We've seen plenty of retro consoles built using a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 chip, but they often require an external controller to play. However, what if you could have a handheld console where the screen is on the controller itself? Or, better yet, if you had an ESP32 device that could act as a handheld or a controller? Well, someone has made just that, and you can help fund it right now.

Given how disastrous Microsoft Edge's initial launch was, the company has managed to pull through. We're at the point where Microsoft's browser now commands 7% of the US market share, leaving Firefox in the dust at 3.8%. Well, it seems the Redmond giant has decided to make itself comfy with its decent share, as it's now going to update Edge twice as fast as usual soon.

The funny thing about home lab hardware is that “too much” usually has a very short shelf life. I set up a LattePanda Sigma with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB NVMe SSD, expecting it to be excessive for most of what I do. On paper, it looked like the kind of board that should spend half its life waiting around for a workload worthy of it. In practice, it took almost no time at all before I started finding jobs for it.

‘Listen, that's not what I'm here for.' | Image: Apple Our early testing has already shown that Siri AI knows when to shut up, and that's very much by design. In an interview with Mostly Human spotted by MacRumors, Craig Federighi said Apple's new Siri won't act all sycophantic like chatbots made by OpenAI, Google, and others."As you may know, if you use many of the existing chatbots, they're really focused on engagement to a large degree," said Federighi, who is responsible for software at Apple. "And sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself, and then use that as a basis to establish a connection."Apple purposely took a di …Read the full story at The Verge.

Filament prices coming down should have felt like the big win this year. A spool that costs less is easy to understand, easy to justify, and easy to celebrate when the printer is already sitting there hungry for plastic. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t notice cheaper PLA and PETG when I was restocking. I absolutely did, because I’m still human and I still enjoy pretending a bulk filament order is a financially responsible act.

Sooner or later, a NAS or home lab that's pulling double duty hits the same wall: too much data, not enough space to store it. You go to add one more drive, reach for a SATA cable, but find that there's not a single spot available, or you've had your attention caught by a used enterprise drive that has very compelling price-per-terabyte value. Either way, the solution is largely the same, and it's in the form of a PCIe add-in card called a Host Bus Adapter, or HBA. HBA cards aren't sexy, but they're incredibly useful cards that add a ton of potential capacity to your home lab or NAS, and they're worth exploring if you haven't already. As with any used enterprise gear, though, they come with their own unique edges that need some ironing out.

Amazon's rolling out a free software update for Echo Hub devices that gives the home screen a much-needed update to the interface it launched with in 2024. It had already added Alex Plus AI support, but the new interface has a cleaner, fully customizable layout that fits more smart home info and controls on the screen than the previous version. The Echo Hub is also getting access to Ring AI's Video Search feature that lets you use natural language to search through your smart home camera footage, as well as Alexa Plus summaries of detected camera events. These are the five new features Amazon highlighted for the Echo Hub:Organize by r …Read the full story at The Verge.

Proxmox is my favorite hypervisor platform, and it scratches my itch for testing multiple apps and distros at once. I've started using LXCs more lately to replace resource hungry VMs, and it's been going well. At least, until it came time to update them all.

If you think far back, you'll notice that for as long as technology has been applied to learning, the central challenge has remained the same, for at least the past few decades. Abstract concepts resist verbal explanation, and the tools available to "visualize" them have always demanded both a high level of professional skill and a significant investment in time and capital. The widespread access to generative AI is set to change all of that, and we received the first hint with the introduction of Claude's interactive visuals.

People have now spent enough time with Forza Horizon 6 to gauge how good a game it is, and so far, the reviews have been shining. However, that doesn't mean that Playground Games can rest easy. The development team has announced that it has noticed a strange save game wiping bug that affects both Xbox and PC gamers, and while it has made recommendations on what gamers can do to keep their saves intact, it sounds like it doesn't quite know what's wrong yet.

Have you noticed that some of your custom Windows icons have reverted to the default look after the latest update? If so, don't worry; you're not alone. Microsoft has made some tweaks to how custom icons are handled with Windows 11, and if the operating system cannot verify that they came from a good source, it will silently change them back to defaults without warning you. Yes, it's one of those rare moments where what may seem like a Windows bug is, in fact, entirely by design.

If you've been hanging out in the self-hosting circles lately, everyone seems to declare that a powerful local AI setup is far better than paying for a cloud LLM subscription forever. The reasoning is that instead of paying $20 perpetually for Claude Pro (or a service of your choice), you could absorb a one-time investment in a beefy GPU, and enjoy all the inferencing you want on your PC. Eventually, the whole thing is sure to pay for itself, right? Well, it turns out that the answer isn't as simple. Whether a local setup ends up being better for you depends on your use case, preferences, and how much time you spend on LLMs daily. There are also hidden costs with both cloud and local models that many people don't consider. You'll have to contend with trade-offs either way. What will determine the winner for you, specifically, is which trade-offs you're more comfortable with. I did the math, which is the easy part; what's harder is deciding what level of investment, quality, control, and privacy you're after.