't exactly slow, but on occasion, it does take its time. Windows Media Player was snappy, with near-instant load times and no lag before it started playing whatever early-2000s emo rock I had queued up.

The Google Pixel 10a is one of the best mid-range phones you can buy right now. It's retail price of $499 is more than fair, but the discount that drops it to $424 makes it even better. This is close to the lowest price that we've seen for this phone, making it a fantastic time to pick one up.

Two years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt released his New York Times bestseller The Anxious Generation. The book posits that the rise of social media and smartphone use is largely to blame for the prominent decline in teen mental health since 2010. It quickly became a central rallying cry of the social media backlash. Haidt has been credited with helping inspire Australia's nationwide teen social media ban. He has joined forces with bereaved parents who are fighting tech companies in court. His name comes up unprompted in conversations with people in power who say his book opened their eyes to an online crisis. Haidt's theory has …Read the full story at The Verge.

When it comes to retro video game decompilation ports, we've definitely been eating very well lately.

Every paid Claude plan meters usage in two ways: a rolling 5-hour window and a weekly cap across all models, and that quota is shared with Claude chat and whatever else is running on the same account. So if you're a heavy Cowork or Claude Design user in addition to Claude Code, then you're out of luck or onto the Max plan.

Poll data released Tuesday by the New York Times and Siena University confirms what we've already been seeing, and what politicians are responding to - AI and data centers are incredibly unpopular. Asked if they support or oppose the construction of data centers to power AI tech, 61 percent of the 1,503 likely voters surveyed in early September (ahead of the recent AI safety slowdown discussion) said they were opposed, with only 14 percent saying they strongly support. The split was about even among 2024 Donald Trump voters, at 49 percent support to 45 percent oppose, while people who had voted for Kamala Harris or who didn't vote leaned opp …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been more than two years since the last major Windows event, so Microsoft is heading to San Francisco next month to outline the future of Windows and Surface devices. At an event on October 7th, the company says it will host a "conversation on how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC."Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will be in attendance, alongside Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will be appearing at the event, which suggests that RTX Spark PCs could be the main focus of this event. If that's the case, don't be surprised to hear more about the Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra pricing and avai …Read the full story at The Verge.

Storage was cheap and accessible a year ago, and I rarely thought about maintaining it. My laptop has an NVMe SSD, and I have a couple of other SATA SSDs inside SATA-to-USB enclosures. My SSD is five years old, and I've been putting as much stress on it as possible. But the landscape changed in 2025, and AI development bolstered the storage and memory prices by a huge margin.

A few months back before RAM prices hit the roof, I decided to add a nice little perk to my NAS. Specifically, I added in SSD caching to eke out a bit more speed, because I thought my hard drives were being the bottleneck to peak performance. My NAS handles everything from file storage to applications, indexing, backups, and more. Once in a while, I might even dabble in a workload with plenty of reads and writes. An SSD cache should help with all that, right?

I was called a rookie when I recently mentioned that my media server has no more than 5TB of storage. I agree that 5TB isn't a very large collection, but the idea that your media server needs double-digit terabytes of storage is flawed.

Windows Vista is an operating system that I look back on fondly for one major reason: it was among the best-looking Windows options we've ever had. The Aero design philosophy was a major part of both Windows Vista and Windows 7, though Microsoft dropped it in Windows 8 in favor of its Metro design. Aero is honestly reminiscent of Apple's design philosophy in a lot of ways.

I've always maintained that every single tool in the PowerToys suite improves upon a distinct aspect of Windows 11, and recently I've come to realize that they do it in a way such that it becomes hard to envision going back. A few months of my experiences with Workspaces established just as much.