Blizzard originally tried to bring the StarCraft universe to the world of 3D shooters way back in 2002 with StarCraft: Ghost. It sat in development hell for years until Blizzard president Mike Morhaime confirmed that it had been canceled in 2014. Now Blizzard is giving it another go with the simply titled StarCraft. Dan Hay, a VP at Blizzard, took the stage at BlizzCon today to reveal that after more than a decade of lying dormant, StarCraft would be returning in 2030. But, rather than another top-down real-time strategy installment, the new title would be an open-world shooter. He then showed off a cinematic trailer for the title that fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've tried plenty of Android launchers over the years, but I rarely found a reason to change the one I was already using. Niagara Launcher had become my default, so switching to something unfamiliar wasn't high on my list. Then I came across Escape Launcher, an open-source project that takes a noticeably different approach to the Android home screen. I installed it mostly out of curiosity, expecting to test it briefly and move on. Instead, I kept coming back to it. The experience made me look differently at what I actually want from a launcher, and whether a simpler approach can work better for me.

My home server is the heartbeat of my home office. It acts as my photo and video library backup point, my NAS, my local AI node, and media library, all while being built from parts I already had. This system was collecting dust for many months in my closet, and had sat without a CPU cooler and boot drive until I revived it about a decade after it was initially built. The Skylake-era i7 and Z170 board provide more than enough headroom alone for a decent home server for self-hosting, but I've since built upon it with incremental upgrades that have made it more reliable and capable than anything I'd be able to buy off of a retail shelf right now.

Storage was a luxury back in the day when I bought my first laptop. Slowly, the storage became cheaper, smaller, and faster than a traditional HDD. Before the whole AI crisis that shot up the cost of storage and memory, NVMe SSDs were only slightly more expensive than SATA SSDs, despite a huge difference in read-write speed, primarily due to their connection interface. I have a couple of SSDs that I use and external drives with a SATA enclosure. My main system, a Windows 11 PC, uses a Samsung NVMe SSD.

Before you toss your old Fire TV Stick because it's too old and slow, look for ways to repurpose it. One thing you can do is use it to turn your TV into a digital photo frame. As a Prime member, you get unlimited photo storage at no extra cost.

Earlier this week, Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers detailed some alarming findings about how LG's TVs are logging and uploading data on its users. Now the company is pushing back against those allegations, saying that "Some recent media coverage may have contributed to misconceptions about how LG smart TVs work."LG released a statement in which it claims that its "TVs do not continuously record or transmit users' conversations," and that wake-word detection is all processed locally. However, the word "continuously" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as Gamers Nexus demonstrated an LG TV keeping extensive l …Read the full story at The Verge.

I recently acquired a Bambu Labs A2L to design parts for all my hobby projects as well as home improvement tools. Looking at the sheer breadth of options and designs over on websites like MakerWorld and Thingiverse has also helped me discover solutions to problems I didn't even know I had. Part of that is a series of kitchen fixes that solve everyday practical problems. Some are things I could probably purchase; others not,

President Donald Trump is weakening environmental regulations in the name of speeding up the construction of AI data centers, raising health risks for Americans, a cadre of former EPA officials said this week in a briefing and new report. They are urging - perhaps futilely - the president to adopt a "Data Center Health Protection Pledge" to signal that the administration is taking the environmental threat seriously. At the start of his term, Trump's EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, proclaimed his goal of making America "the AI capital of the world" through deregulation. Since then, Zeldin and the White House have rolled back dozens of rules …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sylvan Esso preparing to attend a frutiger aero renfaire. Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn, better known as Sylvan Esso, have been bringing their low-key electro-pop to the masses since 2014, bursting onto the scene with their self-titled debut album and the single "Hey Mami." Over the years, they've put out a number of excellent records, dabbling in dustier, more fragile textures on Free Love, going dancier and glitchier on No Rules Sandy. The two are constantly pushing at the edges of their sound while retaining the core of what makes a Sylvan Esso record sound like a Sylvan Esso record. Their new album Ow ∞, released this past Friday, represents perhaps the boldest reinvention of their sound, how …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the time has come to slow down AI development and will give third-party evaluators like METR access to its models to help ensure its "adherence to safety practices and commitments." In a winding essay, Amodei proposed a three-step plan to "pace the frontier" - jargon that simply means to slow the pace of training and development to give companies time to build safeguards and regulators to evaluate models.Amodei says that giving external evaluators wide-ranging access is just the first step, and one it is taking now unilaterally. Step two would involve the industry coming together as a whole, likely with gove …Read the full story at The Verge.

You could easily spend hundreds of dollars on a high-end tri-band Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 mesh system. The box will promise you blanket multi-gigabit coverage across a 5,000-square-foot home; however, the real-world experience is plagued by weird and erratic wireless behavior. Your phone might desperately cling to a distant node instead of handing off cleanly, and download speeds in your office might spike, causing jitter and packet loss for someone gaming in the living room.

Due to a scheduling mishap, I was only able to check out two movies on my second day at the Toronto International Film Festival - but I did manage to get an early look at and some fascinating details on one of my most anticipated films this year.Even if you don't know the name Laika, you probably know the studio's work; it's the animation house behind stop-motion hits like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Over the years Laika's films have steadily gotten more impressive on both a technical and artistic level. Which brings us to the incredible-looking Wildwood, hitting theaters next month. If you're unfamiliar, here' …Read the full story at The Verge.