I have used Claude long enough that I thought I had a pretty good handle on what it could do. I would throw questions at it, use it for writing and research, and occasionally lean on it for more complex tasks. But the more I experimented, the more I realized I was still treating Claude like a smarter chatbot instead of a proper productivity tool.

Over the past year, we've seen countries around the world ease themselves off Microsoft's software. Back in April, we saw France ditch Windows for Linux, and around a month ago, we heard reports that China was moving forward with its own homegrown Linux distros. Now, Switzerland has started a trial that will see 3,000 government computers use open-source solutions alongside Microsoft 365 to see if it's feasible to jump ship.

Doomscrolling is pretty nefarious; as damaging as it can be for you, it can also be very addictive. But what if your endless swiping caused harm to something else, too? Such is the case with this ESP32-S3-powered virtual pet, which senses if you're endlessly scrolling through your feeds and will slowly deteriorate in health until you stop.

I think that when you have to give an autonomous tool permission to do something, it often kills the autonomy. We often see that with Claude Code. You ask the agent to do something, and it starts working on the task, but during the process it also asks for permission to run certain commands, which means you have to keep approving them.

The Xiaomi 18 Fold and its Xring O3 chip. China is getting first crack at a British technology that might change how mobile games are made and played. Today, the Xiaomi 18 Fold launches in mainland China with an Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX graphics processor inside its custom Xring O3 chip. What's so special about that? After five years of development, Arm now has an AI gaming graphics accelerator inside its GPU.By following Nvidia's playbook, Arm-powered phones are about to have PC-like technologies to make games run faster, at higher resolution, with advanced lighting techniques, all without using more power than they do today. The jagged edges you see in the mobile versions of popular …Read the full story at The Verge.

Xiaomi is the latest manufacturer to release a short, wide foldable phone, in the week Apple is expected to do the same. I got to try the 18 Fold behind closed doors at IFA last week, and while it looks and feels similar enough to Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8, superior specs make it feel like the phone I wish Samsung had made.The 18 Fold is Xiaomi's first book-style foldable since 2024's Mix Fold 4, but the company has followed Huawei and Samsung in moving to a short, squat design. Xiaomi's phone goes further though: It's both shorter and wider than Samsung's, with a roughly 1.4:1 aspect ratio on both the 7.58-inch inner and 5.38-inch outer s …Read the full story at The Verge.

New Apple CEO John Ternus’ first hardware launch has already proved the company’s industry influence. | Image: The Verge; Getty Images Apple is almost certain to launch its first foldable iPhone tomorrow, seven years after Samsung's Galaxy Fold initially went on sale. And while Apple might be a few years late to the party, the run-up to this launch proves that new CEO John Ternus has inherited a company that's as influential as it's ever been.Tomorrow's iPhone event is likely to be a little different than what we're used to. For one, the arrival of some iPhone 18 models will likely be delayed - the Pros will be available first, but the regular 18 is supposedly set to launch early next year instead. But leaks and rumors have consistently suggested that Apple will instead p …Read the full story at The Verge.

The LG G5 OLED is one of the TVs tested by Gamers Nexus. | Photo by John Higgins / The Verge LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode, according to a new report from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus. The company's TV sets scan Wi-Fi networks for nearby devices, record audio logs through their microphones, and use audio and video sampling to recognize exactly what you're watching from across the TV inputs.Gamers Nexus partnered with fellow YouTubers Level1Techs and independent security researchers for the investigation, which involved testing retail LG OLEDs. Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like pho …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most PC guides related to BIOS settings end up in similar places, covering EXPO and XMP, Resizable BAR, and other usual suspects. They're not incorrect at all, and enabling those can generate some of the more transformative increases in performance you can get out of BIOS tweaks, but your BIOS is a very deep place. Some of the settings worth finding and experimenting with are buried beneath context menus and beneath advanced toggles, and on my 7800X3D system, some of the more effective ones were found while looking for something else unrelated.

If you live a wireless life, then you're always at the mercy of your device's batteries; it's a key thing you should keep in mind before making the cordless jump. Keeping tabs on all of them can be annoying at best, and highly disruptive to work at worst. Fortunately, Microsoft is adding a way to see all your Bluetooth devices' battery levels in a single widget, alongside your laptop's charge levels if you're on the go.

Running a language model on your phone used to feel like a novelty, and now there's a whole aisle of apps that actually make it practical. Reading the store listings, you'd struggle to tell any of them apart though - they all look identical and you don't actually know how each one holds up after you've spent some time with it.

A little while ago, Jon Seager, the vice president of Engineering at Canonical, made a strange comment. He said that the operating system with the biggest adoption rate was Windows, and that he wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu on Windows became the most popular way to use the operating system.