If you've ever built or owned a PC, chances are, you're no stranger to the occasional storage failure. SSDs indeed fail, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly, and almost always when you least expect them to. What makes this failure so unsettling is that they don't show signs of failure like the traditional hard disk drives most of us grew up on. There's no clicking, no grinding, and most of the time, no warning whatsoever. One day, your system boots instantly; the next, the drive disappears like it never existed.

Prices for components are seeing a steep increase lately, making it more expensive to build a new PC. And while you can find some deals on parts, some folks are looking to the prebuilt market in order to save. Now, I get it, a prebuilt PC isn't for everyone, but if you're someone that doesn't have the time or the knowledge, it's a good one to go with, especially now with so many different options being available.

A smart home can be an exciting project, but it can also feel overwhelming when you are just getting started. Newcomers often assume they need a small but powerful PC to get everything running smoothly. That instinct makes sense because the dashboards, automations, and integrations can look pretty complex. Once you dive in, though, you quickly learn that a Raspberry Pi is a far better place to begin.

I hit my breaking point using Notion again with a client who insisted on sticking to it. Not because it's bad — it's genuinely powerful — but because they were paying for features I'd touch maybe twice a year. Worse, every time I opened a database-heavy page, I'd watch the loading spinner for what felt like an eternity.

As a kid, I always wondered why Microsoft had titles on Xbox but not Windows, and vice versa. It just made sense to me that the company would release games on both systems, because it's all the same company at the end of the day.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year's NeurIPS in San Diego.NeurIPS, or the "Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems," started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.I was regretfully unable to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every time I finish an article, I tell myself I’ll remember the key points. A little later, I have already forgotten the details, and I’m lucky if the title sticks. NotebookLM’s flashcards and quizzes are how I finally stopped pretending I would “just remember” and started checking what actually stuck. There are times when I only remember the headline and random examples, and the rest is a blur.

Throughout 2025, fantastic games of varying shapes, sizes, and genres occupied our time and attention. At the end of the year, the most unforgettable experiences rise to the top and emerge as frontrunners for our favorite game of the year. After deliberation, XDA's Gaming team — Jakejames Lugo, Samarveer Singh, and I — settled on our top ten video games of 2025.

Docker lets you create containers that work as individual entities, and you can manage multiple containers inside a single Docker installation. While you can create and use as many self-hosted app containers as you wish, the hardware resources are always limited. I have a spare old laptop with just 4GB DDR3 memory, and it serves as a good machine to run some of my essential self-hosted services.

Future Call of Duty releases will no longer include back-to-back launches of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games, Activision announced on Tuesday. The past four releases in the series have been Modern Warfare II (2022), Modern Warfare III (2023), Black Ops 6 (2024), and Black Ops 7 (2025), but moving forward, Activision wants to offer "an absolutely unique experience each and every year," according to a blog post.Black Ops 7 came out in November to mixed reviews, and in Europe, the game had a "disappointing launch," The Game Business reports. Ahead of the game's release, Treyarch Senior Director of Production Yale Miller told CharlieIntel th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Getting started with 3D printing can feel overwhelming, especially when you are learning new software and trying to make your first successful prints. Free tools can make a massive difference by removing guesswork and giving beginners the support they need during those early stages. These tools help you understand your printer, find reliable models, monitor prints safely, and troubleshoot problems without spending a dime. They also make the learning process more enjoyable, which is important when every successful print boosts your confidence.

For a while, the Call of Duty series had a very particular release schedule; at least, since Black Ops made its introduction. It used to be that the company released a Modern Warfare game followed by a Black Ops game. However, in recent years, we've seen the holy schedule fall apart, with two Modern Warfare releases in the space of a year, followed by two Black Ops releases back-to-back.