As a newcomer to the Linux scene, I didn't have the pleasure of using it back in the 2000s. I only just recently learned that the K in KDE used to stand for 'Kool', and these days, it literally just stands for 'K'. If you're like me and want a taste of what old KDE looked like, someone has reconstructed KDE 3's interface to work with KDE Plasma 6, and yes, it supports Wayland.

It's the most natural home lab move there is. You buy a managed switch, carve your network into VLANs, and then drop a cheap five-port unmanaged switch in the office or behind the TV because you ran out of ports. It works, so you forget about it. That's exactly the problem, and most rundowns of the things you need to know before setting up VLANs on your home network never mention it.

A common rule of thumb for PC building was to allocate anywhere between 30% to 40% of the budget towards the GPU for a balanced build, but this advice doesn't really hold much ground anymore. Alongside other hardware, graphics card prices are seeing hikes quite frequently, and mid-range GPUs aren't affordable anymore.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the fragile state of your connected devices, follow Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it startedA decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly, the June Oven set the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a smal …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google Keep has gone from a tool I barely touched to one I can't imagine starting my day without. I'm deep into the Google ecosystem, so it slots into my workflow almost perfectly. It's minimalist, quick to use, and always right there when I need to dump a thought somewhere before I forget it.

Using power backup for your PC is something most users consider a given. It keeps the system powered on during the occasional power outage and keeps it protected from power surges. You've avoided outage-related interruptions by adding a UPS to your main rig, but what about everything else keeping your network and data accessible?

Obsidian has been one of those apps I rarely question. It is fast, works offline, and gives me enough control to build my knowledge system exactly how I want. Then I tried AFFiNE. After spending more time with it, I started noticing several areas where my Obsidian setup suddenly felt more limited than I had realized.

AI coding tools have reached a point where they can all build something that looks impressive at first glance. The real difference shows up when I start paying attention to the smaller things like spacing, component behavior, consistency, and whether the final app actually feels thoughtfully put together.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 145, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm happy to be done traveling for a bit, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I flew to San Francisco to try out Meta's new hardware, including the impressive Meta VR Glasses. Along the way, I've been listening to Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg, watching this interview with new Apple CEO John Ternus, revisiting Steve Jobs' "Antennagate" press conference Q&A, playing games on my Steam Deck using the Xreal One Pro glasses, and reading Sarah Wynn-William …Read the full story at The Verge.

The idea was big, exciting, and inspiring: What if we could get every kid in the world access to a computer? For a bunch of thinkers and executives in Silicon Valley, it felt like the way to fix everything. But the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and the XO-1 laptop designed to be given away, were both more complicated than anyone expected.In the next episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Adi Robertson and tech journalist David Imel to figure out why OLPC didn't work, whether there's anything to learn from the XO-1's innovative design, and if this kind of computer giveaway could ever succeed.We're halfway t …Read the full story at The Verge.

The United Nations logo on a gate outside the UN headquarters in New York. | AFP via Getty Images Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish a task.According to Howard-Jones, the agents were likely tasked with retrieving publicly available data related to the Productive Capacities Index (PCI) through the UNCTADstat API. However, the agents did not appear to have direct API access and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It's a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn't Suno in a box, though. This isn't a "push-button, get-song" device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It's about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits.Engram isn't connected to the internet. Instead, it runs a "tiny AI" locally. According to the Kickstarter listing, the model is designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says: …Read the full story at The Verge.