Like a lot of people, my gaming youth was marked mostly by console games, whether they were handheld or home consoles. However, long before I built my first gaming PC, there was a very formative time I had playing games on a computer that required nothing but an internet connection.

In 2023, when I realized small phones were truly dead, I decided I couldn’t wait for the Small Android Phone Project to revive them. That project, from the founder of the Pebble smartwatch, just wasn’t far enough along. Unfortunately, things aren’t any better in 2025 for small phone lovers — now that founder Eric Migicovsky is bringing back the Pebble smartwatch (yay!), he tells me he’s only “tangentially” working on small phones, and that they’re no longer “the top priority.”“I really do hope someone else makes one so I don’t have to 😂,” writes Migicovsky. I’m now one of a contingent of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip owners who is seriously considering trading in my Flip for a Galaxy S25. It’s not small, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got and my Flip’s battery doesn’t remotely last until bedtime anymore. I ask Migicovsky whether I can safely upgrade without feeling I might miss out on a possible Small Android Phone by, say, mid-2026. He says I can, without commenting on my proposed timeline.At one point the phone project was targeting a 2024 release date and had gotten as far as creating an entire brand, Beep, to market it with, according to the portfolio of Small Android Phone Project industrial designer Alex De Stasio. He’d even dreamt up a billboard:I’m still pretty excited for Migicovsky’s new project to revive the Pebble smartwatch — I loved my Pebble Time Steel and even owned two of them for a bit. You shouldn’t get your expectations up too high for that project, either, though: Migicovsky told the Android Faithful podcast that “this will not be a watch for everyone,” and expanded on that in a February 6th blog post:Please don’t get your hopes up that the new watch will have X/Y/Z new feature. It’s going to be a Pebble and almost exactly as you remember it, except now with open source software that can you can modify and improve yourself. More hardware details will be shared in the future.For the uninitiated, the original Pebbles were low-power devices whose best features were dead simplicity and battery life — no touchscreen, no digital crown, just a few buttons to help you read notifications and run a catalog of charming basic apps. That’s fine with me as long as the buttons are good!A few other things he’s confirmed about the new Pebble so far:It will be new hardware, not an existing watchIt’s targeting this specific chip as processor, which is marketed primarily as a Bluetooth SoC!You’ll be able to load your own firmware if you want to develop your own featuresHe told Android Faithful there are two software features he’d like to add. His “big thing” is to someday have a chat client, one that could address a limitation of early Pebbles by letting you see a whole conversation history on your wrist. The other is a basic AI handoff: “Pebble has a microphone, it has a screen… why can’t you talk to ChatGPT?”Migicovsky should be in Shenzhen this week to meet with suppliers and factories for the new smartwatch.

Installing apps using winget from the CLI is an efficient way to get the utilities you need on your PC. It’s certainly more efficient than installing apps from the Microsoft Store. However, the UniGetUI (formerly WingetUI) tool is the ultimate package manager if you want total control over your app installations. Even if you are experienced with the winget commands, you should look at UniGetUI, as it’s an efficient way to install and update multiple apps, packages, and updates from a centralized location.

Despite featuring plenty of Bethesda jank, Skyrim remains one of the best RPGs of all time, and for good reason. The latest chapter in the Elder Scrolls franchise combines an engaging open-world brimming with fun side activities with rich lore, plenty of equipment, and deep customization options to role-play as your ideal Dragonborn.

It's true that some of the best experiences to be had in video games are housed within AAA games. The games have the scale and budget to bring players into these massive worlds, with gameplay and cinematics that push graphics cards to their limit.

Raspberry Pis and Lego are a match made in DIY heaven. While Raspberry Pi projects usually utilize 3D-printed components to protect the board from the elements, sometimes you can't go wrong with the colorful blocks. So, here are a handful of projects that combine the two in a pleasing arrangement of DIY goodness.

While mechanical keyboards come with many benefits that often make them the default option for PC enthusiasts, they also come with some drawbacks — like the potential to develop keyboard chatter. If your keyboard has started chattering — the phenomenon where a single press on a key registers multiple times — you've encountered one of the reasons mechanical keyboards aren't always the best option.

Experimenting with different distros and container projects is the biggest draw of home labs. But over time, you might get burned out by manually installing packages and libraries on your virtual machines whenever you want to work on a new project.

Google Maps now shows the “Gulf of America” in place of the “Gulf of Mexico” for users on both web and mobile in the United States. It made the change after the Trump administration formally changed the name today of the body of water spanning between the eastern coast of Mexico and the Florida panhandle. Google says it follows the GNIS, or Geographic Names Information System, a US database of location information.Users in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” while the rest of the world will see the original name with “Gulf of America” in parentheses. Google says it determines a user’s location — and thus which version of the body of water they see — using data from their mobile OS, SIM, and network. Desktop users will see changes based on search settings or device location if not provided.Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t made any changes in Apple Maps yet, although it does redirect “Gulf of America” searches to the Gulf of Mexico. Other mapping companies like MapQuest have not made changes either. However, we found that Google-owned Waze shows both names if you search for “Gulf of Mexico,” but finds nothing when searching for “Gulf of America.”

Obsidian's powerful features have made it a popular choice for note-taking and building a PKM system, but its closed-source nature and markdown-only approach aren’t for everyone. If you are looking for flexible and open-source alternatives, you are in luck. There are plenty of such options, and among them, I have hand-picked the best tools for your workflow.

Meta has partnered with the nonprofit organization Childhelp to create a curriculum that will teach middle schoolers how to recognize forms of online exploitation, such as sextortion scams and grooming. The curriculum was “fully funded” by Meta and is free for any school, parent, or organization to access.Meta says the curriculum consists of lesson plans, interactive classroom activities, and videos to help kids “navigate both the online and offline world safely.” It was developed with child safety experts from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the Department of Homeland Security, the nonprofit organization Thorn, Purdue University, and the Crimes against Children Research Center.Childhelp is an organization that assists neglected and abused children. It also aims to increase awareness about child abuse.Meta has ramped up efforts to make its platforms safer for kids as lawmakers focus on child safety. Last year, Instagram started putting all teens into more private and restricted accounts and began automatically blurring nude images sent to minors. The platform also introduced new features to fight sextortion scams, including preventing users from screenshotting disappearing photos in private chats.At the same time, bills like the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0 have made their way through the Senate, while the recently introduced Kids Off Social Media Act aims to prevent kids under the age of 13 from creating social media accounts. Some states have passed social media safety laws of their own, though most of them are facing legal challenges.“At Meta, we continue to do all we can to protect young people on our apps,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global safety head, said in the press release. “Those protections will be even more effective if teens also feel confident in spotting potential harms and know where to go for help.”

Every so often, you hear tech enthusiasts claim it’s finally the year of Linux. But despite its high utility in server and production environments, the casual PC user base has sidelined Linux for years, and for good reason. After all, the terminal-heavy nature of Linux distros makes them seem a lot more complex than they actually are. Back in the day, Linux operating systems were notorious for their compatibility issues with consumer-grade apps. Factor in the extra effort needed to get accustomed to a new OS, and it’s no surprise that the average user stays away from Linux.