One of the easiest things to do during the holidays is spend too much money. It happens to many of us, even when we swear that things are going to be different this year. We want to help you stay true to your intentions to save money when possible, and we're doing that with a gift guide focused on products that cost no more than $50. We've already posted a guide to the best gifts under $100, but you might be surprised how many good gifts can be purchased for half the amount.You can delight a lucky recipient who's looking for a quirky addition to their home with an heirloom tomato beeswax candle. Or present a set of rechargeable hand warmer …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most people reach for AI when they need slides fast — ChatGPT for bullet points, Gamma for auto-generated decks, or Canva's AI templates for quick polish. But that approach treats presentations like a formatting problem, not a thinking problem. The real struggle isn't making slides look good. It's organizing ideas so they actually land.

If you spend enough time around hardware enthusiasts or lurking in PC building forums, you start to hear the same rituals when it comes to RAM: set your XMP or EXPO profile, tighten your timings if you're feeling brave, and make peace with whatever speed your motherboard can handle. I thought I understood all there is to it. After all, memory tuning is supposed to be one of the more straightforward parts of a build. Then, I stumbled across a BIOS setting that took me by surprise.

Self-hosting has many benefits, but you also have to prioritize which services you want to spend your time on. This is because self-hosting involves troubleshooting, unexpected downtime, and more maintenance than most consumer cloud services.

Shortly after appeals court judges ruled against Apple's contempt appeal in a years-long antitrust dispute against the makers of Fortnite, I got to talk to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in an interview. According to Sweeney, today's ruling "completely shuts down" Apple's App Store rules that allow it to collect "junk fees."The three-judge Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel largely affirmed an April ruling that Apple failed to comply with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers's 2021 order allowing app developers to link to external payment options, which Sweeney said "… is really awesome for all developers." Perhaps the most notable part of the app …Read the full story at The Verge.

The longer I’ve used NotebookLM, the more obvious one thing has become: while it's great on its own, pairing it with other productivity tools takes the whole experience to the next level. Over the last few months, I've used NotebookLM alongside practically every tool you could think of: Notion, Apple Notes, VS Code, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity — and the list goes on.

Native Union’s Weighter managing one of up to three cables. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Warning: I'm going to make an attempt to justify a $40 paperweight for cable management. I'm not sure how I ended up in this position, or who hurt me. All I can say is that I'm not proud of myself, so please, take pity.I've been using Native Union's 3-cable Weighter for about a week. It sits on my kitchen table, which also serves as my impromptu workspace on most days. It looks nice when I happen to notice it, and I can be assured that each time I return with my MacBook Pro in hand, I'll find the MagSafe connector right where I left it.Before Weighter, I'd just let the cable fall to the ground, requiring a middle-aged bend and audible gr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remedy Entertainment is finally showing off the much-anticipated sequel to Control. The new game, dubbed Control Resonant, expands on the original with a new action-RPG framework. It takes place seven years later and shifts the setting from the unsettling Oldest House of the original to a more open Manhattan, while putting players in the role of Dylan Faden, brother of Control protagonist Jesse. It's expected to launch in 2026.Here's the basic setup, per Remedy:After years in confinement at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), Dylan Faden's former captors are deploying him at the peak of a supernatural crisis. Charged with …Read the full story at The Verge.

What do you think LLM models would have looked like if they were around in the 90s? What if you could pick up an AI assistant on a floppy disk, pop it into your computer, and ask it things? While it's always fun to think about these what-ifs, making them a reality is a lot harder. Fortunately, some people are just really, really determined to get ChatGPT running on a 32-year-old PC.

While Geoff Keighley had already announced that Tomb Raider would be making a Game Awards appearance, the surprise was that instead of one game announcement there's two. Crystal Dynamics and Amazon Game Studios are releasing two Tomb Raider games back-to-back in 2026 and 2027. First up, coming in 2026 is Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. Don't let the fancy name fool you though, Legacy of Atlantis is the Unreal Engine 5 version of the first Tomb Raider game, a remake similar to Tomb Raider Anniversary which updated the 1997 original PlayStation game for the PS2. But that's not all. In 2027, the Tomb Raider team will release another game, To …Read the full story at The Verge.

You know, sometimes I wish I didn't have to write out the formula in Excel. Sometimes I wish I could just tell my computer, "Hey, I really want to achieve this and that, can you just figure out how to do that and make the formula for me, please?" It would save a ton of headaches trying to figure out why my logic doesn't work.

You might have invested a significant portion of your budget into your power supply (as you should), but your setup is incomplete without a UPS. A quality PSU is essential for routing clean and stable power to your PC, but a UPS sits between your PSU and the mains. It's not just a power backup for your system, but a means of protecting both your PC and PSU from power surges, brownouts, and fluctuations. Even if power-related incidents are rare in your neighborhood, you shouldn't risk the safety of your PC. A decent UPS will be far more valuable than a cheap surge protector that doesn't protect anything at all.