Running a network-attached storage (NAS) device on the LAN is a great way to start self-hosting content. Whether you're planning to save money by cancelling various streaming services, wish to take control of your own data and cease relying on cloud storage, or simply want somewhere to stash some backups, it can be difficult to resist the urge to run everything on the NAS. The problem with prebuilt turnkey enclosures of today is that they're powerful enough to run multiple services, allowing you to create your own streaming platform, collaboration suite, and more with the click of a few buttons.

Almost five years with Windows 11, and Microsoft has made several changes to the Start menu. But the core usability problems never got fixed. The oversized layout, the Recommended section taking up valuable space, and the lack of meaningful customization made it feel oddly limited on a desktop PC. In the past, I tried living with it; I even tried several native tweaks like registry edits and Group Policy workarounds, but those still felt like a patchwork, not an actual solution.

Many people rightly believe that panicking about SSD lifespan is pointless, since most PCs will never write enough data to a drive to exhaust its endurance. If you check your SSD's health with CrystalDiskInfo or a first-party tool, you'll probably see "Good" or "Normal" under "Drive Health." You'll probably see the same status for years, irrespective of what's going on physically with the NAND flash on your drive. SSD health is just a percentage that tells you how much of the drive's rated lifespan has been exhausted. It doesn't account for serious read/write errors or physical degradation of the SSD's cells. Even an SSD with 99% or 95% health could have encountered uncorrectable errors, at which point it should not be trusted with your data anymore. A deeper look at your drive's S.M.A.R.T. data will tell you if you need to start preparing for the last rites.

Buying a GPU always used to feel like an investment, and a long-term one, at that. You'd spend good money on a GPU, and it would carry you through years of new releases without making you feel like you were falling behind every six months. In fact, I'm willing to wager that the average gamer had just one graphics card that varied them through their teens, but today, things couldn't be more different.

Activision is planning to drop support for PS4 and Xbox One consoles in Call of Duty: Warzone later this year. Players will need to upgrade to a PS5 or Xbox Series S / X console to continue playing Call of Duty: Warzone once season 6 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 finishes later this year.Call of Duty: Warzone will be removed from PS4 and Xbox One storefronts on June 4th and will no longer be available to download. Activision will then remove the in-game store in Warzone on PS4 and Xbox One on June 25th, and the game won't be playable once Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 season 1 begins later this year.The timing couldn't be worse for Warzo …Read the full story at The Verge.

Playing Windows games on an Android phone has gone from being a novelty to something people can actually do in approximately two short years, and most of that movement has come about as a result of a single tool: Winlator. Winlator stacks Wine on top of x86/x86_64 translation layers like Box86 and Box64, with forks increasingly experimenting with components like Proton builds, FEXCore, Mesa Turnip, DXVK, and VKD3D. It turns a modern smartphone (typically Snapdragon-based) into something that can plausibly boot a PC game.

New features coming to YouTube could make it better for listening to podcasts, rolling out to Premium subscribers starting today on Android and coming later to iOS. A new "on-the-go mode" shifts YouTube into an audio-first layout, with larger, simplified playback buttons, a still image in place of the video, and a timeline showing video chapters. YouTube says you can turn on this new mode in a video's settings - a pop up will also appear if YouTube detects you're moving around while watching a video. If you like to speed up your podcasts to get through episodes faster, YouTube's new auto speed feature can help you automate that process. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Modern charging bricks are little computers of their own, packed with circuitry to protect your devices from issues while charging. If you stick to reputable brands, they should be of good enough quality, and that's partly why we haven't done any charger reviews for a while.

While Claude's been around for a little less than ChatGPT, you wouldn't really know it from its fanbase alone. It went from a somewhat niche tool only developers were following to a tool every other person is leaning on. Suddenly, everyone is using Claude and Claude Code to automate their workflow, ship the gazillion product ideas they've always had, and generally do more than they ever thought they could on their own. Claude Code is one of Anthropic's flagship products, and while that too once only found traction within a developer's workflow, it's now creeping into the workflows of designers, founders, marketers, and plenty of people who'd never call themselves engineers.

Before even trying Gemini’s Daily Brief, I thought it wasn’t going to be much. I thought it would give me a general overview of my tasks, or at least some random news. Guilty as charged for not giving it enough credit. It showed me more than I expected, gave me details that made me think, “Where did it get that from?”, and even offered an additional option for something on my to-do list. Now, it’s something I open every day.

While I try to do as much as possible to protect my privacy on my Android smartphone, I always have lingering concerns about what information apps may access, especially in the age of AI. There are plenty of privacy settings you can tweak, but these menus have also become difficult to navigate.

Next month's Tribeca Festival will include the premiere of an AI-generated film: Dreams of Violets. The 75-minute film is a fictional dramatization of the Iranian government's mass killing of protestors in January, with the people and images fully created by AI, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter.Dreams of Violets cost $2,000 to make and is "based on journalistic reports, photographs, and eyewitness accounts," according to a press release. It was created by Ash and Pooya Koosha, two brothers who left Iran in 2009. Pooya cofounded Fountain 0, the company behind the film, while Ash serves as CEO.Fountain 0 says Dreams of Violets …Read the full story at The Verge.