The Nintendo Switch 2 has entered the ring, possibly complicating your decision of which handheld to buy this year. While Nintendo’s new console, which comes out on June 5th, may seem similar to handheld gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally, there’s a lot that sets them apart. Everything like how you buy and play games, their control methods, how powerful they are, and how you can expand their storage makes them different. Unique doesn’t always mean “good,” by the way.While tech-savvy folks likely understand the key differences between each of the major handhelds, possibly enough to establish a preference, some could use a hand breaking things down. That’s exactly what I’m going to do here, specifically comparing the Switch 2 to the Asus ROG Ally and the Ally X, two of the most popular handheld gaming PCs that aren’t a Steam Deck (in small part because they’re easy to buy at Best Buy). I’ve already compared the Switch 2 to Valve’s console, so my focus here is exclusively on Asus’ consoles that have a dedicated fanbase and some great specs.Pricing and availabilityAs mentioned, the Switch 2 will launch on June 5th. Preorders were initially s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Note-taking is a task that most of us perform regularly. Whether you're in a meeting, discussing deliverables with your colleague, or have a personal matter to attend to, most of us resort to our Notes app to pen all of them down. Owing to this, it becomes extremely important to pick the right note-taking tool based on one's specific needs. If you end up picking the wrong platform, you may be stuck for a long time, since you may have paid for it, or you wouldn't want to migrate all your data to an alternate app or tool. The fact that there are tons of note-taking apps out there makes things harder for the average user.

The downside of working primarily at a computer is that, at any given time, you have a whole universe of distractions available to you. It would be wonderful if we could all just focus on the task at hand at all times, but I'm sure I'm not alone in falling for temptation more often than I should. Whether it's YouTube or some online forums where I can geek out about Nintendo, it can be hard to stay on task.

Using Linux in 2025 is more viable than you may think. Although the operating system (OS) has powered much of the world's servers for decades, it remains a severely unpopular choice for desktop and laptop systems. This is largely down to game and app support on Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, which have traditionally offered superior experiences to Linux. That's no longer the case, and many Linux distributions (distros) are more polished than commercial operating systems. If you're coming from Windows, here are a few things that will surprise you to learn about Linux.

Smartphones, laptops, and other products that are exempt from Trump’s April 9th tariffs will be lumped in with duties on semiconductors in “a month or two,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl on This Week. Yesterday, the Trump administration released updated guidance that excluded smartphones, laptops, and more from Trump’s new tariffs, including the 125 percent additional levy on Chinese-produced goods last week. “This is not like a permanent sort of exemption,” Lutnick told Karl, saying that they will be subject later to “a special focus type of tariff” applied to the semiconductor industry, similar to automotive tariffs Trump has already issued. When asked if the new tariffs will include products like iPhones, many of which are built in China, Lutnick said that’s “correct” and that the goal is to “encourage them to reshore, to be built in America.” ”It’s not like you can open a factory tomorrow to build iPhones,” Karl said, before asking if these coming tariffs will mean higher prices for goods in the US. Lutnick responded: I don’t necessarily think so. I think the idea is that we can manufacture here in America. As I said, there’s a — I saw Panasonic, the battery company. Right? A Japanese company. They built an amazing factory in Kansas, which they’re opening now. They were putting it in the ground when Donald Trump was President, just finishing now.Lutnick may be referring to an EV plant Panasonic announced it had broken ground on in November 2022. Panasonic reportedly stands to gain billions in incentives for the plant under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has threatened to “rescind all unspent funds” from.

One night in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her day with a prayer. May our partners have good health. May they be ambitious, and successful, and may their businesses grow. The next morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, and the people they worked with awoke to what seemed like a miracle: Shopify orders. So many Shopify orders. They got to work. It felt like everything was falling into place: The company they had built from scratch was exporting felted slippers and artisan products to wholesale partners around the globe. And with help from USAID’s green business initiative in Central Asia, they were expanding their production abilities — and finally building their own modern, direct-to-consumer web store: one with the payment processing and data security infrastructure to help them reach customers directly. But just as their new ecommerce infrastructure was coming together, the USAID funding vanished around the world — leaving them with a $35,000 funding gap. In so many places, the internet makes building a retail business easy — but in the world’s most land-locked country, with a banking system bogged down by sanctions against o …Read the full story at The Verge.

The latest Mario Kart title has officially been revealed by Nintendo, and it is called Mario Kart World. Not only is the game bigger, but so is the number of racetracks, and the number of characters. One look at the trailer, and it is easy to get overwhelmed by the number of racers in the game. Everyone seems to be joining the party this time, from the classic Mario to a penguin. Are you prepared to get passed by a Pokey or lapped by a dolphin? Here are the most obscure characters I saw in the Mario Kart World trailer shown during the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct.

I'm usually the first one to advise people to maximize FPS per dollar and build a balanced gaming PC. While that means buying only those components that directly affect the performance of your PC, I'm also someone who appreciates esthetics and convenience in PC building. You might not need an expensive motherboard, but it comes with definite benefits that extend beyond performance. Spending on a good-looking case or graphics card isn't mandatory, but it sure feels great.

Raspberry Pis and Home Assistant are a match made in heaven. The former is great at sensing the world around it and collecting data, and the latter is amazing at taking in data, making decisions, and outputting information to better control a smart home. Put them together, and you have a tag team system that keeps an eye out for stimuli and decides what to do next with that information.

Like every other gamer in the world, I fell in love with gaming because of the stories it told, the worlds it let me escape into, the characters it made me love and hate, and the sheer magic of being at the center of it all. However, when it comes to games, it’s never just the main plot lines and central narratives that do the heavy lifting. It’s often the side quests that breathe life into the world, giving it texture, depth, and a human heartbeat.

By the time Apple releases M5-powered iPads, using iPadOS may feel closer to working on a Mac, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. It won’t be macOS running on a tablet, but he writes that the changes will be significant enough to make people who want such a thing happy.Updates to iPadOS coming this year will be focused “on productivity, multitasking and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac,” according to Gurman. He says these changes are due “about a year” after the release of the M4 iPad Pro, a fantastic tablet with far more power than its software demands. Gurman’s report doesn’t give any indication of what Apple’s updated multitasking will look like, and it’s best to reserve any excitement until we see more. Back in 2022, Apple added Stage Manager to iPadOS 16, a feature that enables windowing and also groups app windows together in a dock-like collection on the side of the display. It might have seemed like an exciting change if you wanted to be able to ditch your MacBook, but what shipped felt too half-hearted to be a useful step in the direction of a proper desktop operating …Read the full story at The Verge.

From a private cloud, 3D printer management hub, and other practical projects to borderline unhinged creations like a bare-metal Windows 11 installation and a (barebones) Steam gaming machine, there’s no shortage of ideas you can bring to life with your Raspberry Pi. But if you want to enhance your quality of life, you’ll have an absolute blast putting automation projects together with your Raspberry Pi. So, here’s a byte-sized list of ways you can turn your Raspberry Pi SBC into an automation behemoth.