An old laptop might sound like a dead end to a regular user who has upgraded to a better system. But for home lab enthusiasts, it's an underutilized treasure that can serve as a reliable home server at no additional cost. While new users love jumping on the SBC bandwagon, I prefer turning old laptops and workstations into devices that host my favorite tools and do a small but useful job in the overall setup.

Summer is almost here, and that means getting outside, having fun in the sun, and touching grass. But if you need to cool down for a bit, allow me to sing the praises of the library. If your local library system is anything like mine, it probably offers a lot of great things for you to do, both tech-related and not, at no extra cost.I'm part of the Multnomah County Library system, and I'm frankly spoiled by all of the things available with just a free library card. The perk I use most is the ability to fill up my Kindle with the wide selection of ebooks made available through OverDrive, a platform that partners with thousands of libraries …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia and Microsoft recently unveiled the much-awaited N1X and N1 SoCs, now called RTX Spark. These Arm-based chips are meant to reinvent Windows PCs for the AI era, with Nvidia claiming that laptops powered by RTX Spark are purpose-built for agentic AI. Offering 1 petaflop of compute, RTX 5070–level GPU performance, and tons of unified memory, these laptops are set to change what Windows on Arm laptops will look like at the premium end of the market. Nvidia is trying to do for Windows what Apple did for macOS, bringing its hardware leadership, software dominance, and partner ecosystem to the personal AI market. To be clear, these machines, especially the maxed-out memory models, will be too expensive for the average user, but adoption by the high-end creator market could slowly influence other segments. Nvidia could see itself competing head-to-head with AMD and Qualcomm, as each of them tries to grab the attention of serious creators and AI professionals.

Network-attached storage (NAS) may appear self-explanatory at first, but there's much more to this handy device than meets the eye. Whether you're using a custom-built server with TrueNAS SCALE or happen to be rocking the latest Synology DiskStation prebuilt turnkey model, there's a lot that can be done with such a device. One cool project I completed with a Synology NAS is storing retro games and streaming them to almost any device with a supporting browser.

Giving users the power to easily find and install new extensions is just as important as having a huge library of them. You can have the biggest catalog of tools known to man, but if people can't easily browse them and grab the ones they want, a lot of them will go uninstalled, or worse, undiscovered.

This is the Trump phone, but it could just as easily be an HTC. | Image: Trump Mobile After getting its hands on a Trump phone and tearing it apart, iFixit has confirmed what I first reported back in February: the T1 Phone is an almost exact duplicate of the HTC U24 Pro.iFixit partnered with NBC to get hold of the network's media sample of the Trump phone, along with a U24 Pro. They ran the phones through a CT scanner, tore them down to parts, and even put them back together into a functional Frankenstein phone with the U24 Pro's board inside the T1 Phone's chassis, confirming along the way that the two phones are functionally identical.There are minor differences: The flash has been moved slightly, the speaker grille was …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Go 6 now supports Boox’s stylus. | Image: Boox Boox has announced a new version of its smallest e-reader that expands the Go 6's functionality to now include note-taking. The new Go 6 (Gen II) sticks with a 6-inch, 300PPI E Ink screen like its predecessor but gets a bump from 2GB to 3GB of RAM and now supports Boox's InkSense Plus stylus, which can be used for sketching, annotating documents, or making handwritten notes.The Boox Go 6 (Gen II) is now available for preorder for $199.99 and is expected to start shipping on June 17th. The $45.99 InkSense Plus stylus isn't included, but you can bundle it with the e-reader for $232.99. That's more expensive than the entry-level Amazon Kindle …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ryanair said the CMA’s investigation is “bogus.” | Photo by Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images European economy airline Ryanair is under investigation in the UK for charging parents mandatory fees to sit with their children. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was looking into whether the seating fees, which may be charging parents for the airline to meet its child safety and disability‑related obligations, are "unfair" under consumer law.Under Ryanair's terms and conditions, at least one parent or guardian is required to sit with children aged between 2 and 11 when they fly, which the airline calls a "mandatory family seat." This approach to seating imposes a fee - typically £8 (around $10) per flight, according to …Read the full story at The Verge.

You have to be over 18 and already be connected with the person you want to chat with on other messaging platforms. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is reintroducing private messaging after testing new ways for users to share videos and "have conversations about them" last year. In an announcement on its official blog, YouTube says it's now starting to expand the in-app video sharing and messaging feature to users in the US and "other global regions" who are 18 or older.The video sharing platform had previously introduced private messaging in 2017, before discontinuing it just two years later to focus on public conversations like the Instagram-like Stories feature - which it also killed in 2023. When it started testing its latest in-app messaging capabilities in November 2025, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Near the end of 2025, Microsoft had a big wake-up call. Its huge Copilot push was not winning over the hearts of its users, and its software, including its flagship OS Windows 11, began showing problems. As such, when 2026 came around, the company went full speed ahead on getting back to its roots and improving its software over Copilot.

Anthropic has apologized for stealthily throttling its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, with hidden guardrails that undermine both researchers and rivals using it to develop competing systems. The company says it is reversing course and will be more transparent about when the restrictions kick in, even if that means Fable refuses more queries.Fable is the first widely available model in Anthropic's Mythos class of AI systems, a group the company has spent months warning are too dangerous for public release. Anthropic says it has addressed some of those risks by launching Fable with safeguards that prevent it from responding to certain "high-r …Read the full story at The Verge.

Deezer will now scan your playlists on other streaming platforms to detect AI-generated music. Deezer was the first of the big streaming services to start labeling AI-generated music. It even offered its tech to other platforms, but it doesn't seem like it had many buyers. Qobuz launched its own detection tech, while Apple and Spotify have opted for a voluntary tagging system. "No other company has followed our lead yet, so we decided to make it possible for everyone to check if their playlists include synthetic music, no matter which streaming platform they use," Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release. So, since nobody is ta …Read the full story at The Verge.