Paying for third-party apps is something we've all become used to, one way or another. Whether it's to fulfill work commitments or satisfy creative interests, app subscriptions now constitute a significant portion of our monthly expenses. Video editing, photo editing, note-taking, cloud storage, document editing, and antivirus are some of the areas where people prefer the convenience and features of paid software.

Google Translate is one of those tools that most of us take for granted. It's free, it’s convenient, and it's usually good enough to get the gist of something written in a language we don't speak. But as local AI models get better, I've started wondering whether sending text to a cloud service should still be the default when our own hardware is increasingly capable of doing the same job.

It looks exactly like what you’d expect a Teenage Engineering guitar amp to look like. | Image: Teenage Engineering Teenage Engineering is branching out into instrument amps with the previously leaked EP-35, a multi-input, multi-instrument, battery-powered amp with built-in effects. The back of the unit has a line-in port, as well as a 1/4-inch guitar input and an XLR input for mics, including mics that require phantom power. You can also stream audio to it via Bluetooth and connect multiple EP-35s together over Bluetooth using Auracast. If you have them paired in stereo, tilting a unit to the left or right sets it to the appropriate stereo channel, which is pretty neat.There are separate effects processors for guitar and vocals, though you have limite …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Find X10 Pro Max’s design is still camera-centric, but less extreme than most Ultra phones. Oppo's Find X10 Pro Max is the first phone with a triple 200-megapixel camera, which you're likely to see as either a masterful feat of engineering or a load of hyped-up marketing nonsense. The truth is somewhere in the middle.We've seen 200-megapixel cameras in phones before, starting with 2022's Moto X30 Pro. This year's Vivo X300 Ultra was the first phone to feature two of them - with 200-megapixel main and telephoto cameras - and is still my favorite camera phone on the market. With the Find X10 Pro Max, Oppo is trying to do one better: It's the first to use a 200-megapixel ultrawide camera too. Only the selfie camera runs at a more mo …Read the full story at The Verge.

Mars not depicted. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger!The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which you believe Elon Musk about wanting to go to Mars, or "spread the light of consciousness," as he put it in this week's SpaceX earnings call (and earlier S-1). Now, a reasonably informed person knows that we don't have the technology - or, frankly, even the raw information to build the technology - in order to support human life in space. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Building a smart home is great until you come across a dumb appliance. My first instinct is to grab a screwdriver, open it up, understand the internals, and plug an ESP32 into it. But that also means voiding the warranty and soldering it. It’s natural to dread the soldering part because no one wants to risk it on an expensive appliance.

Keeping track of the items around my home is a constant struggle. Even when I think I have a system in place, I ultimately end up throwing a spanner in the works and collapsing the whole thing.

My TV is one of the most-used screens in my home. I like playing vintage horror movies in the background while I work. But what I don’t like is that modern televisions across the board serve as advertising platforms (I’m looking at you, Google TV) or even spyware, as we recently found out with LG. I'm not a fan of that at all.

Since budget phones started adopting high-refresh-rate displays, Motorola has quietly been pushing solid entry-level devices that don't feel cheap. The Motorola Moto G Play (2026) is now available on Woot for $160, which is 36% off its usual retail price of $250.

On October 13th, Brendan Carr's FCC gave itself a new power - it can block gadgets for containing any computer chip made by any company on its list of potential threats to national security. Today, it's exercising that power for the first time, blocking two gadgets because they contain "foreign surveillance chips," the FCC claims.The agency doesn't say which specific gadgets it blocked, and it didn't immediately respond to our request for comment, but it does name the "surveillance chip": it's a HiVision Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC, a chip that turns a raw camera sensor into a home security camera, a dashcam, or the like. It's often s …Read the full story at The Verge.

When talking about laptops with 128GB of unified memory, conversations naturally gravitate towards local LLMs. It's the pretty obvious pitch when it comes to Nvidia's RTX Spark, after all, given its close relation to the DGX Spark's GB10. What's more, being able to run Qwen3.8 Flash Next in a device that you can carry around is pretty incredible. I did exactly that with the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, but I also wanted to see what you can do with all that memory if you aren't running local AI.

There's a good chance you're running an ISP-supplied router. That's not something to be fearful of. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing so, but you could be losing out on some enterprise-grade functionality for making the most of your local area network (LAN). If you're serious about creating a home lab and self-hosting as much as you can to save money, building your own firewall and router may be a worthwhile project. It's what I did, and I just wish I did it sooner. All you need is a cheap, passively cooled mini PC.