Having smart devices in your home can make life a lot easier, but once you have a few, you may start wishing you had a dedicated device to control them. And there are some devices out there that sell themselves as just that — dashboards for your smart home.

When you buy a new Pixel phone, you are likely — or even pushed — to install and/or use preinstalled Google apps and widgets. However, there are several widgets that I use nearly every day that are not created by Google. In many cases, they work better than the typical Google ones you are expected to use.

When I built my first PC, I figured the PCIe slot was useless outside of plugging a graphics card, and I went my merry way after tossing my pixel-pushing companion into the rig. Unfortunately, this trend continued for longer than I’d like to admit, until I ran into a situation where I needed extra adapter cards after my motherboard’s I/O ports proved to be inadequate for my tinkering misadventures.

Valve has been pretty open about what people do with the faceplate of their Steam Machines. In fact, it made the designs for an e-ink front display open-source so you can make your own at home. Now, someone has made their own faceplate that can hold a Steam Controller in place while also charging it using the official puck.

After Sony revealed that it would ramp down disc production in 2028, gamers began making their voices heard. The idea was that, if they showed enough support, Sony might rethink its strategy and roll back its decision. Unfortunately for fans of physical libraries, it seems that Sony has already doubled down on its plan, as new PS5s now show a warning about going digital-only.

Nintendo has smashed its first-quarter earnings estimates for the fiscal year, bolstered by strong games sales and US tariff refunds, though its customers likely won't receive anything from the latter. In its latest financial results, Nintendo reports that operating profits soared to 142.5 billion yen (about $902 million) between April 1st and June 30th, compared to 56.9 billion yen (about $360 million) for the same quarter last year - an increase of 150.5 percent.This spike is partially attributed to a boom in game sales, with Switch 2 software sales increasing by 9.2 percent compared to the previous year, and software for the original Sw …Read the full story at The Verge.

I prefer Cursor over VS Code because it is more agentic, and its $20 subscription gives me generous usage limits that let me get actual work done. I am comparing Cursor with VS Code because both are based on the Electron framework and are similar in speed and performance. They take longer to open files and folders once you have a significant number of extensions installed. They also consume a lot of RAM.

xAI's Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia with AI-generated articles that Elon Musk once promised would be a "massive improvement" over Wikipedia, apparently hasn't been updated since April 24th, according to a report from Lawfare. "As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months," Lawfare said.Grokipedia launched in v0.1 in October 2025 with an initial batch of 885,000 articles, and is now on v0.2 (released in November 2025) and has more than 6,000,000 total articles, according to grokipedia.com/live. But that live page also has a section titled "Recent changes to…" with a message under it that reads "No live edits av …Read the full story at The Verge.

As everyone debates Sony's recent decision to go digital-only, people have been finding fun ways to turn their Steam library into a physical form. We've already seen someone turn SSDs into Game Boy cartridges that load a game when plugged in, which was pretty wild by itself. Now, someone has devised a system where you can load a Steam game with its corresponding floppy disk, and as you may have guessed by now, it uses a bit of trickery to get everything working.

For years, Synology was the safe bet for home NAS enclosures. And like many of you, I went with the safe bet for the best part of a decade. But things change, and my home storage needs changed. It’s not even because Synology became actively hostile to users, although that’s certainly been on my mind, but because the all-in-one NAS formula stopped making sense to me.

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to toss out Apple's landmark lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, describing the allegations as "meritless." In a motion filed yesterday to dismiss the complaint, OpenAI says that Apple is mischaracterizing both the actions of the AI startup's employees as theft, and "generic" product development information as "trade secrets," adding that Apple made no reasonable efforts to maintain such secrecy.The dismissal request is in response to a lawsuit filed by Apple in July, alleging that former Apple employees that went on to work for OpenAI stole confidential documents to further OpenAI …Read the full story at The Verge.

Have you ever wondered why your laptop is running warmer than you'd like? You might think it is just the hardware struggling to run the apps you are using. But it is also Windows itself that is causing it — even on high-performance systems.