Every time I get excited about a shiny new creative tool, it usually ends the same way — paywalled by subscriptions and owned by a big-name conglomerate. This is why I find myself coming back to open-source software. It gives you freedom, not just from subscriptions but also from hidden costs and ecosystem traps.

Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks.”Maverick quickly secured the number-two spot on LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. In Meta’s press release, the company highlighted Maverick’s ELO score of 1417, which placed it above OpenAI’s 4o and just under Gemini 2.5 Pro. (A higher ELO score means the model wins more often in the arena when going head-to-head with competitors.) The achievement seemed to position Meta’s open-weight Llama 4 as a serious challenger to the state-of-the-art, closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Then, AI researchers digging through Meta’s documentation discovered something unusual. In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as what’s available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality,” Te …Read the full story at The Verge.

There are many useful things you can 3D print, and some interesting applications of 3D printing are for decoration. Unlike traditional ways of creating things, which often limit customization and can be expensive, 3D printing allows for complete creative control and is cheaper. Many people have used this technology to create interesting decorative models and have published them on various popular 3D printing websites. We are going to look at some of the best ones. We selected them from different categories based on their popularity and the number of downloads and likes. Below are the five interesting ones:

Thanks to their low power consumption, inexpensive price tags, and multiple I/O options, ESP32, Arduino, and other microcontroller families are perfect for automation and circuitry projects. Then you’ve got Single Board Computers, which serve as multi-purpose computing systems capable of doubling as a (low-end) PC.

Did you know you can make virtual disks on Windows? It’s a cool and underused feature that has been available in the OS since Windows 8. Perhaps you have seen files on your system with the VHD or VHDX extension with a hard drive icon on a PC you’re using. Those are virtual drives, which users create for various needs, and you can also make them. I often use them to share files from my host PC to a virtual machine (VM) using Hyper-V or VirtualBox. Virtual disks also offer portability so that you can move them between systems. In addition to virtual environments, they are helpful for developers, home lab enthusiasts, and IT administrators.

It appears Razer is pausing laptop sales in the US as the Trump administration's global tariffs loom. Following Framework's pause of sales in the US, Razer has taken down the configuration page for the new Razer Blade 16, as originally spotted by The Verge. The configuration page for the Blade 16 redirects to a 404 error page, while the product page now as a "Notify Me" button where a link to the configuration screen originally was. Just a week ago, Razer was still offering the Blade 16 for sale in the US.

For some, installing a CPU is one of the easiest parts of building a new PC. For others, it can be nerve-wracking, especially if they're doing it for the first time. While the basics of securing a CPU in the motherboard socket are fairly simple, there is potential for mistakes that can damage the processor or at least diminish performance. First-time builders or those assembling a PC after a long gap might commit these mistakes even if they try to be as cautious as possible. Sometimes, common myths or a missed detail can end up costing you hours of wasted time or, worse, a dead CPU.

It's the second Tuesday of April, which means it’s time for none other than Patch Tuesday. If you’re unfamiliar with it, this is the day Microsoft rolls out updates for its software, including security patches, bug fixes, and other improvements.

We really love Framework laptops here at XDA. If you've never heard of the company, Framework's entire business model offers, well, frameworks for laptops. You can pop hardware out and slot new pieces in on a whim, and makes them an essential business for anyone who detests how most laptops tend to entomb their chips and sticks under warranty-voiding screws and tape.

Nintendo has been steadily adding its older titles to NSO over the lifespan of the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, the only games that have been added have come from a handful of consoles. The consoles on NSO include the Game Boy, NES, SNES, and N64. The next console on the list just so happens to be the GameCube, and rumor has it that this system will be added to NSO after the Switch 2 is released. With that being said, I have a strong connection to the GameCube, and it is a console I have been looking forward to, so I have compiled a list of my favorite GameCube titles that Nintendo needs to add to NSO.

I never considered cooling important enough in my first few PC builds, trusting cheap cases and stock coolers, and never looking at the CPU temps or fan curves. This approach might have worked for some of the earlier CPUs I used — Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD FX-6300, and even the Ryzen 5 1600. However, I later regretted not caring enough about PC cooling. The PCs I have built would have been so much better had I known some of the basics about cases, case fans, coolers, and thermal paste.

macOS is a deceptively open platform. On the surface, in typical Apple fashion, it can look like an incredibly locked-down system, but there are a lot of tweaks and mods you can do to make it look and feel like you want it to. One such application is Stats, a free and open-source application that can show you all of the important metrics about your Mac in the Menu Bar.