When it comes to PC building, experience teaches you a lot. The choices you made years ago can seem ludicrous today, irrespective of any budget or availability constraints that might have been at play. You might say it's water under the bridge, as my old PCs and components don't matter anymore, but I still regret a few of them to this day, thinking I could have done so much better, saved more money in the long term, and crafted better-looking rigs.

In recent weeks, airport Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have drawn public outcry for denying travelers US entry based on searches of their phones. A doctor on an H-1B visa was deported to Lebanon after CBP found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders. A French scientist was turned away after a device search unearthed messages criticizing the Trump administration’s cuts to research programs, which officers said “conveyed hatred of Trump” and “could be qualified as terrorism.” As the administration ratchets up pressure to turn away even legal immigrants, its justifications are becoming thinner and thinner — but travelers can still benefit from knowing what are supposed to be their legal rights. Your ability to decline a search depends on your immigration status — and, in some cases, on where and how you’re entering the country. Courts across the country have issued different rulings on device searches at ports of entry. But no matter your situation, there are precautions you can take to safeguard your digital privacy.CBP device searches have historically been relatively rare. During the 2024 fiscal year, less than 0.01 percent of arr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Let’s say you managed to grab a server PC for your home lab and equip it with the best operating system for your experiments. While the system may surpass your expectations in the beginning, you might realize that it doesn’t hit its full potential after using it for a while. Perhaps it lacks enough ports and connections for your USB passthrough needs. Or maybe the system doesn't possess enough horsepower to transcode your favorite 4K movies without running into performance issues.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 76, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry if your bracket’s busted, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I have been shirking most of my responsibilities to watch March Madness. But I’ve also been reading about Polymarket and the future of social media and Taylor Sheridan, watching the Severance finale and immediately starting a full season two rewatch, listening to Amy Poehler’s delightful new podcast, testing out the new base-model iPad and the Nothing Phone 3A Pro, and cleaning out my Downloads folder for the first time in way too long.I also have for you a new-old gadget I love, a new Assassin’s Creed title, a new mid-range Android phone, a decidedly not mid-range camera you’ll want anyway, a great journaling app, and much more. I want to buy too many things this week. Let’s dive in.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be watching / reading / playing / listening to / sticking in their suitcase this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge …Read the full story at The Verge.

Graphics suites like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are excellent choices for designers and digital creators because of their free plugins and other powerful features. However, they aren't cheap, and the monthly subscriptions can add up to thousands of dollars over time. Luckily, many free, open-source alternatives to Photoshop are available for users who'd rather try free software and put their cash towards a new laptop or other hardware.

Balatro just won four Game Developers Choice Awards, including Game of the Year, but the person who made the game wasn’t on stage to accept them.Instead, Playstack communications director Wout van Halderen spoke on behalf of Balatro’s developer, who goes by the alias LocalThunk, each time the game won an award. “The team does that to give LocalThunk the freedom to work in the style that he likes, which we respect,” Playstack marketing director Liz Cheng-Moore tells The Verge. “That’s our job,” van Halderen adds. It’s an arrangement that the Playstack team figured out with LocalThunk ahead of other ceremonies like The Game Awards, where Balatro won three awards and was nominated for Game of the Year. LocalThunk didn’t want to be public, but he also didn’t want to be disrespectful to fans and the industry, so now the Playstack team accepts his awards on his behalf.Balatro was one of the biggest hits of 2024, launching after a series of popular demos to wide acclaim. Months after its initial launch, the game launched on iOS and Android, and as of January, it’s sold more than 5 million copies. LocalThunk was at the Game Developers Conference this week meeti …Read the full story at The Verge.

With a Raspberry Pi at the heart of your 3D printing setup, you can accomplish so much. This tiny computer delivers reliable performance, allowing you to automate tasks and experiment with creative features. It also helps you control different elements of your builds, offering convenience that makes printing more enjoyable. Below, you’ll find several projects that tap into the power of the Raspberry Pi so you can enhance your 3D printing endeavors and learn new skills.

There's just something about ASCII art that looks cool, even today. Perhaps it's how it uses hundreds of tiny little symbols to make one picture that makes it so appealing. Well, if you want to make a real impact in your next Zoom video call, this cool webcam feed ASCII converter is definitely one way to do it.

Anyone can use Linux today. Gone are the myths surrounding its steep learning curve (outside of something like Arch) and some excellent distros are available for those who have yet to visit the command-line interface (CLI). If you're considering the switch from Windows or macOS, I've rounded up a few of my favorite beginner-friendly Linux-based operating systems that almost anyone can use. Don't let this list fool you into believing these are basic distros. Once up and running, you'll have the full power (and versatility) of Linux at your fingertips.

Gaming mice haven't changed a lot in years, so when I came to know about the Lofree Hypace, an ultralight gaming mouse by Lofree (the company's first, by the way), I was intrigued. The mouse boasted a weight of just 47g, a flagship sensor, and an eye-catching design. Although its looks and specs were the main reasons I wanted to review it, the thing that left a lasting impression on me was its weight.

The Apple Watch Series 10.Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On Newsletter.The cameras will be “inside the display” for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on the side, next to the digital crown and button, according to Gurman. With them, the Apple Watch would be able to “see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information,” which he says is also the plan for camera-equipped AirPods Apple is rumored to be working on. The Visual Intelligence features that these devices would use debuted on the iPhone 16, where it works with the phone’s camera to do things like add details from an event flyer to your calendar, or look up information about a restaurant. It’s underpinned by AI models from other companies, but Gurman writes that Apple hopes to power the feature with its own in-house models by 2027, when he says the company plans to release these new Apple Watches and AirPods. Visual Intelligence and other AI features coming to Apple’s wearables would depend a lot the leadership of Mike Rockwell, who Gurman reported last week is now in charge getting the delayed Siri LLM upgrade on track. Rockwell was previously in charge of the Vision Pro and reportedly will continue to work on visionOS. That software is expected to power another Apple wearable that’s likely to have a big AI component, but that’s likely still several years away: AR glasses in the vein of the Orion concept that Meta showed off last year.

Windows isn’t the only operating system you can run on your PC. Provided you have space on your local drive, you can use multiple partitions to run different Linux distros, create storage partitions, and more. With storage so cheap these days, most users have multiple drives for managing operating systems and data on their desktops. However, it is still possible to partition your drive, and there are good reasons to use multiple ones.