A comparison of ‘Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat’ and Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Self Portrait with Grey Felt Hat’ | The Pokémon Company, the Van Gogh Museum If the Pokémon Company’s video teasing its upcoming collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum was already enough to have you thinking about booking a ticket to Amsterdam, the promise of an impressionistic Pikachu promo card might just do the trick.In celebration of the Van Gogh Museum’s 50th anniversary, it has teamed up with the Pokémon Company for a special event designed to introduce young artists to Van Gogh’s work, and to teach people about the way he was profoundly influenced by Japanese art.“This collaboration will allow the next generation to get to know Vincent van Gogh’s art and life story in a refreshing way,” the Van Gogh Museum’s general director Emilie Gordenker said in a press release. “The Van Gogh Museum and The Pokémon... Continue reading…

Jim Ryan, the head of PlayStation and CEO of Sony, is stepping down. In a press release on Wednesday, Sony announced that Ryan will retire in March 2024, while Sony Group Corporation president and chief operating officer Hiroki Totoki will become the interim CEO of Sony starting April 1st, 2024.“After 30 years, I have made the decision to retire from SIE in March 2024. I’ve relished the opportunity to have a job I love in a very special company, working with great people and incredible partners,” Ryan says in a statement. “But I’ve found it increasingly difficult to reconcile living in Europe and working in North America. I will leave having been privileged to work on products that have touched millions of lives across the world;... Continue reading…

Network-attached storage (NAS) is the next step up from simple external drives. Connect one of these to your network and you'll have a centralized location for storing files, backups, running services, and much more. Whether you want to create and run your own home media, surveillance server, or even a web server, a NAS can do all that and more. All you need is a NAS enclosure, a NAS drive (or a few), and a home or office network. Here are our picks for the best NAS.

Lululemon will end hardware sales by the end of the year. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Lululemon is calling it quits on Mirror. And it’s tagging Peloton for help parachuting out of connected fitness.As part of efforts to wind down the business, Bloomberg reports that Lululemon plans on ending hardware sales this year. The companion app will be made unavailable to new users at the end of 2023. Lululemon will continue to offer service and support for existing Mirror owners. According to Bloomberg, those changes will start taking effect on November 1st. To ease the blow, Lululemon has inked a five-year deal with Peloton to provide ongoing content to existing users, as well as develop co-branded apparel. As part of the agreement, Lululemon will start offering Peloton classes on its Mirror device and Lululemon Studio app.... Continue reading…

Mesh routers are a great option if you're looking to cover a lot of space with wireless internet. This Google Nest Wifi mesh system is going to be an excellent choice if you want to eliminate dead zones in your home or office, and do so on an affordable budget.

OnePlus is a little late to the party, but it's finally gearing up to jump on the foldable phone bandwagon. The company recently confirmed that it's working on at least one new foldable phone, which it plans to launch sometime this year. OnePlus hasn't shared any details about this officially, but there is a lot that we already know about it, thanks to all the leaks and rumors. If you're excited for what's to come, read on to learn all the details we have on OnePlus' flagship foldable so far.

Disney CEO Bob Iger foreshadowed the move last month. | Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images Starting on November 1st, Disney Plus will begin restricting password sharing. In Canada. The company announced the change in an email sent to Canadian subscribers. Disney has not provided many details on how it plans to enforce this policy — its email merely states that “we’re implementing restrictions on your ability to share your account or login credentials outside of your household”. The announcement reads more like a strong finger-wag than anything else: “You may not share your subscription outside of your household,” reads the company’s updated Help Center. A new “account sharing” section in the Canadian subscriber agreement also notes that the company may “analyze the use of your account”, and that failing to comply with the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge From basic and affordable to premium and ultra-customizable, these are the best controllers for Xbox. And they work with PCs, too. Continue reading…

Counter-Strike 2 | Image: Valve Counter-Strike 2, the highly anticipated upgrade for CS:GO, has finally arrived. Valve announced today that it’s launching CS2, which comes with some major updates like improved smoke grenades, redesigned maps, and improved network features.After years of rumors, Valve announced CS2 in March and opened up a limited test. The updated game is based on Valve’s Source 2 engine, giving the game a much-needed facelift, reworked audio, UI enhancements, and upgraded Community Workshop tools. There’s even a new “tick-rate-independent gameplay” that Valve describes as a way for servers to “know the exact instant that motion starts, a shot is fired, or a ‘nade is thrown.” You can download the 27GB CS2 for free from Steam, with its listing... Continue reading…

Although the desktop is geared towards gaming more than ever, the way modern PCs have evolved has arguably done much for normal stuff and work-related tasks. In fact, while PC gaming has been made expensive by the rising prices of good graphics cards, it's almost the opposite for a standard home or office PC, which doesn't require a graphics card in most cases.

Windows 11 has been available for nearly two years now, and it brought with it a lot of new features and apps with new capabilities to make Windows better than ever. That continues to happen with new updates like Windows 11 version 23H2, but the original release was arguably the most impactful, and a big part of it was the new Clock app with Focus sessions.

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is testing a DALL-E-powered text-to-image creator in Microsoft Paint for Windows 11, the company announced in a blog post. Called Paint Cocreator, the tool creates art based on a description the user types out.Alternatively, users can select an art style, and Cocreator will then generate three variations. After choosing the one they like, customers can then edit the artwork by, for example, adding layers — a feature that’s also new to Paint.It remains to be seen how well OpenAI’s latest DALL-E image generation model converts text to image, however — previous generations of DALL-E have struggled to correctly interpret text input. Aside from that, DALL-E has been prone to gender and racial bias. In its blog post, Microsoft says... Continue reading…