For all the things it does right, Windows 11 also has a pesky habit of making decisions for you that you don't necessarily remember agreeing to. Some are harmless enough, while others quietly change how your PC behaves in the background. Somewhere in the middle of these two areas falls Delivery Optimization. Microsoft designed it to make Windows updates faster and more efficient by allowing your PC to get update files from other computers instead of relying entirely on Microsoft's servers.

A little over five years ago, I bought a SATA SSD that, for one reason or the other, spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time doing absolutely nothing. It was unboxed and sitting in a drawer for years. Eventually, I found it again, wired it into my PC, and gave it a purpose, which I should've done long ago.

Does your power bank have "CryoPulse technology" or a "Cyber Window"? If you disappointingly answered "no" to both, you might want to consider upgrading to Ugreen's new MagFlow Pro Magnetic Power Bank. It's available starting today for $149.99, which puts it on the really expensive end of power banks with only a 10,000mAh battery, but those fancy-sounding features are part of what Ugreen is claiming to be the world's first liquid-cooling system on a power bank with wireless charging.Inside the MagFlow Pro is a micro-pump that's used to circulate coolant and draw heat away from components including the power bank's Qi2.2-compatible wireless …Read the full story at The Verge.

UGREEN is moving well beyond chargers, docks, and network-attached storage. At its Smart Living Launch Event at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which I attended on Sept. 1, the company introduced HomeAgent, a new smart home platform built around local storage and AI processing. This marks UGREEN’s first serious foray into AIoT, and the scope is broader than I expected. The lineup ranges from compact HomeAgent hubs to security cameras, a smart speaker, smart displays, and a much more powerful Nvidia Jetson-based system.

Consumer hardware is getting more expensive by the day due to rising AI demand and the enormous amount of compute it requires. Resources such as RAM are becoming increasingly scarce for consumers, so we have to make the most of the hardware we already have.

Strahd returned earlier this year in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. | Image: Wizards of the Coast A Ravenloft series is currently in development from executive producer Alfonso Cuarón, writer and executive producer John August, and Hasbro Entertainment, Deadline reports. It could bring to life one of Dungeons & Dragons' most iconic campaign settings, which got an update earlier this year with Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. Netflix's Ravenloft series will reportedly center on the infamous Strahd, according to Deadline: At its heart, the series follows the making of the vampire Darklord Strahd von Zarovich, whose story of power, love, obsession, and undead transformation charts his origins from tragic antihero to one of Dungeons & Dra …Read the full story at The Verge.

INGLEWOOD, CA - JULY 19: A view of Halo Board inside the Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers new arena, during a press preview on July 19, 2024 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Jevone Moore/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) | Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Last September, Steve Ballmer insisted in an ESPN interview that the Clippers weren't involved in a shady-looking $28 million endorsement deal for his star player, Kawhi Leonard, that involved no actual endorsing. Now, the former Microsoft CEO has been suspended by the NBA for a year, while the league says his team will forfeit five future draft picks and pay a $30 million fine, among other penalties. A year later, an NBA-commissioned 35-page report by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is basically calling him a liar, saying those claims were "inaccurate (at best) with respect to Mr. Ballmer" and "clearly false" when it came to Clippers presi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Today has been a wild day for AI news. Earlier today, we saw Nvidia announce that it's acquiring Hugging Face for a cool $12.93 billion, promising to keep the open-source nature of the platform alive. Now, OpenAI has revealed GPT-6 Astra, the model the company hopes will deliver AGI to everyone

Let's face it, my home network has been embarrassing for a while. There's a Synology DS1621xs+ in the rack with a 10 GbE port that came out of the box, and until last month it had spent its entire life plugged into a switch that topped out at 2.5 GbE, which is its own kind of bottleneck nobody warns you about when you upgrade a NAS to 10 Gigabit. My desktop wasn't any better: the MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi has a 5 GbE port onboard that has never once negotiated 5 GbE, because nothing else in the house speaks it. I'd built a lab full of multi-gig hardware and connected it with what amounts to a slightly faster Gigabit.

The Verbatim Store 'n' Stay Nano USB Flash Drive is a compact storage solution that's perfect for travel. It comes in a variety of sizes, but the 32GB model is on sale from Amazon right now. For a limited time, you can save 33% off the usual retail price of $17, with the price falling to just $11.

Building a simple webpage with AI isn’t hard anymore, but making it look polished and intentional is a different story. It’s easy for a model to generate working code; it’s much harder for it to balance margins, pick the right contrast, and keep every visual element aligned.

While some people use AI to write entire documents or completely replace their work, this opens you up to problems like hallucinations and generic output. The real value of AI tools lies in using them as collaborative partners that can help you identify blind spots and speed up repetitive processes.