Building out the home lab has been a lot of fun. Going from a single prebuilt network-attached storage (NAS) device to used enterprise gear and a server cabinet, I learned a lot about how best to configure a smart home and what I actually needed in the home office. Turns out, less can be more, which is why I replaced those enterprise beasts with a single AMD Threadripper server. This thing absolutely flew with 64 cores, but the 150W idle power draw was simply ridiculous. That's when I looked at mini PCs, but instead of settling for these small devices, I ended up with a few compact PCs.

Ask Americans how they feel about AI and most say they have concerns. Communities have mounted resistance to data center projects, stalling them across the US. On social media, anger at AI companies and executives is unrestrained - sometimes to the point of condoning violence.But look at the issues that most campaigns are focused on, and AI is far less prevalent, experts say.More than 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats polled by Ipsos earlier this year agree that the government should regulate AI for economic stability and public safety, and that the technology's development should slow down. Still, "when you just ask folks, 'w …Read the full story at The Verge.

Framework CEO Nirav Patel is showing off his company’s latest modular, repairable laptops in San Francisco today. The headliner is the new Laptop 13 Pro, which is its first machine fully machined out of aluminum, and Patel says its goal is to be “the MacBook Pro for Linux users.”Read on below for all the updates from Framework’s April 2026 event. And here’s our Framework Laptop 13 Pro video. We just tried — and tore down — the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. Framework’s first laptop sleeve is made of space-age Tyvek. Hmm… 🤔 that photo in Framework’s keynote looks familiar. Framework announces Laptop 13 Pro, ‘the MacBook Pro for Linux users’ Framework’s first eGPUs turn its laptop into a desktop PC Framework is filling the Laptop 16’s literal gaps with one-piece touchpad and keyboard decks. Framework is building a better couch keyboard because everyone hates the Logitech one Framework says new Laptop 13 Pro has more Netflix battery life than an M5 MacBook Pro. Stick a 10Gbps port into your Framework Desktop or Laptop. “The industry wants you to own nothing and be happy. We want you to own everything and be free.”

An image generated by ChatGPT Images 2.0. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI is rolling out the latest version of its AI-powered image generator with new "thinking capabilities," allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Images 2.0 can now create more "sophisticated" images, with improvements to its ability to follow instructions, preserve details of your choosing, and generate text.It's powered by OpenAI's new GPT Image 2 model, with new thinking capabilities available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. When a thinking model is selected, the chatbot's image generator can pull information from the w …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remember when Framework made the first laptop where you can easily upgrade its entire internal video card in three minutes flat? The company's getting into the external graphics game, too. As promised last August, you'll be able to turn the Framework Laptop 16's GPU modules into external ones instead. Or, you can plug in a desktop graphics card (or network card, or other PCIe cards) for more power than most laptops ever dream of having, with eight lanes of PCI-Express bandwidth. Framework's calling it the OCuLink Dev Kit, because it uses the OCuLink standard to transmit data between your CPU and the external GPU, and because the company wa …Read the full story at The Verge.

Astronaut Chris Williams and the rest of the Expedition 74 crew are getting new laptops. | Photo: NASA Even astronauts need to level up their laptops once in a while - including the crew of Expedition 74 on board the ISS, which NASA announced last week is in the process of some computer upgrades. According to NASA, the crew met on Friday to review plans to "first replace network servers then activate their new, more powerful laptop computers." In a statement to The Verge, NASA spokesperson Joshua Finch confirmed the new laptops the astronauts will be using: "The International Space Station Program has selected the HP ZBook G9 Mobile Workstation as the next laptop for the space station." According to HP, the custom ZBook Fury G9 …Read the full story at The Verge.

Under Steve Jobs, Apple released the groundbreaking products that defined the company. But the company wouldn't be what it is today without Tim Cook's reign of ruthless efficiency.Jobs' legacy has long been written at this point. He was stubborn, unpleasant, and a generational visionary. He pushed the limits of industrial design and brought technologies together in ways that others laughed off at the time. It's an iconic tenure that's basically unequaled anywhere else in tech. But the radical thinker passed the torch to a very different kind of CEO in Tim Cook in August of 2011. Tim Cook is an inventor of a different kind. The Apple Watc …Read the full story at The Verge.

Pi-hole is one of the most popular privacy-focused local solutions for a cleaner browsing experience. When I set up my homelab server, I implemented Pi-hole to get a complete privacy solution. My main focus was on fewer ads, trackers, and better control over my network. A clean Pi-hole setup solved the ad and tracker problem, but once I started digging into how DNS actually worked, I noticed the setup was missing something.

Posting links to X through custom social media software just got a lot more expensive. On Monday, X significantly increased how much it costs to post a URL via the X API, which is what third-party tools use to hook into the platform. It now costs $0.20 when a link is posted, up from $0.01.Any change to make posting links more expensive will likely make X even less attractive to publishers than it already is, especially given the widely held suspicion that linking news articles can lower a post's reach. The issue came up in a recent spat between Nate Silver and X's head of product, Nikita Bier, who claimed that links are "not deboosted." Bu …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a very specific kind of friction that comes with introducing someone to gaming when they didn't grow up with it. My partner is one of those people, and while she's been happy to be a backseat gamer for many years, it's now time for her to take the wheel.

Gorilla arm who? | Image: Framework Every time we review a Framework laptop, we find familiar pros and cons. They're truly upgradable, incredibly repairable, but we always wish the battery lasted longer. We always wish the build quality were top notch. Today, Framework is announcing what could be the answer: the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. I just tried it at Framework's event in San Francisco, and the build quality feels like night and day compared to the somewhat piecemeal designs the company's released before.It's the company's first laptop to be fully machined out of blocks of 6000-series aluminum, its first with a haptic trackpad, and its first with a fully custom 13.5 …Read the full story at The Verge.

I spend most of my day alternating between browsers, editing tools and large files. And over time, my PC has started to feel a bit heavier, and slower in daily operations, even when nothing demanding is running. Now, here's the thing, most of my tasks are not particularly CPU intensive. But they certainly put a dent on RAM. A year or two back, my approach would've been to add more RAM, but that's certainly not an option in this economy. Moreover, the Task Manager doesn't give me a clear answer as to why things are slowing down. So, I turned to RAMMap to figure out what was happening behind the scenes.