It's easy to see why portable SSDs are so popular. Not only do they offer excellent performance, but you also get a device that's rugged and compact. Crucial's X9 portable SSD delivers on all fronts, and is now down to its lowest price for a limited time.

The hard drive that I have been using since 2017 died on me around two years ago. It was past the 5-year mark, and had started showing signs that it was about to die, such as slow access speeds and occasional file corruption. Alas, I procrastinated backing up my data, ignoring all the well-meaning advice we tend to give readers here. Then, the worst happened, and my HDD stopped working completely one fine day.

The ability to craft anything from your imagination makes 3D printers invaluable for DIY projects involving microcontrollers, SBCs, and other computing devices. By letting you concoct everything from custom screws and cable ties to full-on racks and cases for your paraphernalia, a 3D printer serves as a solid investment for home labs.

If you've been looking to get rid of your bulky desktop PC setup for something smaller, then this Acemagician mini PC is going to be the one. You get tons of power, excellent expandability, and a huge discount right now that knocks $100 off, bringing the price down to $449. This is the best deal we've seen on this model, so grab it while you can.

In a perfect world, no one will have to buy used PC hardware, and newly launched components will be widely available at affordable prices, providing phenomenal generational gains, every single time. We don't live in that world, unfortunately, which is why used PC components exist. Buying a used PC part can be filled with anxiety, especially when doing it for the first time. If you know how to protect yourself when buying used hardware, you open yourself up to a whole new world.

No other PC component attracts as much attention and fanfare as graphics cards. Every GPU launch is preceded by a flurry of rumors and leaks, and proceeded by endless coverage, analyses, and criticism. Amid this entire hype, manufacturers do their best to confuse the consumer by marketing features that have little to do with actual performance.

Netflix is starting to test search that’s powered by OpenAI, according to Bloomberg.The new search engine will let users “look for shows using far more specific terms, including the subscriber’s mood, for example, the company said,” per the report. This OpenAI-powered search will also allow users to make queries that “go well beyond genres or actors’ names.”The feature, which is opt in, is already available for some users to try in Australia and New Zealand on iOS.Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s story is accurate. Zhou says that the test will expand to the US “in the coming weeks and months” and that there aren’t currently plans for the feature outside of iOS.“It’s early days for the feature and we’re really in a learn and listen phase for this beta,” Zhou says.OpenAI didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.In an interview on the Decoder podcast last year, The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, asked Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters about how the company was thinking about AI. Here was part of his response:We have a long history of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in our recommender systems. We’ve been doing that for 20-some years. Again, we think that our job is to be proactive about understanding where there’s technical innovation. How do we use that both to serve creators, allow them to tell their stories in more compelling ways, and also then to serve our members better user experiences?

I've been going all out on my smart home recently, and that includes finding new ways to integrate older hardware that I have lying around into Home Assistant. That hasn't been too much of an issue; many of my older Tuya devices work with Local Tuya, and I have a lot of self-hosted services that are useful for feeding info into Home Assistant, too. I hit a major snag when it came to my Govee H615B strip lights, though, which led me down a rabbit hole of reverse engineering to integrate them like I had everything else.

Raspberry Pis are a ton of fun, but it can be a lot when you're getting into the hobby. There are lots of little nuances and pitfalls that you need to skirt around to really get the most out of them. Of course, you will make mistakes; that's part of a hobby, after all. But there are some considerations you can make before you get started that can help reduce that number of errors as low as possible before you get started.

For the first few PCs I used, I didn't have much of a say in the components. I used to shoot for the stars, and my parents used to land a few storeys from the ground, selecting whatever hardware fit the budget. Later, when I started earning, and had full control over my builds for the first time, I started with budget PCs. From using a Pentium 3 pre-built machine to a custom-built Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 3080 gaming rig, I have a long list of CPUs and GPUs that I wish I had purchased at launch.

For a while, it looked like President Donald Trump was going to have Big Tech’s back.Now, the tech industry is collateral damage in his global trade war.On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen floated the idea of placing “a levy on the advertising revenues of digital services” if tariff negotiations with the US go south. This would be the opposite outcome that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg were hoping for when they threw their support behind the new administration. To someone like Zuckerberg, Trump was supposed to be the strong-armed leader to bring the overbearing EU to heel. Instead, the rhetoric between the US and EU is ratcheting up just weeks before the EU is already set to fine Meta (and Apple) for violating its Digital Markets Act. While certainly more of a self-inflicted wound, Elon Musk’s popularity in the US has “inverted as his support for President Trump has increased,” Nate Silver wrote this week. Tesla’s stock price, meanwhile. has lost over a third of its value this year, and, thanks to tariffs, the company has removed the option to buy new, US-made vehicles in China. As I predicted last week, TikTok is particularly s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ever since Microsoft added widgets to Windows, I haven't really made use of them. However, the newest Windows 11 Beta patch may change that. Microsoft has pushed a new update full of content, and one of the key features allows you to read articles on MSN right from your Widgets feed.