Most people should never buy a sound card, and I'll say that to anyone planning a new PC. Apart from the odd old game that still misses a 20-year-old sound card, onboard audio got good, headsets went USB, and sound cards quietly became a niche. Yet every desktop I've built since 2020 has had a Creative Sound Blaster AE-9 in it.

It's incredibly easy to ask AI to write code for you, and when it does a good job, you start to wonder why you need to learn to write it yourself. I used to think the same way. I don't come from a traditional development background, and I've only recently started learning how to program. But what has helped me become better at coding and building things with AI agents is actually taking a more hands-on approach instead of asking them to do everything for me.

I expected the chip inside the Portronics Flash C2 to contradict its own box. The box says "Thunderbolt 4.0," and I assumed the tiny e-marker in its USB-C plug would admit to something slower. Instead, my M2 MacBook Air read it with a Samsung T7 Shield on the far end and a free app called WhatCable, and the chip agreed: USB4, 40Gbps, 240W.

Live TV streaming services like Hulu Live, YouTube TV, and Sling offer cable-style channels, but they cost a lot. I subscribed to live TV services to get some Minnesota Vikings games, but I decided it wasn't worth it. I don't watch much other than live sports. So, I canceled the service and created commercial-free channels that stream the content I own.

So I'm trying to escape Fedora. It's not because I don't like Fedora (I do), and it's not because I hate Red Hat (I don't). It's because Fedora was only the second Linux distro I took seriously. The first was Linux Mint, which convinced me that Linux was worth the effort; once I had learned what I did and didn't want from my distro, I packed up and moved to Fedora KDE.

Now, former Savannah police officer Amber Harpe was fired in August following a department investigation that found she had shared her Flock login information with her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent. SPD does not share its Flock data with ICE and said sharing access to the system violated the department's security protocols.While he had unauthorized access to the system, Tyler Harpe conducted 983 searches related to 97 license plates, which were overwhelmingly registered to Hispanic drivers, according to Savannah's local ABC affiliate, WJCL. The Harpes defended their actions, saying they didn't use access for personal reasons and that …Read the full story at The Verge.

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward."Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arrested her. The incident was captured on video and has now garnered considerable media attention. The delivery robots have become a common sight on the …Read the full story at The Verge.

My Asus TUF Gaming AX4200 moved its 5GHz radio to a new channel 11 times in two weeks. I felt almost every one as a frozen video call, a buffering show, or a smart plug going offline.

I've never been the best coder, whether in college with Assembly or C++, or in any other language I've tried to pick up since. That's changing now that I can use agentic coding tools like Claude Code to explain things as I go, and I've wired them into local models to cut down on token costs. But I still have to set things up on every new machine, and that gets tiresome.

If you're as indecisive as me, then you're probably paying for more than one AI chatbot, and each one naturally ends up with its own job. And usually the one that's easiest to open or sitting closest to hand ends up getting the most work. On Windows, Gemini never had that spot, and instead it used to live in my browser as a bookmark. Claude and ChatGPT both have desktop apps, so they get the quick stuff by default, and Gemini got whatever I remembered to open a tab for. Google has finally put out a Gemini app for Windows, though, and it got me wondering if a proper app could change which subscription earns its keep.

Once every generation, a genre-defining title emerges and becomes the benchmark for the others that follow. And every once in a while, that benchmark remains unbeaten for years, long after the hardware that first ran it has been retired, and the studios chasing it have moved on.

Mister Organ doesn't reach the level of societal horror of The Act of Killing or the creepypasta-meets-true-crime gruesomeness of Beware the Slenderman, but there's something deeply unsettling about Michael Organ and his intimate campaign of terror against everyone who enters his life. Mister Organ is a documentary by David Farrier, an Auckland, New Zealand journalist. The movie starts with Farrier reporting on Bashford Antiques, a shop in Ponsonby that has begun aggressively clamping cars in its lot and demanding exorbitant fees to release them - up to $760. Farrier's article for The Spinoff eventually led the government to introduce legi …Read the full story at The Verge.