Image: Roku Roku is the latest company to lean into the trend of throwing artwork onto your TV screen, offering viewers some serene relaxation time when they’re not actively watching something. Today the company announced a new feature / app called Backdrops, and it all sounds very familiar.Rolling out first to Roku-branded TVs and third-party Roku TV sets (and then to Roku streaming devices “later in the fall”), Backdrops features “a catalog that includes famous classics, wide-ranging museum collections, abstract designs, and more.”Here’s more on what to expect:Viewers can also learn more about the artwork, including artist name, year it was created, and a brief description for each image, even cycle in photos from their personal collection to... Continue reading…

Image: Volvo Volvo is pushing back its deadline to sell only electric vehicles, now saying it will rely on a mix of hybrids and battery electric vehicles. The company says it will achieve “net zero greenhouse gas emissions” by 2040.Three years ago, the Swedish automaker made a commitment to only sell EVs by 2030. Since then, EV sales have exploded, but a recent slowdown in growth is leading many manufacturers to reconsider their pledges. Volvo blamed the readjustment on a number of factors, including “slower than expected rollout of charging infrastructure, withdrawal of government incentives in some markets and additional uncertainties created by recent tariffs on EVs in various markets.”Volvo is now among them, arguing that it will be a... Continue reading…

Ignore my cruddy handwriting to marvel at this beautiful color. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales A front light and color display are just two of the ways this pretty note taking device puts luxury first. Continue reading…

macOS is full of great native utilities, like the built-in Screenshot app, but third-party software can often provide a better experience than what you'll get with Apple's default apps. I'm constantly searching for new must-have macOS apps to improve my daily workflow on the best Macs, and I recently decided to give CleanShot X a try. At its core, CleanShot X is a paid screenshot utility that offers a more robust feature set than what macOS' Screenshot can provide.

In addition to data organization, basic spreadsheet layouts, and performing calculations, Microsoft Excel can serve as a robust tool for making engaging, interactive dashboards. After all, static spreadsheets with endless rows of numbers can be overwhelming at times, and may fail to display and communicate key insights. Here is where interactive dashboards come in to offer you a dynamic way to explore data, spot trends, and make informed decisions.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”The decision is another blow to the nonprofit in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case. In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — sued the Internet Archive over claims its digital library constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”The Internet Archive has long offered a system called the Open Library, where... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Safety regulators are urging the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to investigate the ultracheap e-commerce platforms Shein and Temu. In a statement published Tuesday, two CPSC commissioners say Shein and Temu “raise specific concerns,” including reports that “deadly baby and toddler products are easy to find on these platforms.”The statement cites last month’s report from The Information, which highlights some of the dangerous products sold on both sites. That includes padded crib bumpers on Temu that have been banned in the US, as well as children’s drawstring hoodies on Shein that the CPSC considers a strangulation hazard.CPSC commissioners Peter Feldman and Douglas Dziak say the safety agency should evaluate how Shein,... Continue reading…

Image: Asus Asus is launching its latest NUC mini PC today, complete with Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 2 processors. For some reason, Asus has decided to put a dedicated Copilot button on the front of this puck-shaped PC, so you can reach out and launch Microsoft’s AI assistant.I’m not entirely sure why you’d want an AI button on a miniature PC that’s probably going to sit more than an arm’s length away from you on a desk, but it’s a button that has now progressed beyond Microsoft’s effort to push it on keyboards. Asus also has a fingerprint reader on top of this NUC for Windows Hello authentication, which makes more sense so you can touch the fingerprint reader when you initially power on this mini PC. Image: Asus The full... Continue reading…

Obsbot has been making some of my favorite webcams ever over the past couple of years, and while I love the advanced tracking they provide, not every webcam needs a gimbal to follow you around. The Obsbot Meet 2 is a much simpler webcam, and one that you can easily take with you anywhere, or use with a laptop.

Sometimes, when deleting a file on Windows, you get a pop-up window with the "File in Use" error message. This indicates that the file that you are trying to eradicate is being used by a program or process on your Windows device that has locked it, preventing it from being deleted, renamed, or moved. It could be a visible app like a media player, photo viewing app, MS Word, or Excel, or it could be a hidden process that is active in the background, like Windows Update.

Apple’s iPhone 16 event invitation. | Image: Apple Apple is getting ready to announce the iPhone 16, which will surely be its most powerful and best-camera-having phone yet (at least for the Pro models). It’s also expected to be the first iPhone to launch with Apple Intelligence across the board.In addition to the iPhone 16 lineup and a slate of new watches and AirPods, Apple is expected to show more AI features, like the ability to understand what’s onscreen, along with features it introduced at WWDC in June, which include an upgraded Siri, image generation, AI rewrite, and call recording and transcription abilities.The word “glowtime” is likely a reference to the glow effect that appears around the edges of the screen when Siri is activated in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.... Continue reading…

Between the proliferation of SSDs and the drawn-out death of HDDs, there was a weird cross-over of the two that briefly took hold of the enthusiast community: SSHDs. Solid State Hybrid Drives were a type of storage device that combined an HDD with an SSD, with the expectation that it would be a viable compromise between the two technologies given the cost of SSDs. However, SSHDs are really nowhere to be seen these days, and there are a few reasons why.