Claude has quickly become my favorite AI chatbot. For some reason, it took me so long to give it a real shot, but ever since I did, I’ve been using it practically exclusively for brainstorming, research, and, of course, coding. Although Claude is currently my go-to AI chatbot, the AI productivity tool you'll always catch me obsessing over is NotebookLM.

The PC-versus-console gaming argument has long been moot, and not to beat a dead horse, but PC gaming has always had a smug little trump card called power. Here in the world of PC gaming, paying more gets you more frame rates, sharper textures, better settings, and less compromise. Lately, however, that entire argument has started to wobble, because the cost of keeping up has turned borderline ridiculous.

During a chaotic multiday event, I found myself working anywhere. And always in a rush. At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from pre-production hardware glitches, I came away impressed.The Zenbook A16 that Asus sent me for early testing has a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 chip. It's one of the flagship …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you're picking components for a build, it's easy to get hung up on "must-have" features that you think you can never do without. I've been in the same boat before, endlessly debating the merits of CPU cores and GPU VRAM against value for money and practical considerations. In 2026, I've decided not to chain myself to a handful of specs that keep delaying the research phase without benefiting it in any way. Going forward, I'll focus on performance rather than specs, and features rather than looks, when choosing components for a new build. This way, I can also save myself a significant portion of my budget that would otherwise be wasted on vanity metrics and "future-proof" specs.

It's really awkward when you're writing an image to a storage device, and the progress bar seemingly stops. This goes double when the writer doesn't give you any feedback on what it's doing. Is the write process still going? Is it just churning through a particularly large chunk of the image? Or has things come to a stop? If I try to X out of the process, will it corrupt stuff? It's not a great feeling.

You know, I didn't realise how useful a system-wide push-to-talk system would be until I learned that it was a thing. Even if the app you're using doesn't support push-to-talk, you can just enable it within the operating system and use it no matter what software you're on. In fact, I'm a little surprised Windows doesn't have such a feature already.

It's fair to say that dipping into the world of self-hosting has been a slow learning curve for me. I've tried a fair few methods, copying files manually, running scripts and more, all accompanied with a fair amount of anxiety wondering if I'd missed a step or reused a port. Deployment, if you are not experienced, can definitely feel like a bit of a test. I've worked around that for the longest time by keeping things small. Be it sticking to easy to install services, or following tutorials. But that becomes far too limiting beyond a point, and you need to find a better way to work. For me, that better way turned out to be Ansible. Honestly, once you start using it, there's no going back. Here's why.

Between Safari, Chrome, OperaGX, and other browsers, I have a lot of bookmarks saved in a lot of different places. Throw in my Safari reading list, Pinterest boards, and other services, and the interesting content and links I've stumbled across while browsing are scattered to the four winds. I needed an easier way to collect my bookmarks in a single, centralized place, but there were a few requirements. First, I didn't want to pay for it. Secondly, I wanted control of my data, rather than relying on third-party servers to host it.

My home network isn't the same without a NAS attached, whether it's serving media files or backing up my devices. I've had a variety of enclosures over the years, from bespoke to DIY, and there's one feature that I can't live without. That's having a second Ethernet port, preferably with both at the same transfer speed, although I've owned models with one 10GbE and several 1GbE ports before.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 112, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I hope your home is warmer than mine right now, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about WhatsApp and Gavin Newsom and David Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz, obsessively waiting for every new episode of The Pitt, using the app Monologue to talk to my computer instead of typing to it, joyfully rewatching The Night Manager before diving into the new season, finally getting my Ikea buttons hooked up to my smart home, listening to the Halt and Catch F …Read the full story at The Verge.

Twisting the PlayCube angles the image without a tripod. The best all-in-one portable projector is the one that makes all the right compromises. It needs to balance image and sound quality with battery life and responsiveness in a device that's not too expensive and small enough to take anywhere. TCL's fun little PlayCube delivers the right mix to justify paying $800 for a 1080p projector in 2026.I tested the TCL PlayCube running Google TV during a two-month road trip, and then again for a few months at home. It's so small, adaptable, and enjoyable that I've had no problem setting it up at a moment's notice, day or night, anywhere I've been.TCL PlayCubeScore: 8ProsCons3 hour battery in bright …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you need some more storage space, you might be looking at getting a 4 TB or even an 8 TB drive. A new consumer NVMe SSD like a Samsung 990 Pro would cost a fortune, but on eBay, you may have come across a used enterprise drive that is listed for 30% of the price. You might see some pretty great specs like high drive writes per day and power loss protection so you pick it up. But then in reality, when it arrived, it wasn't just plug and play.