$799 for twice the battery, twice the storage, and loads of small improvements. Continue reading…

Minecraft is 15 years old, so it’s only natural that Lego should honor the anniversary with a set just for the game’s many adult fans. The company has started taking preorders for The Crafting Table, a 1,195-piece 18-and-up build, as Jay’s Brick Blog writes. The set will cost $89.99 in the US when it’s released on August 1st.Lego says the set will include “familiar biomes, favorite mobs and hidden Easter eggs.” As the name suggests, the kit looks like an in-game crafting table. But inside of it is a Minecraft diorama featuring 12 biomes including Plains (with a village), Taiga (with a dripstone cave), and Cherry Grove (with an abandoned mineshaft). Image: Lego It also has eight microfigures; among them are Steve,... Continue reading…

Of all the components inside your PC, the graphics card is the one that works the hardest yet offers the least trouble. You'll rarely encounter an issue with the GPU and if you do it's likely related to the driver and not the device itself. There are instances where the GPU fails, however, and one could be the cooling solution attached to cool the chip. What happens if your GPU fans fail and could this cause issues for using the PC or playing games? I'm going to explain all!

Apple and Samsung sit atop our list of the best tablets, and although the iPad still commands the lion's share of the market, the Android-based Galaxy devices are holding their own. One of the main selling points of Galaxy tablets is their price, but with the 2024 iPad Air sporting the M2 chip, Apple's mid-range tablet is a very attractive value proposition. The Galaxy Tab S9 FE is Samsung's entry-level S-series tablet, but how does it stack up against the 2024 iPad Air M2? Let's see how they compare.

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 40, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me all your recommendations immediately, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Shein and Reese Witherspoon and Hollywood Ponzi schemes, journaling in Papery, testing Lazy for all my link dumps and notes, drinking a lot of Poppi soda, developing a mac and cheese recipe my toddler will actually like, and pricing out plane tickets for the Wu-Tang Clan listening party in Australia.I also have for you a great new app for capturing video, a nifty new Chrome trick, a MoviePass documentary worth watching, a smartwatch for kids, and much more.... Continue reading…

After tons of leaks and rumors, Asus is unveiling the ROG Ally X at Computex. The company isn't considering it a sequel to the original model, mostly because it still has the same Z1 Extreme processor under the hood. Everything else seems to have been improved though, making one of the best gaming handhelds even better.

Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images Boeing, NASA, and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) scrubbed today’s launch of Starliner less than 4 minutes before liftoff. The setback comes after a string of disappointments, but as with its early May delay, the issue wasn’t with Boeing’s crew vehicle.NASA says the ULA is currently investigating why a computer, called a ground launch sequencer, didn’t enter “the correct operational configuration,” triggering an automatic hold. During a press conference afterward, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the issue was that one of three redundant launch sequencers, which are used to control things like releasing connections to the rocket prior to launch, was slow to respond..@NASA, @BoeingSpace, and @ulalaunch are forgoing a Crew Flight Test launch... Continue reading…

Microsoft held a big Copilot and Surface event last week, and it announced a fresh suite of AI features exclusive to Copilot+ laptops. For now, those are the 14 laptops set for release next month powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X platform. The feature that drew the most attention was Recall, a tool that serves as a memory of sorts for your PC. It's designed to make searching your PC easier with the help of artificial intelligence, saving snapshots of your computing history that can be referenced later. We wouldn't blame you if you thought Microsoft Recall sounded a bit dystopian by the sound of it, but it's using on-device processing. That negates many of the arguments about the feature being 'spyware' or 'a Black Mirror episode,' as social media users put it, including those as high-profile as Elon Musk.

If you've got your eye on a fun SBC project, you'll need a solid computer, and Orange Pi is one of the many Raspberry Pi alternatives out there. However, you'll still want a microSD card, and while you could look at the best Raspberry Pi microSD cards, we've found the best cards for the Orange Pi.

This week was a nice cool-off from the wave of Microsoft and Google news that hit over the last two weeks, but that doesn't mean nothing cool happened. This week saw a ton of awesome homemade projects, plus some announcements from the bigger companies. If you didn't have the time to check out the news this week, here's a quick rundown of the most interesting things that happened.

Scarlett Johansson at Cannes in 2023. | Photo: Laurent Koffel / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Researchers at Arizona State University found that Scarlett Johansson’s voice does indeed sound like “Sky,” OpenAI’s currently discontinued GPT-4o voice, according to NPR, which commissioned the comparison. After using AI models developed to analyze vocal similarities to compare Sky to roughly 600 other actresses, the lab reportedly found Johansson’s voice was “more similar to Sky than 98% of the other actresses.”But the models also “often” found that the voices of Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell resembled Sky’s more than did Johansson’s. Visar Berisha, the professor who led the analysis, told NPR that Johansson’s voice is “similar, but likely not identical.” Berisha’s other work includes OriginStory (PDF), an FTC challenge-winning... Continue reading…

Do you think Linux machines require an antivirus scan? While some would argue that the operating system doesn't have enough viruses to justify one, Kaspersky seems to think differently. The company has made a blog post stating that it believes that Linux users should scan their PCs every so often - and while you're at it, why not try this new Kaspersky scanner that happened to come out just now?