ESP32 projects can be extremely practical, but they can also be a lot of fun. Take, for instance, this colorful display that sees you via a camera and draws your outline in rainbow colors on a WLED matrix. It may not have much use outside of a disco, but hey, it looks amazing, so who cares?

Devices that once served a great purpose in your life slowly become neglected as they become technologically weaker or obsolete. I have a decent collection of such devices, ranging from old Hi-Fi speakers to smartphones and laptops that feel outdated by today's standards. My oldest laptop was tucked inside a cabinet, collecting dust because it couldn't run the latest operating systems anymore. It was also too weak for mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu, which also ran poorly on the old hardware.

I think every Xbox gamer has their favorite console in terms of aesthetics. As much as it had a bulky controller and a very 2000s-like vibe, my vote definitely goes for the original Xbox. However, some people fell in love with the Xbox 360, such as this tinkerer who decided to tweak their Steam Deck to make it look more like Microsoft's second console. And while making the modifications wasn't the easiest walk in the park, I think all the effort was well worth it.

The Razr Ultra line is among those due to receive GrapheneOS support next year. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge GrapheneOS, an open source version of Android that prioritizes security and privacy, has detailed its plans for supporting Motorola smartphones. Official support is set to arrive next year, starting with traditional flagships, before rolling out to Motorola's foldable phones and perhaps cheaper models, eventually. In a Mastodon thread, the GrapheneOS Foundation announced that it will initially support a Motorola slab flagship phone, but will later support both Razr Fold and Razr Ultra foldables - the latter of which would be the first flip phone to officially run GrapheneOS.Graphene has always had stringent security standards when it com …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ten years ago, I never thought about ergonomics, whether I was working on my laptop in the office or playing on my PC at home. Having turned 34 this month, however, I'm a lot more careful about my posture when working for 6–8 hours and gaming for a few more — all at my desk. The body can only take so much, and having dealt with neck and back pain for years, I don't intend to make things worse for myself.

Minecraft is pretty graphically simple. Sure, rendering huge worlds can really tax your CPU, but if you cut it down to a smaller size, you can theoretically get it running on all kinds of hardware, such as a smart bulb. Now, someone has managed to get Mojang's hit game up and running on an SNES, and it doesn't even need the advanced 3D tech Nintendo made at the time.

Saving notes isn't a problem when looking for a solution. Plenty of software solutions are designed to fit whatever your needs are. From simple tools to full-on productivity managers, there's something for everyone. Over the years, I've dabbled in several permutations and combinations. I might save a note in a notes app, or leave a reminder in a reminders app. But for the most part, Google Keep has been my go-to for consolidating all these features.

There is a major hardware contrast between my $2,500 custom gaming PC that features an RTX 40-series GPU, a high-end 4K HDR display, and a Gigabit fiber connection, and a $30 Amazon Fire TV Stick plugged into the same monitor. Yet somehow my PC delivers a blurry, artifact-ridden 720p or low-bitrate 1080p Netflix stream, and the streaming stick offers crisp, instantaneous 4K Dolby Vision with zero user configuration.

Tiangong Ultra (left) also broke the 400 meter world record during this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games. | Image: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images The 9.58-second 100-meter dash record set by Usain Bolt in 2009 has been outpaced by Chinese robots participating at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. In a preliminary heat on Saturday, Tiangong Ultra, made by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation ​Center, ran the distance in 9.39 seconds, followed by the Honor-developed Lightning at 9.47 seconds.It's one of several notable achievements to take place at the event, which can best be described as a sort of annual robot olympics that's designed to showcase advancements in bipedal bot technology. After launching in 2025, 2,056 robots from 16 countries are participating in this year's …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have spent enough time switching between ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to know that most AI assistants are starting to feel similar. Switching between them often comes down to small differences in speed, integrations, or output quality.

I’ve invested enough time in my Jellyfin library that losing it would be more than a storage problem. The media files matter, obviously, but so do everything I’ve done around them: folder organization, metadata, artwork, watched status, collections, and all the little choices that make the server behave the way I expect. None of those things sound especially painful to rebuild on their own. Put them all together after a drive or server failure, though, and I’d be looking at hours of tedious work I’ve already done once.

I have been a long-time Notion user. I have used it to take notes, prepare documents, write my articles, and even present things to people. I stuck around primarily because it has a dark mode, which Google Docs doesn’t have on desktop, and I found features like rich embeds helpful.