Image: NASA US astronaut Barry Wilmore called NASA ground crew on Saturday, asking for help with a repetitive knocking sound that was coming from the Boeing Starliner craft. The interaction was captured by a NASA Space Flight forum member, who included a recording of it in a post that was spotted by Ars Technica.In the recording, Wilmore asks NASA crew in Houston to configure their call so that he could show them the noise, which he says is coming from the speaker inside Starliner. Then, a repetitive clanging sound with slight there’s-something-on-the-wing vibes can be heard. The Earthside crew member describes it as sounding “almost like a sonar ping.”Starliner crew reports hearing strange "sonar like noises" emanating from their craft. This is... Continue reading…

Whether you have a great gaming PC, one of the best laptops, or even a mini PC, Windows will somehow still find a way to give you unexpected errors. There are many ways to fix these random issues, but DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management) commands are something most people aren't familiar with. System admins regularly use DISM to configure, tweak, and repair system images.

Shopping for storage can be a strange endeavor. In many cases, items with the same capacity and the same connector (with the same theoretical speed limitations) can cost wildly different prices. Demystifying this can be a process in itself, and comparing SSD features while shopping for one can be just as difficult.

Amazon’s highest-end streaming stick, which can display both artwork and widgets when idle, is down to $39.99 at multiple retailers. | Image: Amazon It’s always sad when summer comes to a close. However, on the bright side, Labor Day represents yet another long weekend — not to mention an opportunity to save on a slew of goods before the holiday shopping season kicks off in earnest. Although Labor Day isn’t until tomorrow, September 2nd, many retailers are already offering steep discounts on a range of tech, some of which rival the Prime Day deals we saw in July.Right now, for instance, Apple’s last-gen iPad is on sale for less than $200. Other Verge-approved items have also fallen to an all-time low (or close to it), including Sonos’ Era 100 speaker, Amazon’s latest Echo Spot, and the entry-level Kindle. Granted, we’ve seen many of these products go for slightly less in the past —... Continue reading…

We generate more data every day than at any other time in history, and most of it is stored on hard drives (HDDs) or SSDs for future use. While most of the time that data is safely stored, there are multiple scenarios where even the best NAS drives can fail, not to mention accidental deletion by users. When that happens, there are various ways to recover or restore the missing data, with varying levels of success. It's important to know that professional data recovery is also expensive. If the software-based methods fail, the costs go up substantially, as hardware repair or reconstruction is a tricky task.

The fediverse has the potential to help create enduring and interoperable social networks. But many creators and businesses rely on bigger, closed platforms because they offer direct ways to make money from their audiences, which is hard to do in the fediverse right now.Sub.club is trying to solve that. The idea is that this will let users on ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon easily offer paid subscriptions and premium content while taking a 6 percent cut in addition to payment processing fees. It could solve a big problem with the fediverse right now: it’s not easy to make a living on it unless you direct your followers back to existing platforms like Patreon that are closed off and require users to visit a particular site or... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo Sure, it’s not straight-up horror as the early teasers suggested, but even still, Emio — The Smiling Man is among the darkest games Nintendo has ever made. It’s a murder mystery that doesn’t skimp on the murder and throws in an unsettling urban legend for good measure. More than that, though, it’s just a really great mystery on a platform that has steadily become an ideal home for them.Emio is actually the continuation of a decades-old franchise from Nintendo called Famicom Detective Club. Created by Metroid designer Yoshio Sakamoto, the games originally never launched outside of Japan, until a pair of surprise remakes hit the Switch in 2021. Emio is the first entirely new entry in the franchise since the late ’80s — but even still, not... Continue reading…

As its name implies, PoE allows you to send both power and data to your devices over a single Ethernet cable. On paper, it may sound like a niche feature, as most servers, PCs, laptops, and NAS cant be powered via an Ethernet cable. But if your computing environment consists of smart gadgets, Power over Ethernet can go from somewhat useful to an absolute game-changer and here are four reasons why you should outfit your home lab with PoE technology.

The next version of the Mac Mini may be so much smaller than this. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s next Mac Mini won’t have USB-A ports, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in today’s Power On newsletter that the new desktops will start to hit Apple’s warehouses in September. The higher-end variant with an Apple M4 Pro chip will ship in October, he writes.The version with an M4 Pro will still cram a lot of ports, including five USB-C ports (two in the front and three in the back), an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack, according to Gurman’s sources. And the new Mac Mini will apparently have an internal power supply. That’s not too shabby for a computer that’s expected to be about the size of an Apple TV.Is it time to say goodbye to USB-A? Maybe. Probably. But no matter how you feel about that,... Continue reading…

Google Pixel phones have always had excellent software, but the elephant in the room was that Google hardware has been below par for the majority of its life cycle. In fact, I'd go as far as saying Google only finally got the hardware right last year with the Pixel 8 phones. Before that, there was always a glaring, significant hardware flaw of some kind, from the second Pixel's display problems to the third Pixel's hideous notch to the Pixel 6's dim display and Pixel 7's bad thermals. And even last year, the Pixel 8 hardware was nowhere near the best, it just wasn't bad.

Obsidian and Notion are two of the top note-taking and knowledge management software solutions. Thanks to their unique approach to productivity and flexibility, both platforms have gained a devoted following. While Obsidian is laser-focused on delivering a personal and interconnected knowledge base, Notion takes a different route with powerful and customizable collaborative workspaces.

With its straightforward user interface and powerful features, Proxmox is an amazing hypervisor for newcomers as well as home lab veterans. But the difficulty gets raised a ton once you start looking into the more advanced aspects of the virtualization platform.