Look, I know there are solid third-party email apps out there like Spark, Thunderbird, and Proton Mail — believe me, I've tried them all over the years. I always come back to Google's Gmail because it's the platform I'm most comfortable with and that I've used for the longest. Still, I've never found a way to manage my very busy inbox efficiently, especially as I pipe more email addresses through it. At various points, I've tried an urgency-related triage system, and sorting email into specific folders, but nothing has really stuck.

Meta's Reality Labs team is expected to lose around 10 percent of its staff, with layoffs concentrated on the division's metaverse employees, as reported by The New York Times. The layoffs are apparently a side effect of Meta's AI ambitions, which are pulling focus away from its virtual reality division. According to the Times, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, called a meeting for Wednesday that he "urged staff to attend in person," saying it will be the "most important" meeting of the year. Bosworth oversees the Reality Labs division, which employs about 15,000 people. Unfortunately, layoffs to Meta's VR team may not come …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sometimes I find myself browsing benchmarks for a new CPU because my current rig feels sluggish or because the fans are screaming. Just as I was considering an upgrade, I decided to actually take a look inside my machine, and one afternoon with a can of compressed air and a screwdriver gave me back 15% of my performance.

Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it's also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099."We held off on it for as long as we could, but we had to update our Framework Desktop pricing today to account for the massive increase in LPDDR5x pricing from our suppliers," Framework says in a post on X. "As before, we're only adjusting prices enough to cover the increases in cost."Framework Desktops with higher RAM configurations and a Ryzen AI Max P …Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ve spent a long time now bouncing between free and open-source editors in an effort to replace Photoshop. I love a lot of them, and a handful have made their way permanently into my graphics toolkit. They definitely offer numerous advantages over Photoshop that remind me why I canceled my Adobe subscriptions in the first place - transparency, low to no price tag, communities, and often unique features. However, I still hit roadblocks now and then, and end up thinking “I get why people still pay for Photoshop.”

If you’re planning on traveling at all this year, the Baseus EnerCore CG11 Universal Travel Adapter is worth a look. The adapter can power up to six devices at once, and now through the end of today, January 12th, it’s on sale for just $34.19 (about $36 off) at Amazon, matching the all-time low price we last saw at the end of November.Baseus EnerCore CG11 Universal Travel AdapterWhere to Buy: $69.99 $34.19 at Amazon $69.99 $39.99 at BaseusBaseus’ handy wall adapter supports four different plug types so you can use it in more than 200 countries, including the US, UK, much of Europe, Australia, India, and South Africa. Instead of requiring you to pack a separate cable, it also includes a built-in USB-C cable that extends up to 27 inches. The braided cord can deliver up to 70W of power and retracts into the adapter, too, making it easy to carry.In addition to the aforementioned built-in cable, the EnerCore CG11 features three USB ports on the bottom: one USB-C port that delivers up to 60W, a USB-A port that delivers up to 60W, and a USB-A port that delivers up to 5W.  That means you can charge your phone, tablet, camera, tablet, earbuds, and even a laptop — albeit slowly — without having to carry multiple chargers with you while you travel.Despite its versatility, the adapter weighs about half a pound and can fit in the palm of your hand, so it won’t add a ton of unnecessary bulk to your backpack or luggage. You can even take it on a cruise, as it doesn’t include surge protection, a feature that’s often banned on cruise ships.

The UK is bringing a law into force that makes creating nonconsensual intimate deepfake images, like the ones that have proliferated on X because of the Grok AI chatbot, a criminal offense, as reported by the BBC."The Data Act, passed last year, made it a criminal offence to create - or request the creation of - non-consensual intimate images," according to a statement from Liz Kendall, the UK's Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. "And today, I can announce to the House that this offence will be brought into force this week and that I will make it a priority offence in the Online Safety Act too." As a priority offens …Read the full story at The Verge.

A UK employment tribunal rejected a request from fired Rockstar Games employees to receive interim pay while waiting for a full hearing about their dismissal, according to Bloomberg and IGN. After Rockstar fired 34 employees last year - 31 from the UK and three from Canada - the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) accused the company of "union busting." Rockstar claims that the fired employees were leaking company information in a Discord channel.The hearing took place over two days last week. "Despite being refused interim relief today, we've come out of last week's hearing more confident than ever that a full and substanti …Read the full story at The Verge.

I ditched Docker Desktop since it was bloated and gobbled up resources. Giving Portainer a shot, I settled for a lightweight utility called Dockge to spin up containers. Yet, the struggle to manage Docker is real. Hopping from one Docker management tool to another was obviously killing my experiments.

I vividly recall my first encounter with the Windows Registry. It was around a decade ago, while I was troubleshooting an issue with the PC, when an online tutorial suggested editing the registry as a possible fix. It seemed simple. Launch a built-in tool, navigate to a particular path, and change the value of a single key. But right there was a warning about how the registry is a critical part of Windows, and an incorrect change could break the OS. That got me intrigued. What really is the registry, why is it central to Windows, and how could making an incorrect modification break the system?

Apple has confirmed that it will use Google's Gemini AI model to power the upgraded, more personal version of that Siri it plans to launch later this year, confirming several months of rumors.

Just after last Christmas, we saw that one of the co-founders of the Good Old Games (GOG) platform, Michael Michał Kiciński, had bought back their own creation from CD Projekt Red. It meant a return of GOG back to its original vision, but then came the next, arguably more difficult decision: how do you survive under Steam's shadow?