Does anyone remember Altavista? It was the first web search engine ever created, but Google made it obsolete. Many other apps and services died due to others offering better features and better design or simply because they didn’t evolve quickly enough. Here, I will pay homage to a few apps and services that might deserve a second life.

Blender is one of the most popular open-source creative tools and, equally, one of the best. Whether you’re using Blender to render models for 3D printing, or you’re learning it as a new skill for something fun to do, there are many great reasons it works out to use Blender for free over paying for 3D design tools. It has excellent features and community, and you’ll make some awesome 3D design creations using Blender.

In a market filled with action, adventure and shooter games, the Sims managed to create a completely new genre in the video game industry. Becoming one of the most popular game franchises of all time, The Sims was revolutionary for the industry, not only bringing an entirely new demographic of gamers to consoles and PCs, but also showing that games didn't have to be all blood and gore for titles to sell.

On its own, OpenMediaVault is a decent OS if you want to build a NAS out of a low-spec device. After all, it has the holy trifecta of a simple UI, lightweight nature, and compatibility with ARM systems. However, hidden under that beginner-friendly exterior is a highly customizable operating system that can be outfitted with powerful plug-ins to extend the functionality of your NAS. So, here’s a quick list of my favorite add-ons every OpenMediaVault user needs to try out.

Google’s Gemini AI assistant doesn’t have ads today, but the company has “very good ideas” for ways they could show up down the road, CEO Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet’s investor call this afternoon. Right now, you can access Gemini for free or pay for a subscription to use advanced features, but it sounds like ads could be part of the product at some point.On the call, a Wells Fargo analyst asked Pichai how people should think about the “future monetization opportunity of Gemini” and if the company sees a potential “ad component.” Here’s my transcription of Pichai’s answer, which I’ve lightly edited for clarity:On the monetization side, for now, we have focused on a free tier and subscriptions. But as you’ve seen [with] Google over time, we always want to lead with the user experience and we do have very good ideas for native ad concepts. But you will see us lead with the user experience.I do think we’re always committed to making the products work and reach billions of users at scale. And advertising has been a great aspect of that strategy. Just like you’ve seen with YouTube, we’ll give people options over time. But for this year, I think you’ll see us be focused on the subscription direction.Based on that last sentence, it doesn’t seem like you’ll have to worry about ads in Gemini at least through this year. But Google’s overall business is built on ads, and it seems like we should expect them to come to Gemini at some point. They’re already in AI Overviews, after all.Google didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.As part of its earnings, Google also announced that it plans to spend $75 billion this year on capital expenditures to help it keep up in the AI race.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has undergone a slight design overhaul that makes it more comfortable to hold in the hand. The corners are more rounded and curved, so the sharp edges that dug into your palms on the S24 Ultra are no longer present. Despite this, the S25 Ultra is a massive phone that certainly requires some getting used to. Moreover, the back is matte glass, making it quite slippery. So, if you just got your hands on the phone and want to keep it safe for an extended period, the best option would be to pick up a case.

Google parent company Alphabet expects to invest “approximately $75 billion” in capital expenditures in 2025, according to a statement from CEO Sundar Pichai in Alphabet’s Q4 2024 earnings release.Capital expenditures have become a hot topic as of late as big tech companies race to build infrastructure to support their growing AI ambitions, and today’s announcement from Alphabet is clearly meant to keep the company in that conversation. Alphabet spent $32.3 billion on capital expenditures in 2023, so $75 billion in 2025 would be a big jump. And while Google’s press release today doesn’t specifically say that the upcoming capital expenditures are all for AI, given the amount of money flowing into AI infrastructure across the industry, it seems likely that a good amount of the expense will go toward benefitting Google’s AI work. AI continues to benefit Google’s business as well. Overall revenues are up 12 percent year-over-year to $96.5 billion. Google Cloud revenues are up 10 percent to $12.0 billion, which Google says is “led by growth in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across core GCP products, AI Infrastructure, and Generative AI Solutions.” On today’s investor call, Pichai said that the company has “very good ideas for native ad concepts” in its Gemini AI assistant. He also teased that Google plans to put new Search experiences “in front of users through the course of 2025.”During its fourth quarter, the company made some big news about its AI products, including revealing Gemini 2.0, an AI agent called Project Mariner that can complete tasks in a Chrome browser, and its Deep Research tool that can research things on the web for you. It also demoed a new Android XR mixed reality OS.Alphabet-owned Waymo had a pretty good 2024 overall, though today’s earnings report shows that “Other Bets,” which includes Waymo, had lower revenue and higher losses year-over-year.In Q4, the Department of Justice also proposed that Google potentially divest itself of Chrome as a remedy for Judge Amit Mehta’s August ruling that the company is a monopolist in the search and advertising markets. The final outcome of those remedies could have a big impact on Google / Alphabet’s future.Update, February 4th: Added details from Alphabet’s investor call.

Steam's in-game recording feature has a lot going for it, making it a welcome addition to the app. However, with other, more established game-recording apps on the market, gamers have a lot of choices — with each app offering its own benefits.

Naturally, there’s an AI element in the Apple Intelligence-created backgrounds.Apple launched a new app today, called Apple Invites, which lets you create, share, and manage invitations for events. With it, you can generate a quick digital invitation that, when shared with your friends, lets them gather all the info about the event, RSVP, and add it to their calendar. That includes your Android friends, who can access invites using a web-based version of the app on the iCloud site.It’s a mostly straightforward, easy-to-use app that offers a better way to invite friends to things than trying to cram all the details into a text message or make sure everyone checks their Facebook events. Creating an event using the plus button at the top of the Apple Invites app will let you type in a name and add time, date, and location details. You can also add an Apple-made background, pick a photo from your library, or, if you have a phone with Apple Intelligence support, whip up an AI-generated one using Apple’s Image Playground feature. You can invite people by picking from your contacts, manually entering phone numbers or email addresses, or copying a link to your event and sending it from outside the app. The app also lets you choose whether each person is allowed to invite others, and you can send notes to invitees after the event is created. The event’s info is shown with widgets, including one showing the weather forecast for that day and an Apple Maps box that you can tap to get directions. You can also create a photo album for people to peruse or add a music playlist, too, using Apple Music. All of that works mostly seamlessly on an iPhone, apart from some buggy behavior I encountered, like invitations that wouldn’t load and trouble getting the photo album in an invite to actually populate with pictures after I picked them.The experience has some hiccups for those not fully in the Apple ecosystem, which isn’t surprising. For starters, where an iPhone user can go straight to the invitation using your link (assuming they’re already signed into iCloud), Android users have to enter their email address and then a verification code to get in. They’ll also need to sign up for an Apple account to look at a photo album if you add one, and Android user or not, your friends need an Apple Music subscription to hear your playlist (otherwise, they’ll only get a preview of it). None of that will keep Android users from seeing key details about your event or RSVPing to it, but it’ll be obvious that they aren’t getting the whole experience. Event invite app Partiful offers largely the same experience — maybe a little too samey, as the app’s developers insinuated today — while remaining a “platform-agnostic product,” Partiful cofounder and CEO Shreya Murthy said in a statement emailed to The Verge.Copycat accusations and bugs aside, Apple Invites seems like a promising start, particularly if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and want to keep friends in the loop without using Facebook events, third-party apps, texts, or emails. But it’s also an app with a social purpose that Apple claims in its announcement “brings people together for life’s special moments.” That sounds pleasant but feels less so once you get the mediocre Android version of the experience.

As a child of the 80s, I grew up with all the classic consoles. From Atari to Sega, consoles were truly the pinnacle of gaming. Aside from the ground-breaking technology at the time and the incredible games that spawned the sequels of today, of all the budding game systems, Nintendo was truly king. Now that we're anticipating the Nintendo Switch 2's launch and hoping for plenty of upgrades, it's a good time to look back at what we used to love.

Back in 2003, m0n0wall started as a GUI to manage a firewall. Manuel Kasper, its developer, once said that no option out there "met all [his] requirements", and he created m0n0wall as a result. Later, pfSense forked from m0n0wall, and OPNsense forked from pfSense in 2014. m0n0wall then shut down in 2015, with Kasper telling users to switch to OPNsense instead. What happened? How did OPNsense become the recommended GUI firewall even though it was late to the party? And which should you use?

OpenAI’s wordmark uses the company’s updated typeface, OpenAI sans.OpenAI just gave itself a full rebrand, complete with a new typeface, logo, and color palette, as explained to Wallpaper in an interview about the process behind the changes. You’ll have to look closely to spot the difference between the redrawn logo and its old one, but a side-by-side comparison shows the updated “blossom” with a slightly larger space in the center and cleaner lines.Though the original logo was designed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, an in-house design team led by Veit Moeller and Shannon Jager took the reins this time around, intending to create a “more organic and more human” identity, Wallpaper reports. OpenAI’s old logo (left) vs. its new one (right). Image: OpenAI As part of the rebrand, OpenAI showed off a new typeface — called OpenAI sans — that it says “blends geometric precision and functionality with a rounded, approachable character.” It now uses this typeface in the OpenAI wordmark, which features an “O” with a perfectly round exterior and an imperfect interior “to counter any robotic precision and make things feel more human,” Moeller said, according to Wallpaper.When asked whether OpenAI used the company’s AI-powered tools like ChatGPT to create the designs, Moeller told Wallpaper that the team only used it to help calculate different type weights.“We collaborate with leading experts in photography, typography, motion, and spatial design while integrating AI tools like DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Sora as thought partners,” OpenAI’s designers told Wallpaper. ‘This dual approach — where human intuition meets AI’s generative potential— allows us to craft a brand that is not just innovative, but profoundly human.”