Every standalone desktop 3D printer shipped today promises the same unwritten joys of manufacturing anything you can design, in any material, straight from a spool of plastic. Yet for sheer cost efficiency and other inexplicable reasons, you'll only see a roll of Polylactic Acid or PLA shipped as the trial filament with most new printers. It is affordable, odorless, and behaves beautifully on a bare glass bed without generating toxic fumes. The ease of use has made it a universal default for print after print based on the dangerously incorrect assumption that if it looks solid on the build plate, the print will perform well in real-world conditions.

Many of us, while allocating our budget for a new build, tend to focus on the parts that directly affect performance. It's easy to convince ourselves to spend more on a faster GPU, CPU, or even RAM because we can actually see the difference when monitoring our frame rates in MSI Afterburner. I'm not against this approach, but it usually results in cutting corners on other components that give you peace of mind in the long run.

On June 10th, the German container ship Posen docked in Los Angeles after a two-week voyage from Shanghai. As Valve watcher Brad Lynch notes, it was almost certainly carrying the first mass production shipments of the Steam Frame, Valve's new gaming headset. Import records show that Valve's distribution partner Ceva offloaded nearly 32 metric tons of "Virtual Reality Devices" on Valve's behalf - or roughly 13 tons of actual product, after you subtract the roughly 3,700 kilogram weight of five 40-foot shipping containers. That's the same math we used to estimate that Valve imported 50 tons of game consoles in two days last month - and sin …Read the full story at The Verge.

Concept art from Dear Upstairs Neighbors that used to train custom builds of Google’s Veo and Imagen models. | Image: Google DeepMind For all the noise that's been made about how generative AI is poised to revolutionize the filmmaking industry, there haven't really been any projects created with the technology that felt like the sort of entertainment people would pay to see. Most AI firms' video models are still only capable of churning out short bursts of visually inconsistent footage. And some of Hollywood's biggest AI partnerships have suddenly evaporated in ways that make it seem like studios might not be able to rely on the new technology coming out of Silicon Valley. For the most part, short-form video slop appears to be the only thing that major production houses ar …Read the full story at The Verge.

The modern smart home has a problem, built by competing voice assistant manufacturers that don't want anyone else's devices to take over. No matter how well the devices connect into that ecosystem, they still have to play by the rules set by Amazon and Google, and be at the whimsy of how their voice models work.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 132, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy soccer, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been preparing for a month of getting absolutely nothing done during the World Cup. I've also been reading about Steven Spielberg and wearables and the Boeing 747, overloading on computer nostalgia thanks to The Virtual OS Museum, watching that Knicks game winner over and over and over, listening to the fabulous new This Was SportsCenter podcast and the fabulous old The Renner Files podcast, and trying to tame my …Read the full story at The Verge.

I honestly feel that if you are still using GUI tools for most of the stuff, you are voluntarily losing time. In 2026, you could easily be using CLI agents for a lot of tasks on your PC and save a lot of time that you would spend navigating through file trees and hunting for buttons. These tools can turn the terminal into a fast, capable workspace where you can get real work done without switching between windows and menus.

Every homelabber follows a similar pattern. You start with a few containers, then you add monitoring, and then you add more monitoring. Eventually, you start writing scripts to check things automatically. I did the same and went further, adding cloud LLMs like Claude to analyze and report. But each time, after a few days, when the cost, privacy trade-offs, and external dependency didn't sit right with my self-hosting approach, I removed it and got back to the basic monitoring dashboards to hunt for everything. Service status — Uptime Kuma, container state — Portainer, resource monitoring — Beszel.

Raspberry Pi is a capable, tiny computer that can run multiple tools without needing a huge amount of power. It's not a PC replacement, but it can help you run self-hosted tools that try to replace popular paid services available as a web tool or a licensed copy. Rather than spending money each month on a popular tool, you can use a self-hosted alternative because of multiple advantages.

A new flagship graphics card has turned into a four-figure investment that does a handful of things well. It's a defensible purchase that I've made myself with the goal of high-refresh rate gaming, but if you're building a home lab, a new GPU is the wrong place to put your hard-earned cash. The same money put toward a used OEM workstation like a Dell Precision, HP Z, or a Lenovo ThinkStation buys you a complete, expandable, always-on platform that can start earning its keep from the moment you power it on.

A little while ago, we caught wind that Microsoft was adding a new Wi-Fi tracking feature to Teams. The idea behind it is that, if an employee connects to a company's Wi-Fi, Teams would automatically update their status to show their location. People were not pleased with the potential privacy issues that came with this feature, so Microsoft went back to the drawing board. Now it's ready to give it another try, and this time it seems to give the user more control over the information they broadcast.

Claude Fable 5 was available to the public for only a few days before Anthropic pulled it offline. Not because of a normal product rollback, not because capacity ran out, and not because the company changed its mind about pricing. Anthropic says the US government issued an export-control directive requiring it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, including foreign-national Anthropic employees, and the company disabled both models for everyone in order to comply.