Intel may not be winning the marathon on the CPU front, but the company has done some incredible work with its Arc graphics cards. The two latest entries in this famof the Intel Arc B570 and B580. These are mid-range 1440p gaming machines at reasonable prices, starting from just $219 at MSRP. Compared to Nvidia's next-gen pricing and even AMD's own mid-tier GPU line-up and Intel has some excellent options for gamers on tighter budgets. I've been using the Intel Arc B570 one and off for months now as I keep returning to see how Intel has further developed its software support for the B-series Arc GPUs. It's difficult to overstate just how important this B570 GPU is for the gaming community.

I've been playing around a lot with ESP32 devices and ESPHome, which has already enabled me to build a silly device that allows me to turn on my PC by simply slapping my table. I have a whole assortment of sensors that I've been playing around with to get to grips with ESPHome, and I've built an ESP32-powered LCD panel controlled by a button, a temperature sensor, and an RGB LED. I set up some other devices too to get comfortable with YAML and ESP32 deployment, and I loved the capabilities it had unlocked for my smart home. In my research, I came across the ESP32 "Cheap Yellow Display", otherwise known as the ESP32 CYD.

When it comes to data storage, it's all about preference. Some like relying on the cloud because it's easy and versatile, while others like to have their data on physical devices. Of course, you can have the best of both worlds by setting up your own NAS, which can sound complicated, but it's actually really simple once you understand the basics.

Meta is announcing its next pair of smart glasses with Oakley. The limited-edition Oakley Meta HSTN (pronounced “how-stuhn”) model costs $499 and is available for preorder starting July 11th. Other Oakley models with Meta’s tech will be available starting at $399 later this summer. Like the existing Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the Oakley model features a front-facing camera, along with open-ear speakers and microphones that are built into the frame. After they are paired with a phone, the glasses can be used to listen to music or podcasts, conduct phone calls, or chat with Meta AI. By utilizing the onboard camera and microphones, Meta AI can also answer questions about what someone is seeing and even translate languages. Given the Oakley design, Meta is positioning these new glasses as being geared towards athletes. They have an IPX4 water resistance rating and offer double the battery life of the Meta Ray-Bans, providing 8 hours of use, along with a charging case that can power them for up to 48 hours. The built-in camera now shoots in 3K video, up from 1080p for the Meta Ray-Bans. The new lineup comes in five Oakley frame and lens combos, all of which are compatible with prescriptions for an extra cost. The frame colors are warm grey, black, brown smoke, and clear, with several lens options available, including transitions. The limited-edition $499 model, available for order starting July 11th, features gold accents and gold Oakley PRIZM lenses. The glasses will be on sale in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.Meta recently signed a multi-year deal with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company behind Ray-Ban, Oakley, and other eyewear brands. The Meta Ray-Bans have sold over two million pairs to date, and EssilorLuxottica recently disclosed that it plans to sell 10 million smart glasses with Meta annually by 2026. “This is our first step into the performance category,” Alex Himel, Meta’s head of wearables, tells me. “There’s more to come.”View Link

Automation apps are great for improving your quality of life, and there are plenty of cool platforms that let you create trigger-action workflows. On the smart home front, you’ve got Home Assistant and Node-RED, which can pull events from your sensors and microcontrollers before using them to execute certain actions. Meanwhile, the home lab department is dominated by the likes of Ansible playbooks and Terraform configuration files.

The best part about pictures of this laptop is that the speakers can’t hurt you. The Acer Swift 14 is all over AI the place. It has powerful chip options, exceptional battery life, and loads of ports for such a portable laptop. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, which is not always a given at any price. But the screen and webcam are mediocre, and the speakers are outright terrible.Battery life, performance, and ports are important, and it makes sense to prioritize those, even if it means cutting costs elsewhere. Those are the kinds of tough tradeoffs that budget laptops have to make. Unfortunately, the Swift 14 AI is not a budget laptop.Component report card:Screen: CWebcam: DMic: CKeyboard: CTouchpad: BPort selection: ASpeakers: FNumber of ugly stickers to remove: 4Our review configuration of the Swift 14 AI comes with a Core Ultra 7 Series 2 258V (Lunar Lake) processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD at an MSRP of $1,299.99. There are numerous Swift 14 variants, including a $1,199.99 AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 config (which I also tested) and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus / Elite model with a better screen. Acer also makes a 16-inch Intel version with an OLED screen, and it's actually $50 cheaper than the 14 but with less RAM. …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're switching from a Windows PC to a Mac, you'll realize that most MacBooks have a base storage of 256 GB. Unlike Windows laptops that have 512 GB or even 1 TB SSDs on mid-range and flagship laptops, Apple charges a hefty amount to upgrade to the next storage tier—resulting in most consumers opting for the base storage to save a few hundred dollars. Now, you can get around the issue of low storage by getting an external SSD for cheap. However, you would also want to keep some part of the internal storage free. What makes it slightly difficult on the base model is the way macOS handles data.

The Nintendo Switch 2 has arrived, alongside a launch line-up containing Mario Kart World and Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. In addition to the console and games, a number of accessories for the new console are also now available, including the Nintendo Switch 2 GameCube controller. Released alongside the new console, the GameCube controller is basically a new version of the classic controller, with the same look and feel as it had 20 years ago. It exists so thatyou can use it with the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack GameCube gameslaunched alongside the new system.

Your webcam works hard to capture a live feed and work some digital magic to take what it sees and shares it with a video recorder or meeting software. Like any peripheral or PC component, the webcam won't last forever. There will come a time when you need to replace it with a better model or one that will offer better reliability with new parts. Instead of throwing the old one away, you can repurpose it for other uses. Here's how I've used an old webcam inside my smart home.

Last week, a Tesla Model Y with the word "ROBOTAXI" scratched into its side and no one in the driver seat made a turn off Austin's bustling South Congress Avenue. Another Tesla, described by autonomous vehicle experts as a "chase vehicle," followed closely behind.Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the clip, seemingly confirming that the lead car was one of roughly 10 vehicles comprising the company's robotaxi fleet, expected to make their official debut sometime next week. If that does occur, it will come nearly nine years after Musk first pitched the idea of a "Tesla Network" in which Tesla owners could add their vehicles to an autonomous ridehail fleet. And it will also be made possible, in no small part, by the state of Texas' laissez-faire, AV-friendly regulatory environment.View Link"In Texas, pretty much anyone can get a [autonomous vehicles] permit who shows up and does a few administrative things," Carnegie Mellon professor and autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman tells The Verge. "If you show up and you tell the state you're operating and you have insurance, you're good to go. That's about it." That AV-friendly landscape - accelerated by a 2017 law that openly court …Read the full story at The Verge.

Astro Bot is filled with whimsy and silliness that makes you want to pay attention to the details. But in a presentation at this year's Game Developers Conference, director Nicolas Doucet shared one particular aspect of Astro the robot that I hadn't noticed but blew me away.Doucet talked about how Team Asobi worked hard to give the game a good tempo with things like enemy placement and how you can interact with Astro's spaceship with the DualSense's gyro controls on loading screens. One thing that kept the momentum going was Astro himself and how he shows his impatience. Doucet showed a video of one idle animation where Astro is hopping up and down on his feet and pointing forward, almost like a little kid that's demanding you go to the playground. It's adorable - and was added "very, very late" in development, Doucet says when I chat with him a few weeks after the presentation. While a lot of games have characters simply breathing or looking left to right while they're idle, Team Asobi thought that it could do something a little more fun. Since the game is about rescuing characters, the team started to tie the animations to the idea of looking around, Doucet says. The team ev …Read the full story at The Verge.

Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or watch any YouTube video, and listen carefully. Past the content and inside the linguistic patterns, you'll find the creeping uniformity of AI voice. Words like "prowess" and "tapestry," which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like "bolster," "unearth," and "nuance," words less favored by ChatGPT, have declined in use. Researchers are already documenting shifts in the way we speak and communicate as a result of ChatGPT - and they see this linguistic influence accelerating into something much larger.In the 18 months after ChatGPT was released, speakers used words like "meticulous," "delve," "realm," and "adept" up to 51 percent more frequently than in the three years prior, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, who analyzed close to 280,000 YouTube videos from academic channels. The researchers ruled out other possible change points before ChatGPT's release and confirmed these words align with those the model favors, as established in an earlier study comparing 10,000 human- and AI-edited texts. The speakers don't realize their language is changing. That's e …Read the full story at The Verge.