With a $300 price tag, Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing tool is one of the pricier options for editing your videos. There are many different alternative video editing programs available, including a whole host of open-source options. Free, open-source editors don’t mean any less quality or fewer features. You can find exactly what you need for editing videos on your Mac without paying a hefty fee for it.

While Windows remains a dominant operating system, you don’t have to be locked into Microsoft's suite of applications. If you are tired of relying on Microsoft apps that eat up your subscription dollars and limit your control, explore open-source alternatives that offer freedom, flexibility, and powerful features without the price tag. In this post, I will go over the five robust open source solutions that can replace your everyday Microsoft staples.

Sometimes you have to sift through a ton of files to find what you need, and opening each one with its intended app can waste a lot of time, especially with different file types. The good news is that Windows File Explorer has a built-in tool that lets you preview files without the hassle of launching full applications. Plus, there are a few other neat tricks in Windows to make viewing files super easy. Here are four ways to view files in Windows without using their applications.

As a PC gamer, you might have already heard about DirectStorage. Announced way back in 2020 by Microsoft, DirectStorage is an API that aims to significantly reduce game loading times, improve GPU performance, and reduce CPU overhead, mainly on Windows 11. While DirectStorage was publicly released to developers in March 2022, gamers have yet to see the technology deliver the transformative benefits Microsoft had promised years ago.

Welcome to The Drive, a new weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! I'll also highlight anything noteworthy from XDA reviews published in the week.

Excel is a great way to store and analyze multiple points of data in a single spreadsheet. But once your spreadsheet gets big enough, it can be difficult to visualize all this data effectively. That's why it may be useful for you to take a look at your data in a different way, so that you can easily identify the information you need without scrolling through all the cells manually.

Building a Network-Attached Storage device can be an enjoyable project, regardless of whether you’re a casual user looking for a network-wide file-sharing and backup server or a tinkering expert who wants to experiment with different RAID configurations, network shares, and a host of other features. But if your NAS setup seems too underwhelming for your needs, you could scale this project up by designing a dedicated Storage Area Network for your home lab. If you’ve already built a NAS using TrueNAS Scale, OpenMediaVault, or another dedicated OS, you can follow these tips to transform it into a SAN system.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images This year’s Prime Video streaming content was led by adaptations and spinoffs like Fallout and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Read the full story at The Verge.

A Google Nest doorbell camera. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Apple is working on a new smart doorbell camera that uses Face ID to unlock your door, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. The camera could be released by the end of 2025 “at the soonest,” Gurman writes.The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it. Like biometric login info on other Apple devices, the camera would be equipped with the company’s Secure Enclave chip that stores and processes Face ID information separately from the rest of the system’s hardware.Gurman writes that this device will “likely” work with existing third-party HomeKit smart locks and that the company may also partner with a smart lock company “to offer a complete system on day one.” He expects the camera will make use of Apple’s in-house “Proxima” combination Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip that’s rumored for new HomePod Mini and Apple TV devices next year.This doorbell camera joins a broader collection of rumors surrounding a renewed Apple push into the smart home that’s centered around Apple Intelligence. Those include another new smart home camera, a possible Apple-branded TV, and new smart home displays — one a simple iPad-like device that magnetically attaches to wall mounts or speaker bases, while another display sits on the end of a robotic arm attached to a larger base.

For the most part, routers are in a great place right now, with mesh systems being the pinnacle, with the ability to deliver excellent speeds, along with plenty of coverage. Perhaps the only downside of going with a mesh system is that it can be kind of expensive. Thankfully, there's a good deal on this Eero mesh router system right now that comes with three devices.

When putting together and running a home lab, looking for ways to reduce overhead and improve performance is of the utmost importance. One way to do so is by harnessing a technology called SR-IOV, or Single-Root I/O Virtualization. SR-IOV allows you to pass-through PCIe devices to multiple VMs at once, while maintaining a high level of performance and low latency. Here are 4 reasons why you might want to use SR-IOV in your home lab setup.

Image: Canoo Days after furloughing dozens of its employees without pay, EV startup Canoo told the remainder of its staff they will be on a “mandatory unpaid break” through at least the end of the year, TechCrunch reported Friday. A company email seen by the outlet said employees would be locked out of Canoo’s systems by the end of Friday, with their benefits continuing through the end of this month.The report follows Canoo’s announcement last week that it was idling its Oklahoma factories and furloughing employees while it worked “to finalize securing the capital necessary to move forward with its operations.” As TechCrunch notes, the company reported that it had only about $700,000 left in the bank last month.Also on Friday, the company announced a 1-for-20 reverse stock split, effective December 24th. Canoo says the consolidation aims to keep its stock listed on the Nasdaq exchange and attract “a broader group of institutional and retail investors.”Canoo was founded in 2017 to sell electric vans and trucks to adventure-seeking customers but has mostly only ever made vehicles for the US government. As The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins wrote last year, analysts have warned of its risk of insolvency as it’s teetered on the edge of running out of cash since 2022. Canoo has lost a steady stream of executives since then, including all of its founders and, more recently, its CFO and general counsel.