Google Maps is one of the first apps I open before a long road trip, but it was also quietly becoming one of the biggest battery drains on my phone.

In June, Nintendo announced a new version of the Switch 2 that should let you easily replace its battery pack - but only for Europe. Logitech will do much the same. User-replaceable batteries will be the law in Europe in February 2027, but instead of bringing them to the rest of the world, Logitech plans to ship one version of its wireless mice to Europe and a different version everywhere else.That's the word from Logitech's new gaming boss, Robin Piispanen. We talked about it over iced vanilla lattes at my local cafe, right after discussing how Logitech isn't sure it wants to make another gaming handheld. Why? Logitech believes that les …Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple says it won't limit the capabilities of devices leased through its new Upgrade program if you miss a payment. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Brian Bumbery says, "There will be no restricted mode and/or there will be no limitations put on device functionality due to missed payments or default with the Apple Upgrade program."This confirmation comes after 9to5Mac uncovered code in an iOS 27 beta for a new "App Managed Features" system. This would reportedly allow financial partners to "perform ongoing status checks" on a device, as well as have Apple's system services put a device in "Restricted Mode" if its ow …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most people who use Tailscale have never thought about the server in the middle of it all, and to a degree, that's the beauty of it. You install the client, sign in with an existing account, and machines scattered across home networks, hotel Wi-Fi, and cloud providers quietly find each other. There is no gateway to configure and no port to forward, and it's totally free for reasonable home use. But at its core, using Tailscale still relies on a server that you do not own, and replacing it with something you personally host is easier than you might think.

It's not too uncommon for a little-known game on Steam to be shot into popularity due to someone discovering it, but none are quite so weird as the story of Crashphalt. The game has seen a 1683% player count boost in recent months, but only because people are downloading it so they can play a totally different game online with their friends.

Most of us already know how to improve battery life on our phones. Things like Power Saving mode, lowering screen brightness, and enabling dark mode are common knowledge. Still, every now and then, I come across a setting that isn't advertised as a battery-saving feature at all, yet still makes a difference. This time, it was Samsung's Customization Service, a feature that I found buried in my Samsung account settings.

Over the last few months, I've spent a lot of time talking to my computer. One underrated feature of the LLM revolution has been a remarkable leap in all kinds of dictation technology - even the fastest, cheapest models are getting very good at understanding and processing speech. I've tested lots of these apps, from WisprFlow to Monologue to Spokenly to Handy to so many others, and have found them all to be useful ways to quickly write emails, Slack messages, and more. They sometimes default to giving everything a too-formal style of formatting and love ending a text message with a period (like a sociopath), but they're getting better at th …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you have ever gone TV shopping in a store, you've likely noticed how good all the displays look.

Hugging Face isn’t doing much to prevent the AI models it hosts from spitting out sexualized deepfakes. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Hugging Face is being used to make nonconsensual deepfakes, and the popular open-source AI model repository is doing very little to prevent it. That's according to a new report published by the European nonprofit AI Forensics, which found that seven out of the top nine image editing models hosted by Hugging Face readily complied with requests to undress women using simple prompts.While most mainstream generative AI models like Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT have guardrails in place to block prompts that undress or sexualize people, that seemingly isn't the case for the models on Hugging Face tested by AI Forensics. The nonprofit says …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every so often, I come across a project that absolutely stuns me. Such is the case with this sci-fi starship simulator, which features tons of buttons, screens, and a whole lot of custom ESP32-S3-based USB boards to keep everything running. And the best bit is, the creator built pretty much everything by hand, including the very game this device was built to play.

For years now, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 has been remembered as Nvidia's dependable mid-range gaming card. It was the GPU you bought when you wanted solid 1080p performance, enough VRAM to outlast its rivals, and even decent 1440p performance if you wanted to dip your toe in a higher resolution pond, all for a price tag that didn't completely empty your wallet. Five years later, it is now back in production, and while budget gamers do have every reason to celebrate, they are not quite the audience for it, which is what makes this return so fascinating.

I’ve been using Ollama to run all my local LLMs, but when Docker recently announced Model Runner, I decided to move my models there. The reason is simple — I don’t need another app to run my local LLMs because I already use Docker for several other services, and adding an LLM feels like a natural extension of that setup.