The drive that used to copy a folder of games in seconds now crawls halfway through and stalls, and the explanation seems obvious: the thing is just getting old. It has probably been in your PC for years, and everything slows down eventually, so why would SSDs be any different?

Battery life is one of the things that people look for when buying any device. After all, your phone goes everywhere you go, and it is expected to last you all day. For a lot of people, a laptop is the same — another device that is expected to last. However, over time, you might have noticed your device's battery draining more quickly and even dying on you sooner.

For the longest time, the allure of NVMe drives has always been their speed and responsiveness. And sure enough, most PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives deliver comfortably on that promise. However, "speed" means different things depending on what part of the OS experience you're actually measuring. There's a difference between how quickly your PC gets you to the desktop and how quickly it can move a 40GB file from one place to another.

Between its terrific support for low-end hardware, detailed documentation, and the ultra-handy PVE-Helper Scripts repo, Proxmox is significantly easier to pick up for newcomers compared to other virtualization platforms. But that doesn’t change the fact that Proxmox is loaded with cool QoL-enhancing (if somewhat complex) features, some of which you might not even encounter unless you go look for them specifically.

The Steam Machine has only just hit the market, and people are already doing all sorts of creative things. Not with the hardware itself, but instead replicating something somewhat similar to the Steam Machine's specifications but $300 cheaper. One company has even begun selling prebuilt gaming PCs that have SteamOS preinstalled.

The video game disc is dead, and Sony's been planning to kill it for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony's discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the company's Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it'll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it's planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.Thalgau isn't just one of Sony's disc plants. It's where the disc-making division is headquartered, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility …Read the full story at The Verge.

For some people, travel isn't just for fun; it's part of their bucket list. Some adventurous types have made it their life goal to visit every single country in the world, and while I can't say I share the same enthusiasm as them, I definitely respect it.

The man whose Tesla struck and killed a woman inside her Texas home last month is now facing manslaughter charges, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and local news outlet KHOU 11. 44-year-old Michael Butler was arrested on Wednesday and claimed to have been driving his Model 3 using Tesla's Full-Self Driving (FSD) system at the time of the crash, according to an arrest affidavit.The court document includes the officer saying that data extraction from Butler's phone found several FSD-related Google searches from May 2026: "Tesla fsd not aggressive enough 2026 model," "tesla fsdnot [sic] aggressive enough 2026," "tesla fsdnot [s …Read the full story at The Verge.

A simple home NAS doesn’t need to be complicated. For most people, the ideal setup is a box with a few drives, a clean web interface, some shared folders, and enough reliability to keep family photos, backups, and media files from scattering across random USB drives. That’s why prebuilt NAS systems are so appealing. They make storage feel like an appliance rather than another home lab project that will eat up half a weekend.

A scan of an imaging phantom, segmented to validate how cleanly structures separate under controlled conditions. | Image: Midjourney Medical Midjourney has shown more of its futuristic medical scanner. It still hasn't shown much proof it works. The AI startup, best known for generating images, released a behind-the-scenes video of its dunk-tank ultrasound scanner, which it plans to deploy in spas and hopes will transform medicine with cheap, detailed, radiation-free imaging. The nearly 20-minute tour comes from tech YouTuber Marcin Plaza, who also happens to be an engineer at the company.Plaza frankly describes the scanner as scores of ultrasound probes "hacked apart and slapped on a glorified hot tub with an elevator in it," connected to off-the-shelf computers and Raspberry …Read the full story at The Verge.

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. | Image: Apple Since its inception, Apple TV, née Apple TV Plus, has built a reputation on quality over quantity. It has far fewer shows and movies than the likes of Netflix or Disney Plus, but generally speaking, the projects it does put out are quite good. It's a strategy that has brought comparisons to the HBO of old, and 2026 has featured a particularly strong mix of new hits and returning favorites. It took a few years, but Apple TV seems to be finally hitting its stride.In terms of brand-new series, this year's offerings have been fairly spread out across genres. Leading the way has been the delightful Widow's Bay, which skillfully manages the diff …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have been in an on-and-off relationship with local LLMs. Initially, I tried 1st-gen or 2nd-gen 8B models, but they were not always up to my expectations. I gave up on them and moved back to cloud models. A couple of weeks ago, I gave local LLMs another shot. I even tested three local LLMs side by side on my RTX 4070 Ti and decided to keep one of them as the default. Not because that one single model beat the other two, but because running all three side by side for every single prompt wasn't practical. Every model had its own strengths, though, so I kept the other two around and reached them whenever the prompt really mattered. That got me thinking: what if I could use all three to get better output? That’s when I came across Karpathy's LLM Council, initially designed to work across cloud APIs. I liked the idea and decided to rebuild it around local models running on my own hardware.