I have been using Plex on my Nvidia Shield TV Pro as a media server for a while now, but as my media collection has grown, I've considered getting a NAS to help with content flow. However, each time I think about it, I realize that with a bit of extra drive and a cheap powered hub, I can get by without the added expense.

GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said in a letter to customers that making cameras is still his company's "core DNA," after a proposed $285 million acquisition by Starman was announced earlier this week. He claims the merger puts GoPro in a better position to continue developing its content creation tech, after saying in the deal announcement that it would work with Starman to address "important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure." YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach, who prior to the acquisition became GoPro's largest individual shareholder, is not mentioned at all.To our GoPro community, fans and custom …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors.As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot chat logs to an expert hired by news publishers. The logs, it claims, were specifically chosen "because they hit on keywords implicating use of News Plaintiffs' websites, and therefore the most likely to contain News Plaintiffs' works." It says the resulting analysis shows that 59,545 …Read the full story at The Verge.

Trump’s racist new “Build the Wall” game. | Image: The White House The PR masterminds at the White House just released a series of vaguely policy-themed "arcade" games, some of which are racist - and modeled on real games whose copyright holders may not be too happy to be associated with the MAGA agenda. The Tetris Company has already responded to "Build the Wall," which is obviously modeled on the famous puzzle game. In the Trump administration's game, the player has to stack interlocking shapes to stop a "zombie border siege" along the southern border. Aliens - the administration's preferred term for noncitizens, and the subject of previous grotesque attempts at humor - run across the screen, trying to …Read the full story at The Verge.

ESP32 is a cheap and tiny microcontroller, but it can do things most people wouldn't expect. It's highly versatile and has onboard Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, making it well-suited to various smart home and networking projects. Besides, you can choose from many different ESP32 boards, depending on the complexity of your project.

It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from scratch and ask it to generate any combination of melody, chord progression, bassline, or drums. Or you can feed it a reference track and have it build off the melodic ideas from that.Unlike Suno or Udio, Melody Flip doesn't spit out fully polished songs with vocals and full arrangements. Instead, it offers …Read the full story at The Verge.

One half of making a laptop is giving it the most powerful portable hardware on the market; the other half is squeezing all of that into an extremely thin shell. Fortunately, HP seems to have struck the right balance, as it has just announced the world's thinnest RTX Spark laptops. These allow people to tap into on-board AI without sacrificing portability.

When you set up a new NAS system, you might notice it constantly humming and drawing a lot of wattage, so you switch it to standby mode after 15 to 30 minutes of inactivity. This might feel like an energy-conscious decision, and you might notice your room get quieter, temperatures falling, and your annual electric bill dropping by up to $40.

OpenAI announced its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, and also, by the way, that "the AGI era" is here now.Today on The Vergecast, we've got an all-star panel to break down the news of the week.First, senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins us to talk about our supposed AGI era and Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face. Then, our friend Joanna Stern pops in to talk about new Apple CEO John Ternus, old Apple CEO Tim Cook, and most importantly, to speculate on the format of next week's Apple keynote.Watch | Listen | Get ad-freeWe wrap things up with a super-special lightning round from the IFA electronics show in Berlin. Senior reviewer J …Read the full story at The Verge.

AMD's proprietary 3D V-cache is perhaps one of the most important CPU innovations of recent times, and anyone who has been remotely interested in processors knows that already. It's one of AMD's biggest tangible advantages in gaming over competitors right now, and it has been for a while, especially with Team Red steadily refining the formula with every generation.

Most homelab guides hand you a 20+ container checklist to start with. The initial setup is usually the easy part; configuring and maintaining it is the real task that comes later. And most beginners get frustrated and drop the whole idea.

When setting up a smart doorbell, you might easily be hooked into monthly subscriptions that total over $100 a year, whether that's Nest Aware or Ring Protect. Even then, you just get generic "person was detected" notifications, sometimes even 10 seconds after they've already walked away.