There’s no denying the monumental impact the Assassin’s Creed franchise has had on gaming. What began as a potential Prince of Persia sequel evolved into a sprawling series with 13 mainline games — some great, some mediocre, and some downright unforgettable. Through the Animus, players have traversed centuries and continents, donning hoods and wielding hidden blades.

I feel bad for motherboard makers. Short of your power supply, it's probably the most mundane component in your PC, and with stiff competition in the market, brands like MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and ASRock need to pack in more features to separate their offerings from the rest of the market. Some of those extras are good, but there are plenty of motherboard features that just aren't worth the money.

Apple is planning to shuffle its iPhone release schedule next year as it releases the first foldable iPhone to make things more manageable, reports The Information. The plan is for the foldable to come out with the iPhone 18 Pro and “Air” models, while the standard iPhone 18 gets shunted back to the spring of 2027, releasing alongside an iPhone 16E follow-up, according to the outlet.With the slimmer model in the lineup and a foldable expected in 2026, The Information says Apple needs to shuffle things around to keep a ballooning six-iPhone lineup manageable. As for what the foldable will look like, the outlet writes that Apple is going with a book-style form factor, rather than clamshell, with a 5.7-inch screen when closed and a just-under-8-inch display when open. Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has previously suggested it will be 4.5–4.8mm thick when unfolded and will use Face ID, rather than Touch ID.The report includes other tidbits, like that Apple will introduce a new battery case for the iPhone 17 Air, as its testing has apparently shown that, on its own, the phone’s battery life “will fall short of that of previous iPhones.” Also, The Information says the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max models will get long-rumored under-display Face ID sensors, leaving the devices with only a “small hole cutout in the top-left corner” for the phone’s front-facing camera.

World Password Day is here, and that means we're going to be talking security. A lot of security, with best practices, things to watch out for, and tips for the best password managers and other ways to secure your online accounts. We've all got dozens of online accounts by this point, and keeping track of them is a chore, even with a password manager, but how do you know that your passwords are safe? If you spot any of the behaviors on this list, change your password as soon as you can. And always remember to use unique logins for every account, so the risk of losing multiple accounts is reduced.

Microsoft OneNote has been my loyal note-taking companion for years. I mastered it, navigated its quirks, and built my entire note-taking system around it. But as my needs grew, its limitations started to affect my workflow. That's why, after much consideration, I've made the switch to UpNote.

The 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie "Smart House" introduced me and my entire generation to an intelligent, connected house with AI assistants performing daily tasks. Today, that vision is closer than ever thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT). These days, connected smart home devices are a dime a dozen, and to be honest, more have been released than could possibly be useful, and many of them cost hundreds of dollars. After having owned and tested many IoT devices over the years, these are the best inexpensive ones I have found to be actually useful in my home.

Janet Jackson was too much for some Windows laptops.Longtime Verge readers might recall the unusual story of how the music video for a Janet Jackson song, “Rhythm Nation,” could cause certain Windows laptops to crash just by being around when it’s playing. Now, in a blog post spotted by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has revealed that a filter created to deal with the problem stuck around until “at least Windows 7.”For those not familiar: in 2022, Chen wrote a pair of posts relaying a Microsoft colleague’s story about how an unnamed “major computer manufacturer” had to create a custom filter for audio playback after finding that certain frequencies in the video resonated with its laptops’ hard drives. Unfiltered, the resonance could “disrupt the hard drive’s proper operation long enough for it to result in the operating system crashing.” The issue even got its own entry in the NIST National Vulnerability Database, which says it affected 5,400rpm hard drives for certain machines “in approximately 2005 and later.” Chen, who says he was curious how long the filter in place, writes this week that he has since learned that after Microsoft introduced a new rule for Windows 7 saying that users must be able to disable all audio processing on their computers, a hardware vendor asked for an exception. Chen writes:The vendor applied for an exception to this rule on the grounds that disabling their APO could result in physical damage to the computer. If it were possible to disable their APO, word would get out that “You can get heavier bass if you go through these steps,” and of course you want more bass, right? I mean, who doesn’t want more bass? So people would uncheck the box and enjoy richer bass for a while, and then at some point in the future, the computer would crash mysteriously or (worse) produce incorrect results.Is that rule still in place to this day? When a commenter asked a question along those lines below Chen’s post, Chen replied, “All I know is that it was there in the Windows 7 era. I don’t know if it’s still there.” Regardless, the industry has moved on from spinning disk hard drives; whether a modern computer has the rule in place or not, chances are good that it’s safe to listen to “Rhythm Nation” around it, these days. So, here it is:

You might think of Microsoft Excel as just rows and columns, a place for basic calculations and simple charts. And while it certainly excels (no pun intended) at those fundamental tasks, the recent integration of Python has boosted its capabilities. I was skeptical when Microsoft first announced Python integration in Excel. However, after experimenting with it for a while, I've discovered a whole new dimension of what's possible within the familiar Excel environment.

For decades, Google has had the lion's share of the search engine scene. And while nothing has outright topped it yet, one search engine has been slowly chipping away at its dominance and has actually risen to 1/8th of the total amount of web search activity on the internet. ANd if you're thinking it's DuckDuckGo, then allow me to be the one to break it to you that it's not. It's Bing.

While SteamOS is nearly ready for a public beta, so that we can all enjoy Valve's gaming-focused Linux distribution without needing a Steam Deck, it's not the only way to play on a gaming-focused Linux distro. The Proton project works on any Linux distro, so conceivably you can run any of your favorites, but there are other gaming-tweaked OSes that are well worth checking out.

Work remotely or want to access your home lab from anywhere securely? Unsurprisingly, Tailscale is the top recommendation for peer-to-peer VPN to juggle containerized servers and self-hosted apps back home. No one wants to take chances when sharing such resources with family, friends, or a small team. While Tailscale is amazing, Twingate lets you employ layers of user authentication and device verification to access resources from any location.

Home Assistant is one of the best free and open-source applications out there, and it's easy to deploy and get set up for even the most basic of use cases. I dove head-first a few months ago into sensors, software integrations, and automation a few months ago, and there's been a lot to learn. Given that I had been running it in a container on TrueNAS for a long time, I finally decided to migrate it to a mini PC running Proxmox I have lying around.