On June 10th, the German container ship Posen docked in Los Angeles after a two-week voyage from Shanghai. As Valve watcher Brad Lynch notes, it was almost certainly carrying the first mass production shipments of the Steam Frame, Valve's new gaming headset. Import records show that Valve's distribution partner Ceva offloaded nearly 32 metric tons of "Virtual Reality Devices" on Valve's behalf - or roughly 13 tons of actual product, after you subtract the roughly 3,700 kilogram weight of five 40-foot shipping containers. That's the same math we used to estimate that Valve imported 50 tons of game consoles in two days last month - and sin …Read the full story at The Verge.

The impending tripling of Plex's Lifetime Plex Pass cost to $750 is a big change. I've been using Plex for a long time, and in that time I've had to pay for the mobile app, then not pay but have features missing without Plex Pass, and watch the UI get more crowded.

A little while ago, we caught wind that Microsoft was adding a new Wi-Fi tracking feature to Teams. The idea behind it is that, if an employee connects to a company's Wi-Fi, Teams would automatically update their status to show their location. People were not pleased with the potential privacy issues that came with this feature, so Microsoft went back to the drawing board. Now it's ready to give it another try, and this time it seems to give the user more control over the information they broadcast.

When people talk about self-hosting, it's usually around media servers, photo backups, and cloud storage replacements. And I agree, those are important, and that’s why I built my own home server in the first place.

The modern smart home has a problem, built by competing voice assistant manufacturers that don't want anyone else's devices to take over. No matter how well the devices connect into that ecosystem, they still have to play by the rules set by Amazon and Google, and be at the whimsy of how their voice models work.

A few years ago, there was major hype in the smart home community. Matter and Thread were supposed to rescue us from smart home fragmentation. We were promised a single, robust, self-healing mesh where an Apple HomePod, a Google Nest Hub, and an Amazon Echo would all work as team players to route local device traffic.

Technology changes extremely quickly, and AI is certainly no exception. NotebookLM, however, has always felt like a bit of an outlier here (and I say this in the best possible way). It's a tool that got upgrades here and there, sure, but it remained largely unchanged at its core for a long while. We were anticipating significant upgrades at I/O 2026, but the company decided not to bring it up by name at all (well, it did get a slight mention at the very end, tied to some Gemini/science announcement).

Nothing Phone 4A Pro | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge If you're thinking about upgrading your phone, "the best time was yesterday," according to Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei, echoing a message we heard during MWC. As Android Authority reports, Pei said in a post on X that the RAM shortage has already impacted Nothing's less expensive mid-range phone: "For Phone 4A , memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They've doubled again since." He warned that "Phone prices are going up, and they'll keep going up into next year." Pei says RAM can now account for over 50 percent of the cost of a new phone. Nothing's just the latest phone maker to warn …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every standalone desktop 3D printer shipped today promises the same unwritten joys of manufacturing anything you can design, in any material, straight from a spool of plastic. Yet for sheer cost efficiency and other inexplicable reasons, you'll only see a roll of Polylactic Acid or PLA shipped as the trial filament with most new printers. It is affordable, odorless, and behaves beautifully on a bare glass bed without generating toxic fumes. The ease of use has made it a universal default for print after print based on the dangerously incorrect assumption that if it looks solid on the build plate, the print will perform well in real-world conditions.

Raspberry Pi is a capable, tiny computer that can run multiple tools without needing a huge amount of power. It's not a PC replacement, but it can help you run self-hosted tools that try to replace popular paid services available as a web tool or a licensed copy. Rather than spending money each month on a popular tool, you can use a self-hosted alternative because of multiple advantages.

Many of us, while allocating our budget for a new build, tend to focus on the parts that directly affect performance. It's easy to convince ourselves to spend more on a faster GPU, CPU, or even RAM because we can actually see the difference when monitoring our frame rates in MSI Afterburner. I'm not against this approach, but it usually results in cutting corners on other components that give you peace of mind in the long run.

Every homelabber follows a similar pattern. You start with a few containers, then you add monitoring, and then you add more monitoring. Eventually, you start writing scripts to check things automatically. I did the same and went further, adding cloud LLMs like Claude to analyze and report. But each time, after a few days, when the cost, privacy trade-offs, and external dependency didn't sit right with my self-hosting approach, I removed it and got back to the basic monitoring dashboards to hunt for everything. Service status — Uptime Kuma, container state — Portainer, resource monitoring — Beszel.