For years, a lot of my networking understanding came from my router's web app. It told me which devices were connected, how much bandwidth was used, and most importantly to me, if the internet was up, and I thought that was all there was to it, especially before my formal education. My network switch that I bought to do nothing but fill a hole managed to teach me a lot, and it costs about as much as takeout. It forced me to consider how the network was actually configured, and that's something no polished dashboard asked of me previously.

For the last couple weeks, I've been in an extremely lucky position: I've been spending a lot of time playing games on Valve's Steam Machine. We gave the Steam Machine a 6, and I don't disagree with my colleague Sean Hollister's review. But even though I already own a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, and even though I've experienced the Steam Machine's drawbacks for myself, I would spend the $1,049 to buy one right now. My PS5 and Xbox Series X can't play the hundreds of games in my growing Steam library, don't support Steam's cloud saves that let me seamlessly carry progress between my Steam Deck and Steam Machine, don't support my beloved Ste …Read the full story at The Verge.

Even so, the privacy LED light is still hard to see. It’s on in this photo. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amid public backlash over its smart glasses, Meta announced that it will be updating its glasses with a new feature that will disable the camera when it detects that someone has tampered with or destroyed the glasses' privacy LED light. The update is meant to address modders who have taken actions such as physically drilling into the LED light.Meta has previously tried to discourage tampering with the LED light. For example, starting with its second generation glasses, blocking the light with tape or other objects will trigger a prompt asking users to uncover the recording light. However, many modders have found various workarounds for tha …Read the full story at The Verge.

With the arrival of AI, different distros have approached the new tech with different stances. Canonical, with its Ubuntu distro, has been pretty pro-AI, as long as any added tools serve a useful enough purpose. However, not everyone agrees with this stance, including Tuxedo OS, which cites it as just one of several reasons why it's ditching its Ubuntu core in place of Debian.

The Linux kernel is one of those weird things where you didn't know what kind of hardware it supported until said support was removed. For example, I didn't know that the kernel supported the i486 processor until Linux 7.1 removed it.

Holding off on that Raspberry Pi 5 purchase since last year was a mistake. Raspberry Pi has raised prices three separate times since December 2025. With the price revision in April, some models were selling for 83% above their launch price. The 16GB Pi 5, which was selling for $120, is now $205 after the price hike. The company, like many others, pointed to the DRAM shortage as the cause of global price increases across several products.

If you're a tinkerer, there's a very good chance you have a spare Raspberry Pi board or two sitting around. If one of them happens to be either a Raspberry Pi Zero W or a Zero 2 W, and all it's doing is collecting dust right now, why not turn it into an Arduino? It may sound impossible, but one project, called PiZZa, aims to let you do just that.

Smart filament loading is one of those features that sounds minor until you get used to it. When a printer or material system can recognize the spool, pull in the color, identify the material, and save you from poking through setup menus, it feels genuinely useful. I’m not going to pretend typing “PETG, black, generic” into a slicer is some terrible hardship. But once you’ve seen how convenient automatic filament recognition can be, going back to manual profile checks feels more annoying than it should. When I'm loading filament into the AMS 2 Pro for my Bambu X2D, it really shouldn't matter whether I'm using Bambu's, Elegoo's, or Creality's RFID-tagged filament.

Every AI assistant wants to read your email now. Gemini can summarize your Gmail, Copilot can draft replies in Outlook, and Apple Intelligence can surface what it thinks is important. And almost universally, to do any of this, they have to have complete access to your entire inbox. And that means all of it. Even if you want to incorporate an external cloud-based LLM with your email, you likely need to give it OAuth access to your account, so it can access everything as well.

Samsung has announced that its next Galaxy Unpacked launch event will be held on July 22nd, with the tagline: "A new shape unfolds."It's long been rumored that Samsung is about to expand its foldable phone line to a third format, with a shorter and wider version of its big book-style foldables, to match Huawei's Pura X Max and Apple's expected foldable iPhone. Today's announcement adds to that impression, showing a tall ticket with the stub torn off, leaving it shorter than before.Alongside the wider foldable, Samsung is expected to announce updated versions of its existing Flip and Fold phones, with the latter potentially rebranded to t …Read the full story at The Verge.

The acceptance of AI use in video games is a bit of a gray area. Some people are fine with it, some people loathe it, and some just don't care. Then there are the gritty details: do you care if a game used generative AI to make images? What about using it for voice acting, NPC dialogue trees, or coding?

For more than a decade, one question has loomed over the race to build autonomous vehicles: Are cameras alone enough to safely replace human drivers, or do truly driverless cars need additional, overlapping sensors like lidar and radar to navigate the world reliably? Tesla has bet billions of dollars that artificial intelligence and cameras are sufficient. Nearly every other major autonomous vehicle developer has gone the opposite direction.Until now, that argument has largely been left to executives and engineers. New Jersey lawmakers are trying to settle it in state law.A bill expected to come up for a vote later this year would requir …Read the full story at The Verge.