Gears of War: E-Day. This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedMicrosoft closed out Summer Game Fest with a bang. The company's annual June showcase was packed with crowd-pleasers: Halo, Gears of War, Fable, a translucent Xbox, and even some pleasant surprises like new Persona and Crazy Taxi games. It was the kind of event that harkened back to the boisterous days of E3, when the industry was in a healthier place an …Read the full story at The Verge.

I love OLED. Well, more specifically, I love QD-OLED, but that's not always an option on laptops and other screens. The gaming side of my desk has a 34-inch QD-OLED ultrawide, and it's the best panel technology I've played on. Perfect blacks, instant response, high refresh rates, and HDR highlights that make my favorite games pop. It's also the wrong screen for my terminal to live on, and I found that out the hard way.

Vibe-coding tools have this weird framing problem where everyone talks about them like they're strictly for developers. Which might make sense on the surface because the output is code and the interfaces of these tools often look like code editors. But the whole point of these tools is that they're natural language first: they're meant for you to describe what you want in plain language, then you can build it. That's the actual pitch. Vibe-coding tools are meant to make coding tasks more accessible to the general population.

Reading my email hasn't been a habit I've had for years now. The only times I do end up opening it is on the rare chance of an email-based OTP, or if I'm simply mailing things to myself between devices. Outside of that, I've had zero willingness to actually sift through tens of unread emails every single day. Suffice to say, going through my mail wasn't something I thought would suddenly become a part of my day that I would actively begin looking forward to.

There's no denying the fact that for years, Android phones have been more than powerful enough to handle everyday work. However, actually getting work done on a phone has always felt cramped. Be it writing long documents, juggling multiple apps, or managing files across cloud storage, it isn't very comfortable. Yes, I have a laptop, but often enough when I'm writing down notes on my Android phone, I would like the ability to just use the same device to draft out a full document as well.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve tinkered with multiple virtualization platforms, ranging from ESXi to the behemoth Harvester, and although each distro has its own perks, I’ve stuck with Proxmox for my home server tasks. Between its killer KVM performance, solid LXC support, detailed SDN stack, terrific cluster provisions, and useful first-party backup and management tools, Proxmox is quite the force to be reckoned with when it comes to virtualization projects.

How long have you been an Xbox gamer? One of the coolest parts of being a part of Microsoft's gaming ecosystem is that things very rarely deprecate. Stuff like your gamer score and your library of older games comes with you even if you started with the original Xbox, meaning all your memories are nicely stored away in one place.

Local AI seems to rise in popularity month after month, but yet, the question of accessibility requires an honest approach. Running a model locally means installing Ollama or LM Studio, researching which model fits your use case, checking whether it's compatible with your hardware, and hoping you own the right hardware to begin with. Even the most patient, beginner-friendly tutorials tend to assume a pre-existing knowledge of terminals, VRAM budgets, and quantization formats.

AI assistants have permeated the world of online meetings quite a lot. People holding meetings deploy AI assistants to keep notes of everything said and covered. Attendees will sometimes invite their own bots to keep track of everything, or even stand in for them. However, with all these bots listening in and keeping notes, it creates a privacy issue. Where's all that information going, and who can get access to it?

I first saw Microsoft's Intelligent Terminal at Computex, running on one of Nvidia's RTX Spark machines. At the time, I had no clue what it was, but it showed a terminal window with an AI agent pane docked to the bottom, diagnosing errors and suggesting fixes in real time. It looked impressive, and they told me that it was using a local Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B model to power it. I later found out what its name was, and I decided to give it a try.

The effect of AI on the Linux ecosystem is very interesting. Some groups accept AI coding and agent tools, citing it as an unavoidable next step in how people use their PCs and code features. The Linux kernel officially allows submissions generated by AI code (as long as the submitter is the one responsible for any issues, not the agent), and Ubuntu now lets you dictate into any text box using AI.

If you ask any PC builder about the most impactful upgrade they've made to their rig, you'll likely walk into a conversation about a new GPU, a shiny new X3D chip, a high-end motherboard, or perhaps a PCIe Gen 5 NVMe. What almost nobody will mention, however, is a BIOS toggle, because unlocking more performance out of existing components isn't ever seen that way. But there are settings within your UEFI that can change how your PC experience feels, and they're almost certainly toggled incorrectly out of the box.