Indulging in the “Dark Souls of synthesis.” | Image: Aleksander Stojanov / Hainbach Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum, is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every time I turn on my TV and boot into the Google TV interface, I wonder, "why did this beautiful display deserve to get trapped in the mess that is Google TV, and can I free it?" My TV boots extremely slowly. It takes its sweet time to get to the homepage and then to load apps. It makes sure to test my patience every time it does that.

If you look at the Steam Hardware Survey, you'll notice that 1080p is still the most popular resolution among gamers, accounting for over 50% of users, while 1440p and 4K only make up roughly 21% and 5%, respectively. This explains why the RTX 3060 continues to lead the GPU popularity rankings despite being over five years old at this point. Even though the RTX 4060 is catching up, it's still a 60-class card that's primarily aimed at 1080p gaming.

Claude Code has a reputation for being a developer tool, and that reputation keeps a lot of people away from it who'd actually get something out of it. I avoided it for months for exactly that reason. The thing nobody really spells out is that Claude Code is mostly just file access. You point it at a folder, and from then on it can read, write, and reorganize whatever lives in there. The coding part is one use case, not the whole thing.

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re …Read the full story at The Verge.

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Cloud Kill Switch poses a systemic threat to hardware ownership in smart homes. The tech industry has normalized remote bricking to save on API server maintenance. However, the ultimate enthusiast response is a strict local-first validation model. If a device requires an external handshake to flip a relay or read a census date, it should not enter your house.

I worked at a local small-town newspaper for a year as a reporter and staff writer, and I thought Otter.ai was the best way to record events, interviews, and meetings through its live transcription capabilities. I blindly used it since the instructors in my community journalism class all said it's the best way to remember the order of a conversation and ensure accurate quotes.

If there's one thing I've learned after just a few years of running home servers, it's that self-hosting software often asks you to choose between being powerful and being user-friendly. So many times, you either get a polished experience locked behind subscriptions and paywalls, or you get an open-source alternative that has you navigating layers of menus and settings. Thankfully, Jellyfin now sits comfortably in the middle, finally leaning towards the user-friendly side.

Most modern Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 routers come with quad-core processors and up to 2GB of RAM (or more), so your router probably isn't overworked in a standard home network. The real reason you should reboot your router at least once a month is linked to how it connects to your ISP and to your devices. Your router is a computer, and, over time, it spawns tons of background processes and temporary files that aren't always cleared perfectly. This accumulated bloat can affect your Wi-Fi performance as your router wades through memory leaks and unwanted cache. Rebooting your router gets rid of memory leaks and also clears minor DHCP conflicts with your ISP. It also forces the router to perform a fresh scan to select the optimal Wi-Fi channel. Lastly, a power cycle also resets any suspicious connection that might have snuck in since the last reboot. A restart every month is a good cadence to adhere to if you want your router to function optimally.

For most people, AI and productivity go hand in hand. We use AI tools to automate tasks, save time, and get work done faster. That's how I initially viewed Claude, too. I expected it to help me improve efficiency and remove friction from my daily workflow. And it did. But the real value wasn't the time it saved. It was the way it changed how I approached creative work. Instead of simply helping me execute ideas faster, Claude helped me develop better ideas from the start. It became a space for exploration, reflection, and decision-making; something far more valuable than a traditional productivity tool.

Every Windows user finds themselves keying a shortcut, subconsciously, perhaps a dozen times a day. The common ones have become so universal that many web interfaces and desktop apps use the same commands for simple tasks such as copying, pasting, and saving. But what about the shortcuts that we use less frequently and don't always remember, or the ones we don't know about at all?