Do you think you could game on a screen the size of a watch face? While it would probably cause eye strain, it's undoubtedly a great way to pass the time on those long rides. Well, as it turns out, people have been getting games working on their Samsung Galaxy Watches, and the performance has been impressively solid.

There's nothing better than a good gag gift. While you could get your friend a horrible pair of socks or a shirt with a questionable quote, sometimes there's nothing better than a Steam game they certainly won't play, let alone install. Clogging up my friends' Steam libraries with nonsense is one of my favorite pastimes, and here are 7 of my go-to games that I gift as a joke.

On January 9th, 56-year-old Peter Akemann flew his DJI Mini 3 Pro drone far beyond the legal limit of his ability to see — and into a Super Scooper water dumping plane fighting the Los Angeles Palisades wildfires, grounding it for repairs after punching a hole in its left wing. Now that authorities have traced the drone back to him, he agreed Friday to plead guilty — possibly escaping a year in jail in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the roughly $65,000 it cost to repair the plane.According to the plea agreement (PDF via Courthouse News), his drone flew quite a distance and punched quite a hole:While the Firefighting Aircraft was conducting its firefighting missions, defendant drove to the area near the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, and parked his vehicle on the top floor of a parking structure. Defendant launched the Drone and flew it toward the Pacific Palisades to observe damage caused by the Palisades Fire. At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued Temporary Flight Restrictions that prohibited drone operations near the Southern California wildfires, including the Palisades Fire. Defendant flew the Drone at least 2500 meters away from its launch point and lost visual sight of the Drone while flying it. Thereafter, the Drone collided with the Firefighting Aircraft, causing an approximately 3-inch-by-6-inch hole in the left wing of Firefighting Aircraft. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Akemann isn’t just any old drone pilot, but rather the former president and chief technologist of video game developer Skydance Interactive and the co-founder of Treyarch, a studio known for its Call of Duty and Spider-Man games. THR writes that he “recently left his role” at Skydance, which would be news in and of itself. Both the Akemann pleading guilty and the game developer are Peter T. Akemann. A LinkedIn page for Akemann no longer exists, and an X social media page for a Peter T. Akemann has been scrubbed. It is possible that the US District Court will not accept Akemann’s plea agreement, which his lawyers are making jointly with the US Attorney’s Office, in which case he faces a year of jail time, a year of supervised release, and either up to a $100,000 fine or “twice the gross loss resulting from the offense,” whichever is greater.Akemann’s attorneys told ABC News he’s now “deeply sorry for the mistake he made by flying a drone near the boundary of the Palisades fire area on January 9, 2025, and for the resulting accident” and “accepts responsibility for his grave error in judgment.” They also added that there are “mitigating factors that will come to light during the court proceedings, including Mr. Akemann’s reliance on the DJI Drone’s geo fencing safeguard feature and the failure of that feature.” DJI recently eliminated its most restrictive forms of geofencing, potentially letting drone pilots fly over active wildfires and government buildings like the White House when it might have previously stopped them automatically. That said, DJI recently explained to us that even the earlier versions of its software would not have stopped someone from flying over a temporary no-fly-zone, like a wildfire, unless that person let their drone download the updated temporary flight restriction lists first.

Have you ever gotten into a debate with an OpenAI bot? If so, did you find it particularly convincing or appealing to human nature? If you did, there's a good reason behind it. OpenAI has revealed that, to train some of the most powerful AI models in the world, it simply points it toward a subreddit built solely for argument and debate and lets the training algorithm do the rest.

A new year means a new Sundance Film Festival, and a fresh crop of promising original features that could go on to become awards season darlings in a few months. It might be hard to top last year’s festival where Dìdi, A Different Man, and I Saw the TV Glow all made strong showings. But with films like Atropia, Bubble & Squeak, and Didn’t Die on the roster, this year’s Sundance might just do the trick.Naturally, The Verge is going to be taking in as much of Sundance as we can and posting bite-sized reviews of everything we see. We’ll also be posting longer reviews and sharing trailers, and you can follow along here to keep up with all of the news out of the festival. Atropia. Luz. Bubble & Squeak. By Design. Didn’t Die. The Legend of Ochi.

Every so often, Microsoft will remove a pretty useful feature from one of its apps. Sometimes, they evaporate for seemingly no reason, and sometimes, the feature just wasn't seeing enough use to justify continuing its support. Today, we're seeing an example of the latter case: Microsoft has announced that it's sunsetting the Microsoft Defender VPN feature at the end of February. It's a move that's bound to prompt a lot of questions, including "When on Earth did Microsoft Defender get a VPN feature?"

Nvidia hasn't been shy to talk gaming at 4K with its RTX 40 and RTX 50 series. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 was the most powerful GPU you could buy and the RTX 5090 has since taken that mantle. These graphics cards are great for enjoying all the latest games at 4K with ultra settings configured, though some titles would prove to be too much of a challenge for high frame rates. That's where Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) comes into play. There are various levels to this technology, but it works wonders for high-fidelity gaming and we could see 8K arrive sooner than we think.

PowerToys' Advanced Paste is a handy tool for anyone who wants to take copying and pasting to the next level on Windows. However, Microsoft wants to take it even further by incorporating two new paste actions that allow the transcoding of media files to help users convert them from one format to another.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 series is here, and if you were lucky to get one of the best GPUs in the brief time they were available, you know you'll be playing DLSS-enhanced games as soon as you plug it in. Only the top two from the range are out, which is the usual release cadence for any GPU release. The RTX 5080 joins a long line of XX80 graphics cards from the company, and the general rule is that the new XX80 card is more powerful than the previous flagship. That's the RTX 4090 in this case, and it's only fitting if we put that long line of historical facts to the test.

YouTube is expanding the availability of its dedicated community space feature to more creators on the site, giving them more opportunities to connect with their fans without needing to lean on another platform like Discord. Only available for access via mobile devices, Communities first launched during the Made for YouTube event last fall, letting the creators write posts with images and text while also enabling fans to start discussions. “We’ve been testing Communities with a small group of creators and have heard positive feedback, which is why we’re excited to keep expanding access, says today’s post from YouTube. Creators can monitor and moderate via a Community Hub in the YouTube Studio app that combines the activity from their channel, and can also offer suggestions for replies to fans.YouTube is also renaming its previously existing Community tab to Posts to try to keep things clear between the two things:The tab will work just as it does today, just with a new name. Creators can still share updates and announcements via posts and viewers can engage by commenting on those posts like they always have!Creators will still need an invitation to access Communities, which will come in an email and as a banner on their channel pages on the YouTube app. Once received, creators will be invited to “Go to Community” to learn more and then allow them to enable the features.

Docking stations can be a great way to expand the ports on your existing devices. But if you need a solution that you can take with you while you're on the go, then going with a USB hub is going to be an absolute must.

Whenever a new generation of CPUs or GPUs drops, PC users are susceptible to a wave of FOMO clouding their rational thinking. From the announcement livestreams and preview benchmarks to third-party reviews and stock issues, everyone gets swept up in the hype. On the one hand, this is what we look forward to every year or two, but on the other hand, a fancy new product doesn't magically make your existing PC trash.