I enjoy streaming from platforms like Spotify and YouTube Music, but I still listen to many of my favorite songs in MP3 format. This is because I grew up in the days of physical media and ripped my entire CD collection spanning decades onto my PC. I find it handy to listen to MP3s because I can enjoy my music library on many devices without worrying about losing my collection and playlists if I cancel my subscription or change services.

If you follow my articles closely, you may already know I'm a lifelong Windows user. At 29 years old, I got my first-ever Mac with the M4 Mac Mini late last year, and after some initial friction, it's safe to say I've fallen in love with it over the past six months or so.

If you’ve been following my articles here on XDA, you may know that I love working on the most bizarre and insane projects imaginable. From running Windows 11 as a container on my Raspberry Pi and gaming on a Proxmox virtual machine to emulating PC titles on my smartphone and conversing with Skyrim NPCs using locally-hosted AI tools, I’ve experimented with several wacky ideas.

There have been a lot of big games this year that have felt all-consuming, like Monster Hunter Wilds or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Maze Mice offers something different: a small, pick-up-and-play experience that takes a bunch of ideas from some classics and adds a clever twist.The game, from Luck Be a Landlord developer TrampolineTales, mixes elements of Pac-Man, Vampire Survivors, and even the classic Snake. As an adorable, pixelated mouse, you zip around a maze to get blue experience gems that are guarded by cats. When you pass by the cats, they'll wake up and start chasing you, sometimes creating a hilariously long line of felines. (Cute ghost cats will also appear and inconveniently float right into your path.) All the action takes place on one screen, so it's easy to see where everything is at any given time.When you get enough gems, you can pick from a selection of three power-ups. The upgrades are often a little silly, like knitting needles that fly through the air to attack the cats pursuing you, but as with Vampire Survivors, it's fun to experiment with different abilities to create interesting builds.Maze Mice's most interesting feature is that time only moves whe …Read the full story at The Verge.

Let's be honest; while Microsoft has added a few handy features to the File Explorer (thanks for the tab-based layout, by the way, I love it), it's still missing a few bits. Fortunately, you don't need to sit around and wait for Microsoft to add those features in; there are plenty of tools out there you can use to enhance your File Explorer and make it more bearable to use.

The Legend of Zelda series is a pillar of gaming at this point, with nearly 40 years' worth of games. What started on the NES with 8-bit graphics has gone to fully open-world games with Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. With the Nintendo Switch 2 looming, which will feature paid upgrades for both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild and GameCube classic Wind Waker on NSO, which makes now a great time to walk through the evolutions of the series has seen since the 80s. Originally an 8-bit game on the NES, there are a few major evolutions you can mark, most of which come with improvements to the technology, or in the case of our first big change, a new place to play.

It's easy to get carried away when building out a home lab, You have easy access to refurbished or used server-grade hardware. It sounds amazing to grab a dual-CPU behemoth of a system for running a few self-hosted services, but it's important to consider the costs outside of the hardware itself. First, there's the cost of electricity, which will quickly become your home lab's kryptonite with everything running 24/7. Then there are more expensive replacement parts, especially for ECC and server-specific components.

After decades of tutorials and guides, PC building might have become pretty standardized, but it remains a deeply personal exercise. People have a certain idea in mind when they embark on a PC build, and RGB lighting is just one of many elements that make PC building what it is today. While we can't escape RGB in PC components, there should be a line that manufacturers shouldn't cross. As if RGB power supplies weren't enough, we have to deal with RGB GPU sag brackets now.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 83, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, please don't spoil Andor for me, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Mission: Impossible and Sam Altman's kitchen and bad roommates, ranting to PJ Vogt about all the ways I'm trying to use my phone less, writing all my scratch notes in Antinote, deciding to be cautiously optimistic about The Paper, rewatching the last season of Mythic Quest, watching and reading about life as an air traffic controller, trying to restart a meditation practice after discovering I get Headspace through work, and using Ludex to see if any of my sports cards are worth anything. So far… they're not.I also have for you a pair of headphones you're practically guaranteed to love, two new sci-fi shows to check out, the new Airbnb, and much more. Let's dive in.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / listening to / playing / carrying around in a backpack this week? What should everyone else be just as into as you are right now? Tell me everything: ins …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hideo Kojima and his studio Kojima Productions are preparing to release Death Stranding 2: On The Beach on June 26 exclusively for PlayStation 5. Kojima, who is 61 years old, said in an interview with VGC that he has some ideas for a Death Stranding 3 but believes someone else would need to make it. While he didn't specify why he wouldn't be able to make it himself, there are a few obvious reasons why he might think that, outside of purely creative choices. Between a stacked schedule, how long games take to make, and his age, it makes sense that Kojima believes he won't be returning to the series. Here's why Kojima says he won't be making another entry in his weird Death Stranding series.

The fighting game genre is filled with many crossovers. Characters from popular and iconic game series are often pitted against one another in exciting and interesting mashups that get fans very excited. Some of the best fighting game experiences have come from this, and have even led to the creation of new ongoing franchises. However, with as many crossovers we see within the genre, there are those few dream matches that we continue to think about seeing become a reality.

The Nintendo Switch Online service has been a great way for players to check out classic games from the NES library. Occasionally, Nintendo will add new games to the list of NES titles to the service for those with an active Switch Online account. Many of the iconic classics everyone will recognize are there to play anytime, especially the big Nintendo first-party titles. But you may not see every major or beloved NES game on the service, even if they were mega hits on the console back in the day.