One of the cooler parts of moving from Windows to Linux is that there's always something new on the horizon, including brand new OSes to check out. One such OS is called AstrOS, which has just entered beta and is ready for people to check out. However, if you moved to Linux because you wanted to escape Windows 11's TPM 2.0 restriction, AstrOS has a surprising limitation in store for you.

Knowing exactly what your student needs for the school year ahead is next to impossible. Sure, you'll probably nail the essentials, but there will likely be a few items you forgot to buy, or didn't think they'd need to have. We're pulling our weight during the back-to-school season with a new shopping guide that's a mix of practical and aspirational products for students to use in and out of the classroom.We're covering items that make writing easier and more satisfying, alarm clocks that can rattle even the most sleep-deprived students from a deep slumber, bags that are just as great for the gym as they are for the weekend away, and more. …Read the full story at The Verge.

A bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day was up on X for over seven hours before eventually being pulled. During that time, it reached over 5.9 million accounts and accumulated over 143,000 likes. Other accounts have reposted the leaked film, but none have lasted particularly long, as Disney now seems to be on top of issuing takedown requests.The leak is unlikely to slow down the box office juggernaut, which is already shattering records. It raked in $72 million in previews this week. The previous record holder was Avengers: Endgame, which grossed $60 million during its previews way back in 2019. Endgame went on to set staggering records for …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 138, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy August, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about microwave sounds and Meta glasses and Alex vs. Alix, testing the Logitech Alto Keys K98M to see if I'm ready for the mechanical keyboard life, digging into the history of the first chatbot, clearing space on my desk for a Bob Ross deskmat, doing a full Ted Lasso rewatch ahead of the new season next week, finally getting into Cyberpunk 2077 now that it's so cheap, cackling and nodding at this A …Read the full story at The Verge.

Donald Trump speaks during the House Republican Party member retreat. | Image: Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images The FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have stopped short of officially blaming Iran for a spate of cyberattacks on Minnesota's water systems, but consensus is that Iran is likely behind them. That, of course, hasn't stopped Donald Trump from sharing his own theory - that Governor Tim Walz is to blame and telling reporters that "I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack."Trump's comments come shortly after the FBI issued a warning that the cyberattacks on American infrastructure were spreading to other states. In Minnesota alone, at least 30 community water systems had been targeted in what a …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Steam Hardware Survey is perhaps one of the most illustrative data sets that indicates the reality of where the consumer market is at. In my many years of going through the survey, a lot has changed, except one category that seems to move slower than the others. In the latest available June 2026 survey, 51.12% of players are reportedly still running 1080p as their primary display. If you were to compare this from three years ago, it was about 61.17% in September 2023, so it is falling, but slowly enough that half the platform is still sitting there.

Lossless Scaling is one of the best apps to have if you're into gaming but can't afford the highest-end hardware, or if you have a gaming handheld like the Steam Deck. It can increase the resolution of your games on almost any relatively modern hardware, and it even supports frame generation to increase the smoothness of your games.

Running a local LLM on desktop is one thing. Pairing it with an Obsidian vault is where the setup actually starts becoming more useful for a daily workflow. And this can be easily done with either an MCP setup or a filesystem connector. On mobile, though, that whole workflow just doesn't exist. There are AI plugins in the Obsidian community that support local models, but not one of them runs the model on the actual phone.

It's hard to imagine that, just a little over a year ago, a dead SSD used to be an $80 or $100 bill. Today, replacing that same 1TB drive has become close to a $220 problem. It was, after all, this number that changed how seriously I was looking at my NVMe's lifespan, especially since that's something I hadn't considered at all.

The Mermaid Mask, the next point-and-click game from Tangle Tower developer SFB Games, has everything you could ask for in a great murder mystery.It starts with a compelling setup: The captain of a submarine is found dead in a locked room, his body next to a mysterious cauldron with blood trickling across the floor. The colorful cast of suspects stationed aboard are delightful to talk to, including a grumpy author trying to draft a sequel to his hit novel, an actor playing the lead in a movie based on that novel, a young woman who puts on elaborate illusion performances, and even a man who studies dreams. The submarine works as an excellen …Read the full story at The Verge.

Your smartphone photos can look way better. If you're willing to put in a little extra work, use third party apps and spend a bit of time editing, it's possible to take photos that - under the right circumstances - can rival dedicated digital cameras.I post a lot of smartphone photos online, and "How do I take better photos on my phone?" is a question I get practically every day. It makes sense. As the saying goes, "The best camera is the one you have on you," and we practically always have our phones on us these days.Over the last few years, smartphone camera sensors have gotten bigger, with better light gathering capabilities and highe …Read the full story at The Verge.

For the longest time, I used a Ring doorbell because it felt like the most popular smart home doorbell option. However, I quickly realized that buying the $100+ device is actually only the admission ticket. To actually use any of the heavily promoted features, like recording video, viewing event history, or receiving personal alerts, you're forced into an ongoing Ring Protect subscription that can cost up to $20 a month.