I'll be honest with you. I've been using Lucidchart for all my flow charting, mapping, or diagram-related needs for quite some time now. It's a simple, straightforward tool that has all the polish you'd expect, and it makes collaboration easy enough. But lately, I haven't really needed the collaborative features, and with my move towards shifting all my most used productivity services to my server, I wanted something that would run on my own hardware. That's what started my search for an alternative and led me to draw.io.

Valentine's Day often comes with more pressure than it needs to. At heart, though, February 14th is about showing appreciation for the people you care about in ways that feel thoughtful and sincere. And while big displays of romance can do that, it's often the quieter, more personal gestures - or a meaningful gift that makes life just a little more enjoyable - that matter most.Below, we've rounded up gift ideas that, in our experience, do just that. Some are practical picks, like a pair of noise-canceling earbuds meant to help you focus or a pair of USB-C hand warmers for those cold, blustery days back east. Others, such as Renpho's eye ma …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you haven't yet updated to the new Apple Home, your smart home devices may no longer work in the Home app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch starting tomorrow. On February 10, 2026, Apple will end support for the original HomeKit architecture.The biggest impact of the change will be felt by anyone still using an iPad as their Apple Home Hub (which allows you to control devices remotely and create automations).In the new Apple Home, iPads are no longer supported as hubs. You'll need a HomePod or Apple TV to serve that role. The new architecture also requires your phone and any devices connected to your Home to be running iOS 16. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Considering switching operating systems seems to have become almost idiosyncratic for the average Windows 11 user. Perhaps on a Monday you'll realize that the Windows recovery environment is broken and can't help you when your SSD develops an issue, costing you hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. On a random Tuesday, you might come to notice that File Explorer is broken after a routine update. Then maybe on a Friday you'll spend thirty minutes disabling its adware so that your desktop can stop trying to sell you OneDrive storage.

All too often, the router receives the blame for subpar Wi-Fi connectivity. People love to dunk on their ISP-provided router for poor hardware, outdated standards, and limited features. I did the same, for good reason. My ISP router was a Wi-Fi 5 model that barely passed for acceptable for a modern home. It required rebooting once every few weeks, and the range was pathetic, considering the size of the house. When I finally replaced it with an aftermarket router, I was disappointed to see that things didn't improve on the ground. That's when I realized that my home network had a lot more hidden flaws, which I had ignored while blaming the router for everything. Once I knew what needed fixing, the network finally started working as it should have in the first place.

One year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to uncover what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says the agency has withheld relevant documents "in bad faith" and is asking a court to allow discovery and depositions to draw out the information. "Thus far, the Defendant has sought to delay document production, and when pressed by this Court to act, Defendant has produced only sanitized email threads," Arthur Belendiuk, attorney for advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh, who together filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) re …Read the full story at The Verge.

Almost a year after the release of the iPhone 16e, rumors indicate Apple is reportedly preparing to launch the iPhone 17e very soon, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, an often reliable source of Apple leaks.

It feels like everyone who produced ad spots for this year's Super Bowl with generative AI failed in terms of making gen AI seem useful or like something worth getting excited about. Though we've seen plenty of AI-generated commercials before (at previous Super Bowls, no less), this year's event was oversaturated with them. That's in part because image and video generation models have become more sophisticated in the past year - though still subpar compared to what humans create, they're just improved enough for a number of brands to now be comfortable having their names associated with AI-derived footage. Also, it's much, much cheaper and …Read the full story at The Verge.

The worst kind of failure is the one you don't see coming. Your NAS sits there humming along, the dashboard looks fine, and all lights are green. Then you need to restore a file and discover it's corrupted, or a drive fails, and you realize backups haven't actually run in months.

Riot Games is already "reducing the size" of the team working on its recently-released free-to-play fighting game 2XKO, according to a post from executive producer Tom Cannon. The game, set in the League of Legends universe, launched in early access on PC in October and hit consoles just a few weeks ago.2XKO has been in development for years, with Riot first announcing the project under the codename Project L in 2019 as part of broader plans to expand the company's lineup beyond League of Legends. While some of Riot's expansion ideas have worked out, including Netflix's animated series Arcane and the tactical shooter that would eventually …Read the full story at The Verge.

A screenshot of a demo from the Fluorite engine. Using a game engine in a "digital cockpit" is useful for things like step-by-step 3D tutorials about a car, mapping the environment around your car, and offering more natural controls, explained Jamie Kerber, an employee of Very Good Ventures, at the FOSDEM 2026 conference. She's a lead engineer on Fluorite, a game engine for use in cars developed by her company as well as Toyota Connected North America and the Automotive Grade Linux project, as reported earlier by Eurogamer and Game*Spark.Epic Games has made a big push for car companies to use Unreal Engine to power those in-car interfaces and visualize them for design and marketing, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

For most drivers, Apple CarPlay is a glorified jukebox and a GPS navigator – nothing more than a mirrored screen for Spotify and Google Maps. But if you are only using it to find the nearest coffee shop or skip a track, you are probably scratching of what your dashboard can actually do.