I’ve been trying to repurpose every piece of old hardware I have at home. I recently turned an old phone into a Jellyfin server and later into a full-blown Raspberry Pi replacement. It worked better than I expected, so I moved on to an old Windows laptop that had been sitting unused.

The hardware inside your phone has a lot more potential than you think. Even if it’s half a decade old, it has significantly more powerful hardware than an entry-level NAS or even a Raspberry Pi, which many of us use for home automation. I have already turned my phone into an always-on Jellyfin server so I can stream movies without keeping my computer running. Since then, I have kept finding more things for it to do.

Even after being inside the Apple ecosystem — iPhone, iPad with Pencil, MacBook Pro, and AirPods Pro — I always kept my Galaxy with me. Not because it's better than my iPhone, but because a few of its features make it genuinely different. And one of those features is DeX. Samsung DeX has always intrigued me because it promises a desktop experience from a phone. But I never properly used it. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to give it a try. I connected my Galaxy to my monitor using a DP-to-Type-C cable, paired a keyboard and mouse, and DeX was ready to go. But after continuously using it for more than a month, I realized that DeX itself was only part of the equation. The experience depended just as much on the apps I used.

One of my favorite uses of Raspberry Pis is recreating old hardware. They're small but mighty enough to either replace aging hardware or rebuild a device using new practices. Such is the case with RecreateDSKY, which takes the software humanity used to walk on the moon and adapts it for your Pi.

Valve released Proton 11.0-1 as stable on July 7, 2026, rebasing Steam Play on Wine 11.0, and Wine 11.0 brought NTSYNC support along with the completed WoW64 architecture. If you game on Linux or plan to at all in the future, these updates were some of the most consequential things to happen in the last month with regard to your PC's future. If you notice, none of that has anything to do with distribution, nor do most of the other optimizations that have come along in the last few years.

In the past few years, several arguments have been made against flash drives. While the logic behind it holds true in most cases, flash drives aren't altogether obsolete, and they don't seem likely to be anytime soon. That's because flash drives have distinct advantages over other storage media like SSDs, HDDs, and SD cards. I have all four, but most of the time I end up choosing the flash drive over anything else.

Notion was my go-to app for notes and documentation for years. Like many people, I assumed I'd keep using it because it had everything I could possibly need. But over time, my workflow started changing. I moved more of my apps to my own server and began questioning whether I really needed such a feature-packed platform for something as simple as managing knowledge. That led me to try Docmost. I wasn't expecting it to replace Notion anytime soon, but after using it for a while, I found myself opening Notion less and less until I eventually stopped using it altogether.

The next Xbox, Project Helix, could theoretically have the largest library of any home console. Not only will it play PC games, but we now know, courtesy of a leaked memo obtained by The Verge's Tom Warren, that it will run games from every generation of Xbox: the original 2001 Xbox, the 2005 Xbox 360, the 2013 Xbox One, and the 2020 Xbox Series, as well as any new Helix titles.We already knew that Microsoft was bringing a limited sample of original Xbox games to PC, and we already knew it was prepping a way to digitize your Xbox One and Xbox Series discs. The leak fills in the missing puzzle pieces. Microsoft is bringing Xbox 360 games …Read the full story at The Verge.

You have to imagine that the team at Game Freak is bursting with ideas. The studio puts out new mainline Pokémon adventures with a machinelike precision. But every so often it launches a curious experiment, whether it's an action title about a militarized elephant or turning horse races into a card game, showing that it's capable of more than the latest generation of pocket monsters. That's part of what makes the idea of Beast of Reincarnation so enticing. Here is an established studio breaking free of the franchise it has become known for to make its take on a blockbuster action game. Unfortunately new ideas are in short supply in Beast, an …Read the full story at The Verge.

Earlier this year, a Reddit user had asked members of a skincare-focused subreddit if anyone had tried a specific hypochlorous acid spray, a product often used for acne. There were dozens of responses; one from a user named Primary-Taro4254 seemed innocuous enough, at least at first."I haven't personally tried [that brand] so I can't fully compare, sorry," they commented. "But I have been using a similar hypochlorous acid spray from Honeydew Labs and I've honestly really liked it." Primary-Taro4254 helpfully shared their experience using the spray to calm their skin's redness and irritation, and even threw in some of Honeydew Labs' crede …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI says Apple’s lawsuit is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal.” | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Apple's legal battle against OpenAI just got messier now that the ChatGPT-maker has publicly aired receipts to counter Apple's version of events. In a blog post published overnight titled "Apple is getting this wrong," OpenAI said that Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is "careless, aggressive, and oddly personal," sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case.This isn't a legal response from OpenAI, but it's an attempt to sway the court of public opinion by poking contradictions into Apple's case using cherry-picked communications.The lawsuit filed by Apple last month primarily rev …Read the full story at The Verge.

Even though I’ve mostly used Samsung phones whenever I’ve switched to Android, I'd always replace most of the preinstalled apps with Google's alternatives. In fact, the first thing I used to do was uninstall Samsung Internet and replace it with Google Chrome since I already relied on Chrome on my PC. Nowadays, though, I also use an iPhone for work and Microsoft Edge on my desktop, so I'm not nearly as connected to Google's ecosystem as I once was.