Back in February 2026, Discord announced plans to add facial and document scans to verify users' ages. People responded very negatively, to the point where they began researching Discord alternatives. Soon after its announcement, Discord said it was delaying its plans; it still wanted to verify age somehow, but it also wanted to explore other means.

I’m a fan. I can't remember the last time I got excited about a fan. Normally, I just buy whatever Vornado or Dreo model fits my budget, but that was before I started testing the battery-powered Standing Circulator Fan from SwitchBot.As the name indicates, the SwitchBot fan is a 3D circulator - a fancy way of saying that it can tilt up, down, left, and right to push a decent amount air around a room. It looks okay, despite all the plastic, is relatively quiet, runs for hours on battery, has an integrated nightlight, transforms from a desktop to standing fan in seconds, and works on its own or as part of a smart home. There's a lot to like here.Over …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 133, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Juneteenth, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Sam Bankman-Fried and PE Guy and admin nights (which we should totally all do together one of these days), listening to Paul McCartney on Song Exploder, trudging through the bugs of the iOS 27 beta in order to use the good new Siri, once again trying and failing to switch to YouTube Music, free trial-hopping my way through the World Cup, finally upgrading my camera setup with the E …Read the full story at The Verge.

For the longest time, it felt as though Microsoft’s Office suite stood completely unopposed in the world of productivity apps. If your experience is anything like mine, you grew up seeing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on every school and library computer, and the idea of using anything else was preposterous.

It's been a good few years for home theater enthusiasts, and that's partly because of XGIMI and the glut of lifestyle projectors from other brands following their lead. The new push is for triple-laser DLP, which boasts huge brightness numbers while being color accurate, and that's what we see used in the XGIMI Titan Noir Max.

Lightning photos always look amazing, but ideally, you're not sitting there with a camera in hand ready to press the shutter the split-second the sky lights up. Fortunately, we have access to technology that can register a flash and take a photo much, much faster than we'll ever manage.

We've covered a lot of security products in the past, and while some people like to build their own systems, others will be more comfortable buying something that's easy to use and setup. If you're looking to get something affordable and easy to use, we can easily recommend this Blink camera bundle that's on sale right now.

Most modern Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 routers come with quad-core processors and up to 2GB of RAM (or more), so your router probably isn't overworked in a standard home network. The real reason you should reboot your router at least once a month is linked to how it connects to your ISP and to your devices. Your router is a computer, and, over time, it spawns tons of background processes and temporary files that aren't always cleared perfectly. This accumulated bloat can affect your Wi-Fi performance as your router wades through memory leaks and unwanted cache. Rebooting your router gets rid of memory leaks and also clears minor DHCP conflicts with your ISP. It also forces the router to perform a fresh scan to select the optimal Wi-Fi channel. Lastly, a power cycle also resets any suspicious connection that might have snuck in since the last reboot. A restart every month is a good cadence to adhere to if you want your router to function optimally.

When reviewers started raising concerns around VRAM back in 2020, many gamers thought it was a niche problem that would only affect high-end gaming, that too, in the distant future. In two short years, however, GPUs with 8GB of VRAM began causing performance issues in AAA titles like Dying Light 2 and A Plague Tale: Requiem. These titles were soon followed by Hogwarts Legacy, The Last of Us Part I, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Alan Wake 2, and many more games. The same GPU model with lower VRAM often saw performance fall off a cliff, especially on older systems limited to PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0. This proved that, more than anything else, VRAM became the deciding factor in GPU longevity. Modern games, local AI workloads, video editing, and other productivity tasks demand more VRAM than ever, and most people simply don't have GPUs with enough of it. The old graphics cards that managed to break the 8GB VRAM barrier have aged far better than others.

A power bank is a great way to keep your devices charged on the go. And while most people will use them for phones, you can also use them to charge up accessories, tablets, and even some laptops, depending on the model. However, if you're just looking to get the slimmest option that's great for phones and accessories, we think this one from iVANKY might be a good option.

Google's Pixel line has always been known for featuring one of the Android ecosystem's best camera arrays, offering a realistic balance between the Samsung Galaxy series' more out-there photography style with blown-out highlights and Apple's more grounded approach to smartphone photography.

Setting up a new smart TV these days means sitting through a barrage of privacy prompts, account-creation screens, and data-collection agreements. I’ve been guilty of just hitting accept and next to get the TV working. But the problems don’t stop there. Declining too many prompts locks features behind sign-ins. Worse, the telemetry quietly got re-enabled after a firmware update, and manufacturers made opting out just a temporary inconvenience.