Databases nested inside dashboards nested inside a workspace I'd tuned over the course of a couple of years was the main appeal of Notion. But it's also what ultimately makes people leave, because it requires quite a bit of maintenance, which ends up shoving the writing and task management part to the side. There's also the ownership question; when your writing sits inside a proprietary cloud workspace, "your data" is only true up to the point that you can still log in.

So, you just got a new Wi-Fi 7 router, hoping to leave the dark ages of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E behind. The massive improvements in bandwidth and reliability, thanks to 4K QAM, MLO, and 320 MHz channel width, promised a dramatically snappier connection, at least according to the router's marketing. The reality is probably that the network doesn't feel any different on any of your devices, and the tiny but noticeable lag is still there on your phone, PC, and smart TV. It's probably because speed was never the bottleneck on your Wi-Fi in the first place.

For a long time though, multimodal AI has had a pattern where all the impressive stuff would usually happen in the cloud. Your screenshots, voice notes, and documents would have to travel to a third party's server, get processed by someone else's model, and return with a response. The privacy implications were just the price of the convenience you'd get. All of that is fair when you're just organizing a few haphazardly arranged notes that you want to make sense of, but for anyone working with intellectual property, health information, and personally identifiable data, cloud AI presented a risk they did not have the appetite for.

Sony shook the gaming world when it recently announced that it wasn't planning to release physical copies of PlayStation games in 2028. With a full move to digital, game collectors are concerned that they'll no longer have a means to keep a game forever. In a digital-only world, all it would take is for Sony to ban the account or even revoke the licenses, and the games vanish into thin air.

I've owned my Asus ROG Ally X long enough to have cycled through its entire identity crisis. It shipped as a Windows 11 handheld, which mostly meant a desktop OS squinting at a 7-inch screen. Then I put SteamOS on it, and it ran so much better on the ROG Ally X that my Steam Deck started collecting dust, even if Valve's appliance philosophy treats you more like a customer than an administrator. But a few weeks ago, I wiped the whole thing and installed the Handheld Edition of CachyOS, the same performance-obsessed take on Arch Linux for normal people that already runs my desktop.

Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also make them intimidating, particularly if you have limited spare time. Dosa Divas, on the other hand, manages to capture much of that same feeling in a package that spans less than 10 hours. And it does it with a bold sense of style and a story that seamlessly flits between big themes and personal drama. There's just one big d …Read the full story at The Verge.

A luxurious hot shower anywhere you go. Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea of spending hundreds on a portable shower seem less absurd. I've been testing the Hottap Go from Australia-based Joolca while vanlifing to shower after surfing and to wash up after cooking. It features a 12L integrated water tank which is an improvement on other portable showers that require an external container and long, cumbersome hose th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in March, we covered an open-source camera called the Saturnix. Back then, it was a work-in-progress, but it was still cool enough to check out. The creator said they'd get something out as soon as they could, but much like everything else in life, it took more time than expected.

Remember when games used to be borderline unplayable on integrated graphics? For those who had a discrete GPU in their builds, that iGPU was nothing more than a backup in case the graphics card died, or you wanted to troubleshoot display issues. You could run games, sure, but when you're averaging 20FPS at the lowest settings, you're really just proving that the game launches rather than enjoying it.

You can do a lot with SBCs and microcontrollers, but one project we see pop up a lot is handheld consoles. It makes sense they're so popular; the hardware is so small that you can stick it on some simple hardware and use it to play retro games on a pocket-sized device. Such is the case of this cool ESP32-S2 game console, where all the hardware, including the screen, fits on a single board.

On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, and this letter kicked off yet another wave of criticism against the company for allegedly trying to shut down discussions of its work."WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED," the group, The Saturday Salon, wrote in the Instagram post, which has more than 3,000 likes. A separate post about the letter on Bluesky has more than 360 reposts. The text of the letter de …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 135, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, crank the AC, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about cold plunges and Colson Whitehead and the food truck mafia, finally getting to the theater to see Obsession, watching The Agency because it's apparently everyone's favorite underrated show, nodding sadly to Adam Conover's video about the death of sitcoms, making a lot of noises during the Dune: Part Three trailer, testing Atlas as a visual journal, giggling endlessly at the new InfoWars, and s …Read the full story at The Verge.