The first thing you notice about the Slate Truck is its size. It's small, surprisingly so. In a country where trucks often come with their own zip code, Slate's pickup is refreshingly puny, measuring 174.6 inches long, 70.6 inches wide, and 69.3 inches tall, with a curb weight of approximately 3,602 pounds (1,634kg). As a reference point, it's nearly the same size as Marty McFly's 1985 Toyota SR5 from Back to the Future. But inside, that diminutive feeling disappears, as I found myself with ample amounts of head- and legroom. As a relatively tallish guy (over 6 feet) who often feels cramped in most vehicles, I couldn't believe the amount o …Read the full story at The Verge.

A photo of a black speaker, the Amazon Echo, on a gray background. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Jeff Bezos badly wanted a voice computer. He had been saying so publicly since the very early days of Amazon, telling anyone who would listen about why voice might make it easier and more natural to interact with technology. (And to buy stuff from Jeff Bezos.) But when a team at Amazon set out to actually make the voice computer a reality, they encountered a seemingly endless series of hard problems. Eventually, though, they created two products, the Echo speaker and the Alexa voice assistant, that would help bring a new kind of computer to millions of people.On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Echo's development i …Read the full story at The Verge.

For a long time, I treated my Raspberry Pi setup like the ideal home lab foundation. One board handled DNS, another ran a few Docker containers, and a third picked up whatever task I didn’t want to disturb elsewhere. I devoted a fourth to Jellyfin media streaming. It felt tidy in theory, and there was definitely some charm in seeing several tiny machines humming along together. But after living with that setup for a while, I started noticing that the cluster was giving me more overhead than payoff.

When I’m deep in research, I usually have twenty tabs open. After a while, the favicons disappear and Chrome leaves me with a row of anonymous gray slivers. This was my daily frustration with Chrome for years. Whether I was working on a 32-inch Windows desktop or trying to stay productive on a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the horizontal tab bar remained the ultimate bottleneck.

Most router settings pages are full of features that sound tougher than they really are. MAC address filtering is one of the best examples. It looks serious, feels technical, and gives off the impression that you’re putting a concrete barrier in front of your Wi-Fi. In practice, though, it’s usually more like a velvet rope. It offers extra friction for you and almost no real barrier for anyone who actually wants access.

For me, one of the most interesting ways of exploring retro tech is imagining if the sequence of inventions was different than what we experienced in real life. For instance, what if we managed to figure out how to get LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini up and running before we went through the Y2K bug scare?

When I grabbed the first-generation Amazon Echo Plus for $180, I planned to make it my smart home hub. It handled my first-generation Philips Hue smart bulbs perfectly for a year. Then it just stopped. No automation worked. Routines quit mid-cycle. Online forums suggested looking into the “connectivity issues” and simply pointed to buying the latest model.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the ups and downs of AI, follow Stevie Bonifield. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it startedMost people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to spruce up your emails, but over the past few years, it's been eyeing bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public pivot to rebrand as an AI company called Superhuman. The new name was adopted from Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform that Grammarly acquired i …Read the full story at The Verge.

Over the years, I’ve built (and disassembled) dozens of projects with my Raspberry Pi, but a retro gaming machine has got to be one of my favorites. Sure, this tiny single-board computer may not have enough processing capabilities to emulate PlayStation 2 and newer consoles, but it’s great at handling games designed for ancient gaming machines and slightly modern-ish systems.

The usefulness of most AI tools is questionable, but some of this emerging tech actually comes in handy. Claude Code is one of those. I have been using it for months, and it still surprises me with how it pulls off certain tasks. The problem is that it runs out of credits far too quickly, which means you end up waiting more than you’d like. And since it’s closed source, you can’t really trust what’s going on underneath (although the recent source code leak did reveal a few interesting things).

When we talk about how far Linux has come with PC gaming, we often cover the performance and compatibility aspects. After all, it's easy to get excited when CachyOS begins taking wins versus Windows 11 on some big titles. However, there are still issues with getting mods to work with your games on Linux, especially if they require DLLs.

Self-hosted open-source tools have replaced a bunch of cloud-based platforms for my productivity needs. Take Microsoft 365, for example. I’d rather not spend extra bucks every month just to edit documents when there’s a battalion of tools available in the FOSS ecosystem. Like most tinkerers, I’d initially chosen a local LibreOffice instance as my Microsoft 365 replacement. But as the devices in my tinkering arsenal increased, I switched to a Docker-based LibreOffice Online instance to access my spreadsheets, presentation slides, and text documents.