There are plenty of great smartwatches out there, but a lot of them cost over $100. If you're a seasoned smartwatch user, then a price like that really isn't going to affect you. However, if you've never bought one before, then the cheaper, the better.

If someone wants to try Linux, but they're unsure if they want to wipe their computer for it, people often recommend dual-booting it with Windows. That way, you keep the familiar OS while also checking out your shiny new Linux distro, and if you don't like it, you can just nuke the Linux partition, and no harm is done to your Windows one.

I work with documents all day. Drafts, research dumps, client briefs, and messy meeting notes that someone insists count as a deliverable. At some point, I got tired of assuming which AI tool actually handles that kind of work well, so I tested it properly by pasting real, ugly, long-form content into Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity's free tiers and seeing what came back.

Before all this, I was blaming everything apart from the router. Swapping out smart bulbs, thinking they were the problem. I reset my camera more times than I can count. I even questioned whether smart home tech was just inherently unreliable. But the one device I never seriously considered replacing or even troubleshooting properly was the router sitting quietly in the corner, doing its job… or at least pretending to be.

A Raspberry Pi looks like the perfect NAS starter kit when you're just starting out. It's small, quiet, cheap to run, and backed by a community that has turned the little board into just about everything. I had drives, I had spare time, and I had the kind of optimism that usually shows up right before a project gets weird. On paper, it felt like an easy win.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 124, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, send me your Coachella fits, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about restaurant bread and GLP-1s and Lenny Rachitsky and Artemis II fashion, watching the new boy band doc because I will always watch a boy band doc, also watching every clip I can find from Justin Bieber's Coachella set, filling the Schitt's Creek-shaped hole in my heart with Big Mistakes, getting increasingly excited about The Mandalorian and Grogu, and watering my new lawn so it …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a version of local LLMs that lives in my head from how they were a couple of years ago. That they’re slow, clunky, need expensive hardware to run anything worth using, and outputs that feel like a worse version of what you already have in your browser. That mental model made sense at the time because local models really were like that for a while, and the barrier to entry was high enough to write them off if you weren't a serious tinkerer.

It seems that, after years of complaining about the Windows 11 Start menu (and most of those complaints coming from me), Microsoft is finally planning to give it the TLC that it deserves. We already know that Microsoft plans to fix those weird Start menu search results you get from time to time, but it seems the company isn't done yet. A recent report claims that the Redmond giant will add a ton of customzation options to the Start menu so you can make it truly yours.

If you're looking for a simple pair of wireless earbuds that won't break the bank, the Skullcandy Smokin’ Buds are going to be a good choice. The brand has been around for over two decades, delivering affordable and reliable audio products.

I've never much questioned the tools I use on a daily basis, especially when they work as well as the Nvidia App. It's clean, it's modern, and it most certainly feels like an upgrade over what used to be the GeForce Experience. Sure, the Nvidia Control Panel still reigns supreme when you need the most amount of control, but the App is pretty darn good, especially thanks to features like one-click GPU overclocking and per-app optimizations.

With a vacation comes a big choice: What game should I focus on during the trip? I thought about grinding out the harder levels of Super Meat Boy 3D, but I was looking for something more chill. I could have dabbled more with Slay the Spire II, but I already know that's a game I'll be playing for a long time. I wanted something that I could really get lost in and finish in a little over a week. People of Note, a new music-focused RPG from Annapurna Interactive and Iridium Studios, turned out to be exactly what I needed.In the game, you play as aspiring pop singer Cadence. What starts as a journey to outperform a popular boy band turns into …Read the full story at The Verge.

In my early years as a PC gamer, I looked at monitor arms as one of those optional accessories that made builds look better for a Reddit post, but didn't actually change how your setup felt to use. I was under the impression that as long as my monitor stand didn't take up much space on my desk and wasn't wobbly, there wasn't really anything to fix. I never questioned whether the way my monitors were positioned was actually ideal because I had just gotten used to working around whatever their built-in stands allowed.