Designers, creators, writers, artists, and other creative types often make it difficult to know what to gift them. There are so many specialist tools or fun creative gadgets, how can you even know what to buy for someone? Heres an ideal gift list for creatives, ranging from small gift items to larger more extravagant items that would really make your creative friends year.

A cozy workspace full of character and characters — and a cat. Continue reading…

Network-attached storage (NAS) is fantastic for storing files on the network, making services available for an entire household or office, and connecting to various systems while away. Compared to simple storage devices, there's much more that can be done with a NAS and they're quickly becoming more like traditional servers. Most enclosures you can purchase have a few USB ports and you'll have a few when turning an old PC into a NAS, but what should you use them for? Here are a few things that can be connected to your NAS through USB.

There are lots of great portable SSDs. But if you're looking for one that offers great performance, tons of storage space, and is great for even the toughest conditions then this SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD is going to be right up your alley.

Still beautiful. Still good. Still the wrong form factor for basically everybody. Continue reading…

Kristen Radtke / The Verge Bluesky feels like the big winner right now.I’ve been covering Bluesky ever since I got my invite in April 2023. I’ve felt the platform has always had promise, especially with features like feeds with custom algorithms and the ability to let users pick their own moderation filters. But for a long while, it didn’t have the critical mass of users that I could follow to make it the first social network I load up every day.Over the course of this month, that’s changed. It added 700,000 new users in a week. Then, it crossed the 15 million-user mark. This week, CEO Jay Graber said it crossed more than 20 million users and had been adding more than a million users per day.Part of the interest in Bluesky is that it looks and feels like a... Continue reading…

Did you know that disposable vapes come with lithium-ion batteries? Yeah, the same kind of battery that you'll find in your phone. Just like their bigger brothers, disposable vape batteries are totally capable of being recharged and reused in other projects. Unfortunately, because they're bundled into a disposable product, a ton of these batteries hit the landfill before they can even perform a slither of their potential.

Hey, remember the Nova SBC that went up as a crowdfunding campaign? It was a cute board that combined an RP 2040 with a small LED grid you can use for minute projects. If you needed a reason to pick one up for yourself, here's one: someone coded Snake on their board, and you can do the same with their tutorial.

Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge Elon Musk is, in addition to many other things, now the co-lead of the currently nonexistent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory group. Now, before it even gets rolling, he has begun singling out individual government employees he says are emblematic of the government’s bloat and posting about them to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.Earlier this week, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the X user “datahazard” shared a screenshot on X highlighting the role of Ashley Thomas, the Director of Climate Diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation, saying, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment” of that role. Musk reposted it, adding the comment “so many... Continue reading…

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on a case involving funding for a major broadband subsidy program, the Universal Service Fund (USF). SCOTUS granted cert in a pair of cases called Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research, and Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition v. Consumers’ Research, which were consolidated for oral arguments. They center around whether Congress inappropriately delegated lawmaking function to the FCC by letting it set contribution rates for telecommunications companies to pay into the nonprofit Universal Service Administration Company, which manages the USF. It also asks whether the FCC delegated too much authority to a private entity by letting USAC manage the subsidy program.The... Continue reading…

A number of Windows users reported snappy performance after updating their PCs to Windows 11, version 24H2. However, for lots of other people, the latest major Windows 11 feature update is causing all sorts of issues. So much so that Microsoft temporarily blocked the Windows 11 24H2 update on certain PCs last month. Unfortunately for Windows users, Microsoft has imposed the update block yet again, but this time, it's for different reasons.

Considering that the RISC-V project began in 2010, its one of the newest CPU architectures to grace the computing space. While theres still a noticeable shortage of consumer-grade processors in the RISC-V space, manufacturers like Milk-V have released a handful of RISC-V-powered devices.