I've spent a considerable amount of this year with Linux under my thumbs, whether that's putting CachyOS on my ROG Ally X and then benching handhelds like the MSI Claw 8 AI+ against it. I even put Proxmox on the ROG Ally X, because why not? And somewhere between installing my fourth Proton-GE build and watching SteamOS boot on Intel silicon, it hit me: the vendors have noticed too. For as long as I can remember, Linux gaming was a hobbyist project that hardware makers could politely wave at and then ignore, because the numbers gave them permission to. Those numbers don't say that anymore.

USB flash drives are something that many of us grew up with, and I've owned so many since I started using computers about two decades ago. They've always been cheap and convenient, so I never really had a reason to look elsewhere, especially as USB standards kept getting faster over the years. Today, we have USB4, which supports up to 40Gbps, but if you look around, you won't find a single mainstream USB4 flash drive on the market. That alone should make you wonder why flash drives haven't kept pace.

When Anthropic announced $100 worth of free Fable 5 credits for Claude users, claiming it felt like the easiest decision in the world. Free AI credits are pretty hard to say no to, after all, and more so when they let you use one of the strongest new AI models in the world. However, for a not-so-insignificant number of users, that "free" offer reportedly came with a rather unexpected catch that they only saw when their next billing cycle came around.

Android Headlines claims to have the specs and price for the entire Pixel 11 lineup. What the site shared basically lines up with everything else that we've heard in the lead-up to the August 12th event. The Pixel 11 is expected to get a $100 price hike, starting at $899, but will come with 256GB of storage instead of 128GB in the base model. While the entire lineup will sport the new Tensor G6 and Titan M3 chips, the base model Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL are both getting that rumored RAM cut to just 12GB, along with price increases to $1,099 and $1,299, respectively.The Pixel 11 will supposedly ditch the telephoto lens and settle fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

When it comes to Windows 11 gaming handhelds, my goal is to get the best visuals and frame rate from AAA games that I can. Sometimes this just isn't possible, even with the ROG Xbox Ally X, and I'm forced to lower the resolution and graphics settings considerably just to barely hit 15-20fps. However, in most situations, I've managed to tweak my handheld's settings enough to make recently released games surprisingly playable.

HDMI 2.2 was first announced at CES 2025, but it was too early to say much about it back then because the specs weren't even released to device and cable manufacturers.

Claude Code is one of the best coding agents out there, but it’s really hard to get anything done with it because of its almost unusable usage limits. I’d been using the $20 plan for almost six months, but I recently canceled it because of the sheer number of options available out there. I ditched it for a local LLM layer I built into VS Code, and while the experience hasn’t been the same, it lets me get a lot more done than I could with Claude Code.

Angela Nissel smiles through the pain. | Image: Angela Nissel Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times. Of course, that sort of dark humor should come as no surprise from Nissel. She first made a splash with The Broke Diaries, which grew out of a blog she kept in college detailing her daily struggles and, at times, embarrassment at being a broke student. Eventually she went on to produce and write for hit shows including Scrubs and The Boondocks.One of her most lasting cont …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you pay for Gigabit Fiber, your speed tests might proudly display 940 Mbps down and up speeds, but your real-world network responsiveness regularly falls apart. When the network is under load — the moment someone backs up a cloud photo library, downloads a 100 GB game patch on Steam, or streams 4K video — your gaming ping can spike from 12ms to 350ms, and your web pages will stutter.

While there's no definitive, 100% accurate way to measure how many people use which operating system, we often turn to StatCounter to get a rough idea. According to the website, Linux usage has been growing since May and has now managed to cross over into the double-digit levels of market share. And while it's always important to take these readings with a grain of salt, it does sound promising for Team Tux.

We've had digitally-created music for a while now, but what if we could get technology to play real instruments for us? Well, that's exactly what one inventive tinkerer wants to achieve. They've created a robot that can pluck the strings on a real guitar, and the end goal is to make a whole band of instruments.

Finding an automation app that fits my thinking style has been difficult. Many apps require familiarity with automation and certain syntax to create helpful flows. Meanwhile, more accessible options can be extremely limited in their functionality or require a subscription to unlock multiple automations.