Retro gaming is having a huge revival right now, with hardware emulating classic consoles so you can use original cartridges, to emulators to create retro PCs, and Atari releasing a modern version of the 7800 from the mid-80s for you to use any old cartridges you still have in the attic. It's a fantastic time to be a classic gaming fan, but what about the operating systems that we used to use?

Welcome to The Drive, a new weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! I'll also highlight anything noteworthy from XDA reviews published in the week.

Hey, PC enthusiasts, have you ever considered using 3D printing to customize your PC? It’s not just for modding your gaming rig; it can also help with maintenance and upgrades. 3D printing lets you create custom parts and accessories on the fly, experiment with new case designs, and even customize your whole system to suit your unique needs.

There are quite a few ways your typical home NAS differs from its enterprise counterpart, most of which have to do with how the NAS holds, processes, and distributes data. Unlike home users, businesses face far more advanced and taxing needs — managing multiple users, applications, and environments. To handle all this complexity, it is crucial for businesses to leverage all the tools at their disposal to maximize the potential of their NAS while ensuring quick accessibility, data safety, and readiness for any data crisis.

When first introduced to the market, external graphics cards or eGPUs were hailed as the savior of gaming on the go, able to increase the graphical power of the best laptops by offloading the processing to the eGPU. While this was a fantastic idea in theory, the practical applications and slower connectivity standards of the time conspired to make them lackluster at best, and the market went stagnant. Most of the eGPU enclosures available now were released years ago, and the manufacturers haven't really been in a rush to release updated versions.

Image: ByteDance TikTok has returned — at least partially — in the US following a nationwide ban, but other popular ByteDance-owned apps, such as the digital card game Marvel Snap, video editing app CapCut, and the social platform Lemon8, are still blocked. None of these apps, including TikTok, are currently available to download on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, either.Though many users expected CapCut and Lemon8 to be affected by the law banning TikTok, Marvel Snap’s ban took some by surprise — including its own developer. On Sunday morning, the game studio Second Dinner said in a post on X, “This outage is a surprise to us and wasn’t planned. MARVEL SNAP isn’t going anywhere.” Marvel Snap is published by Nuverse, a game developer owned by ByteDance. Screenshot: The Verge Users trying to open Marvel Snap, CapCut, and Lemon8 will see a message similar to the one TikTok displayed when it went dark on Saturday night. “A law banning CapCut has been enacted in the U.S,” the pop-up inside CapCut reads. “Unfortunately, that means you can’t use CapCut for now. Rest assured, we’re working to restore our service in the U.S. Please stay tuned!”TikTok, along with several other ByteDance-owned apps, shut down in the US just hours before the federal divest-or-ban law went into effect on January 19th. The ban also affects TikTok Studio, TikTok Shop Seller Center, Hypic, Lark - Team Collaboration, Lark - Rooms Display, Lark Rooms Controller, and Gauth: AI Study Companion.Both Google and Apple display notices to users trying to search for ByteDance-owned apps. While the Play Store says, “Downloads for this app are paused due to current US legal requirements,” a banner on the App Store notes, “TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available in the country or region you’re in.” It’s still not clear when Marvel Snap, CapCut, or Lemon8 will start working again or when they’ll reappear in mobile app stores.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images At a victory rally the day before being sworn into the presidency, Donald Trump extolled his plan to “save TikTok” from the law that banned it through a joint venture with the US. On its face, the plan does not appear to comply with the law’s requirements for a qualified divestiture that TikTok’s service providers like Apple, Google, and Oracle could rely on to avoid hundreds of billions in potential fines. Even so, at least some of TikTok’s service providers seem to be relying on Trump’s flimsy promises, allowing TikTok to restore service to the app mid-day Sunday, on the first day of its ban.Trump is proposing a joint venture where the US government owns 50 percent of TikTok. That raises a host of its own First Amendment issues since any content moderation whatsoever might be considered a government act, and the Constitution prohibits the government (not private companies) from infringing on speech. It’s not entirely clear how Trump envisions this all playing out, but Trump says, essentially, that TikTok would have a “partner” in the US government, “and they’ll have a lot of bidders and the United States will do what we call a joint venture.” Trump claims there is “no risk” to the US because “we’re not putting up any money. All we’re doing is giving them the approval without which they don’t have anything. So, I don’t know, it sounds like that works.”Trump also reinforced the idea that the whole reason he likes TikTok is because he thinks it helped his campaign. He credited his 21-year-old staffer, nicknamed “TikTok Jack,” for helping him get on the app that helped him win over young voters.And though the stated purpose of forcing TikTok to divest from its parent company ByteDance (a move Trump himself first tried to do in his first term) was to remove a possible backdoor for the Chinese government to US data, he now says that “frankly, we have no choice, we have to save it — a lot of jobs. We don’t wanna give our business to China.”Here’s Trump’s full comments on TikTok during the rally:And as of today, TikTok is back. So, you know, I did a little TikTok thing we have a guy, TikTok Jack he’s a young kid, like 21 years old. And we hired this guy, and I went on TikTok; can you believe what I’ll do to win an election?And we went on TikTok and Republicans have never won the young vote, the youth vote. They win a lot of votes, but they never won the youth vote. We won the youth vote by 36 points. So I like TikTok. I like it. I had a slightly good experience wouldn’t you say?Romney lost it by 40 points not so long ago. We won it by 36 points. That’s a very big spread.But I said, we need to save TikTok, because we’re talking about a tremendous — who, who in this audience goes with TikTok? Many? Yeah, very popular. And frankly, we have no choice, we have to save it — a lot of jobs. We don’t wanna give our business to China, we don’t wanna give our business to other people. And I said, you know, TikTok without my approval — meaning the president’s approval because Congress gave the president the right to make a deal to whatever he wants and uh… they did that a long time ago when they have a different president. They didn’t know that I was gonna be at the president, I guess.So I said very simply, a joint venture. So, if TikTok is worth nothing, zero without an approval, you know you don’t approve, they’re out of business, they’re worth nothing.If you do approve, they’re worth like a trillion dollars, they’re worth some crazy number. So I said, I’ll approve, but let the United States of America own 50% of TikTok.I’m approving on behalf of the United States.So they’ll have a partner, the United States, and they’ll have a lot of bidders and the United States will do what we call a joint venture. And there’s no risk, we’re not putting up any money. All we’re doing is giving them the approval without which they don’t have anything. So, I don’t know, it sounds like that works. What do you think, good? So, whether you like TikTok or not, we’re gonna make a lot of money.

The Find N5 is about half as thick as an iPhone 16 Pro Max when opened up. | Image: Oppo Oppo’s upcoming Find N5 foldable phone is barely thicker than its own USB-C port when unfurled, according to photos released by the company. The flagship, which we’re expecting to be re-branded as the OnePlus Open 2 for its US release, will also feature best-in-class resistance to water.Oppo has been steadily teasing the Find N5 on Chinese social network Weibo for the past week. Find series product manager Zhou Yibao has now shared photos that highlight its size, adding that the obstacle to making it any thinner is now “the limit of the charging port.”The photos follow a video from last week, in which Zhou compares a hidden Find N5 to a series of everyday objects, demonstrating that it’s comparable in thickness to two Chinese yuan coins, a stack of four ID cards, or exactly 39 sticky notes.The company claims the Find N5 is the thinnest foldable yet. That title is currently held by the Honor Magic V3, which is 4.35mm thick when open, meaning the Find N5 must be close to 4mm. That explains why it looks about half the size of the 8.25mm iPhone 16 Pro Max it’s shown next to in the photos. For reference, a USB-C port is 2.6mm at minimum.In a separate post, Zhou teased the phone’s waterproofing, boasting that it’s IPX9-rated. That means it currently has no official dust protection (the ‘X’), but has been tested to withstand high-temperature and high-pressure jets of water. It’s also rated IPX8 for submersion in water, and IPX6 for lower temperature water jets. This month’s OnePlus 13 is IP69-rated, with dust protection as well.Oppo’s previous foldable, the Find N3 (the N4 was skipped because of the number’s association with death in China), eventually launched in the West as the OnePlus Open. If the same happens again, it should pose some serious competition for Samsung and Google’s current generation of foldables. We’ll find out more when the Find N5 launches in China next month.

If you are anything like me, you have probably tried countless project management tools, each promising to be the ultimate solution. However, each program felt like a compromise in one way or the other. Then, I discovered the power of Notion wikis. Notion, the versatile note-taking app, can be so much more than just a place for taking notes and creating to-do lists. Thanks to its flexible databases and intuitive interface, it has quickly become my go-to for centralizing project information.

Crowning a single year as the GOAT for anything whatsoever is a controversial exercise; you're bound to anger someone or another. Doing it for video games is especially hard, because there have simply been too many great years that either propelled the industry forward or delivered a lifetime's worth of gaming memories.

Bit by Bit is a weekly column focusing on technical advances each and every week across multiple spaces. My name is Adam Conway, and I've been covering tech and following the cutting-edge for a decade. If there's something you're interested in and would like to see covered, you can reach out to me at [email protected].

If you have been a long-time Windows user, you are likely familiar with using the Command Prompt for your command-line interface (CLI) work. However, the utility you should be using is PowerShell. It is a far more powerful command line tool for Windows and beyond.