Managing email is a chore, and it seems to get worse all the time. I'm not sure why anyone would want to self-host their own email server, and have the pain of managing inbox rules and spam prevention. I much prefer outsourcing that pain to companies that are more than willing to adjust my inbox for me so that I can read the emails that are relevant, and remember to unsubscribe from those I never read. Along with trying different email clients, there are tons of good email extensions you can add to your Gmail account, so you can gain new features in the interface you already use.

My Arms Are Longer Now.The Game Developers Conference, an annual gathering that brings thousands of game developers to San Francisco, has just wrapped up. While most of the event is about networking and interesting talks about game design and technology, there were also a bunch of unreleased indie games that we got to check out. Yes, much of video games in 2025 will probably be defined by the Nintendo Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI. But based on the games we played, there might be some really fun smaller titles that could be huge hits this year, too.Here are a few of our favorites that we’re looking forward to.Dreams of AnotherDreams of Another is a shooter, but you use your gun to create the world around you instead of destroying it. The game’s graphics have a dreamy, deconstructed quality to them, and when you shoot things, the colorful, unfocused scenes you see will solidify into things like buildings and people. Unexpectedly, my brief demo ended with a more traditional shootout against a sentient manhole cover. (I even lobbed a couple grenades to try and destroy it.) But I’m intrigued by the overall concept, and I look forward to seeing what developer Q-Games does with it in the fi …Read the full story at The Verge.

The cool thing about Raspberry Pis is that they're really quite small—about the size of a credit card. This means you can squeeze them into all kinds of teeny-tiny cases that make them a solid choice for portable projects. And while the same can be said for any SBC, we've seen a lot more projects use the humble Pi as its base.

Over the course of the past seven years now, the Epic Games Store has been giving out freebies every week to its customers. Whether you downloaded the Epic Games Store just to be able to play Fortnite or for the Unreal Engine, it’s almost impossible to miss out on the free games that Epic gives out every week now. However, there was a time when Epic did give out freebies, but most of us either didn’t know about them or simply hadn’t even installed the launcher, thus missing out on some fantastic games.

Adobe Premiere Pro might be the gold standard for professional-level video editing, but if we're being honest, it's expensive and demanding on your hardware. When I started looking for alternatives, Kdenlive quickly stood out. It's completely free, open-source, and powerful, making it one of the best Premiere Pro alternatives out there.

Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects “inappropriate bot behavior,” the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path of links to AI-generated decoy pages that “slow down, confuse, and waste the resources” of those acting in bad faith.Websites have long used the honor system approach of robots.txt, a text file that gives or denies permission to scrapers, but which AI companies, even well-known ones like Anthropic and Perplexity AI, have been accused of ignoring. Cloudflare writes that it sees over 50 billion web crawler requests per day, and although it has tools for spotting and blocking the malicious ones, this often prompts attackers to switch tactics in “a never-ending arms race.” Cloudflare says rather than block bots, AI Labyrinth fights back by making them process data that has nothing to do with a given website’s actual data. The company says it also functions as “a next-generation honeypot,” drawing in AI crawlers that keep following links to fake pages deeper, whereas a regular human being wouldn’t. It says this makes it easier to fingerprint malicious bots for Cloudflare’s list of bad actors as well as identify “new bot patterns and signatures” it wouldn’t have detected otherwise. According to the post, these links shouldn’t be visible to human visitors.You can read more about how AI Labyrinth works on Cloudflare’s blog, but here’s a bit more detail from the post: We found that generating a diverse set of topics first, then creating content for each topic, produced more varied and convincing results. It is important to us that we don’t generate inaccurate content that contributes to the spread of misinformation on the Internet, so the content we generate is real and related to scientific facts, just not relevant or proprietary to the site being crawled.Website administrators can opt into using AI Labyrinth by navigating to the Bot Management section of their site’s Cloudflare dashboard’s settings and toggling it on. The company says that this “is only the first iteration of using generative AI to thwart bots.” It plans to create “whole networks of linked URLs” that bots that end up in will have a hard time clocking as fake. As Ars Technica notes, AI Labyrinth sounds similar to Nepenthes, a tool that’s designed to sideline crawlers for “months” in a hell of AI-generated junk data.

Infinity Nikki and Assassin’s Creed Shadows have become my twin obsessions for their meticulously detailed environments, textures, and weather. With open-world dress-up game Infinity Nikki, I continue to be agog at how clothing textures are rendered with such detail and fidelity that by mere sight, I know exactly what a piece of fabric will feel like. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, an action-packed romp through feudal Japan, I’m constantly in a state of awe at the natural beauty of the Japanese countryside, a feature that has been widely celebrated since its release. Both games are so visually arresting they made me fall in love with a video game staple that I’ve never really cared about before: photo mode.Photo mode, which typically pauses the game to give players the ability to take professional grade images of their video games, is a modern gaming feature that’s been around long enough to become a standard inclusion, especially in AAA games. But I’ve never seen their appeal. It’s a video game, not some fleeting life moment. I’m not gonna fondly flip through my PS5 media gallery in five years going, “Aww look at the time Yasuke chopped the arms and head off th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft Excel is the backbone of a lot of corporations. It's the most common software used for calculations, finances, projections, project management, and data analysis. If you're responsible for any of these tasks, it's vital to be vigilant at all times and ensure there are no errors in your spreadsheet. After all, dealing with numbers can mean there are millions of dollars on the line, so you want to make sure all your calculations are absolutely perfect. No matter how alert you are, though, there may be times when you don't realize you've made a mistake. Such errors can turn out to be costly when overlooked.

For years, Photoshop felt like an unavoidable expense for anyone serious about photo editing or graphics design. I explored countless alternatives, from watered-down apps to pricey subscription services, each promising to be ‘the one.’ However, none of them came close to my preferences and met my design workflow. After dozens of trials, frustrations, and disappointments later, I stumbled upon Photopea.

Terraform and Ansible may be the most popular automation tools in the home lab landscape, but they are far from the only options for server enthusiasts and self-hosting maestros. While it’s typically associated with professional workflow automations, n8n pairs just as well with casual home servers. If that sounds intriguing, here are four cool ways you can integrate n8n into your home lab.

SwitchBot will integrate more than 45 of its products with Home Assistant during the first half of this year, the company said in an email to The Verge. That expansion includes The SwitchBot Hub 3 that was first revealed in a filing with the Connectivity Standards Alliance last week.Many of these integrations are coming in April, according to a list on SwitchBot’s website that includes the Robot Vacuum K10 Plus Pro, Curtain 3 smart shades, and its garage door opener. They will join other SwitchBot devices that have Home Assistant integration, like the SwitchBot Lock Pro. Given its varied and ever-growing collection of smart home products, SwitchBot‘s commitment to integrate so many devices is great news for users of the open-source Home Assistant platform. The community-created integrations that let devices from the biggest smart home players work with Home Assistant can be fragile as companies make undocumented software adjustments or actively fight to keep those integrations from working at all.

In my daily workflow, I'll use both macOS on my MacBook Air, and Windows 11 on my desktop PC. I'm someone who doesn't prefer one over the other; both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I can pretty easily navigate potential annoyances without much trouble.