Many of us end up with old streaming sticks, dongles, and boxes that we replaced with the latest and greatest device. For me, one of those is the Google Chromecast. But before you stick it in a dusty drawer and forget about it, it's time to reimagine what that old device can do and turn it into something useful.

I recently dug out my CDs and started reripping them all. I've found a few forgotten gems in there, but few hit harder for me than the beautifully concise Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP. There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in NYC where it seemed like every indie band wanted you to let loose, dance like no one was watching, and just have some damn fun. Few embodied that as much as New York dance punk band Professor Murder.LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture were the biggest names of the dance punk revival. But there were also bands like Rahim, Liars, Dan Deacon, and countless lesser-known acts on DFA that you could see on any giv …Read the full story at The Verge.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Telescope blasts off. | Photo: NASA / John Kraus After funding struggles and a name change, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been successfully launched. It will now make a three-month, one-million-mile journey to its orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2) beyond the Moon. From this vantage point, Roman will conduct an unprecedented survey of the universe. Its field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble's and, according to NASA, it can survey the sky 1,000 times faster using its 300-megapixel infrared camera. Roman also has a Coronagraph system that can block and mask glare from stars, allowing it to directly image exoplanets, even smaller, older, and colder planets …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm not a gamer, and I've never been particularly good at gaming either. Despite that, I've always enjoyed sitting in front of a console or PC and playing whatever game someone else happens to have. I've spent hours playing GTA 5 on my sister's PlayStation 5, mostly just running around, stealing cars, and murdering people.

Many of you may never have used anything other than HDMI or DP on your computers, but some of us still remember the days of the humble VGA port. A 15-pin analog connector, VGA was launched in 1987 to replace older display standards like CGA and EGA. While connectors like DVI and HDMI all but phased out VGA around a decade ago, it's still alive in certain environments and even on some modern motherboards.

Creating a self-hosted media server or NAS with expensive equipment and Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin is simple. However, what about thinking outside the box and turning a budget Android TV box into one? I did the best I could with a cheap Onn box I got from Walmart, an external USB drive, a powered hub, and a bit of time and patience with Kodi.

Tailscale has been my go-to solution for remotely accessing my home network when I am traveling. That’s also when everything started crawling. Syncing photos to Immich, uploading receipts to my paperless-ngx instance, or streaming a movie from my Jellyfin library, all moved at the same frustrating pace. I just accepted it as the price of using Tailscale's private mesh network.

CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs were ubiquitous in the 90s, weighing a ton and requiring way too much space on your entertainment hub. While LCD panels made CRT displays a relic of the past, CRTs are seeing a bit of a revival right now. Retro gaming fans are hunting for working CRT displays for their superior color and performance and that old-school look.

I've tried everything to prevent Claude Code from making the same mistakes again and again. I have clearly included the instructions in the prompt and updated the CLAUDE.md file, but prompt instructions only work once. The next time I ask Claude to do the same thing, it makes the same mistake again. It doesn't treat the prompt instructions as rigid guidelines for some reason, so I decided to add a hook that makes Claude revisit its mistakes and check that it hasn't repeated any of them.

As backlash grows over Flock's AI surveillance cameras, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has frozen state spending on them. The move came just ahead of the publication of a Texas Tribune investigation that revealed the state spent over $30 million on Flock cameras. That money was primarily raised by tacking a $1 fee onto insurance policies, allegedly to help fight catalytic converter theft.Flock cameras have increasingly drawn ire from across the political spectrum as they've become the subject of privacy concerns. There have been multiple incidents of officers being placed on leave or criminally charged for misusing Flock systems, including at …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anyone who's Googled "open source Photoshop alternative" can probably count the results they got on one hand. There's GIMP, and maybe Krita. The truth is, most of your Photoshop alternatives are going to be closed and proprietary, so I'm talking about the Photopeas and the Affinitys and the Pixlrs. There might also be a Canva recommendation when you look up free Photoshop alternatives.

Over 12 terabytes of data, containing builds of every game uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013, has been leaked. We don't know everything in the archives yet because of its massive size. But people have already dug up assets related to the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, content cut from Portal 2, and a build of a game called F-Stop that's set in the Portal universe but is built around a camera mechanic.The leak also includes titles from third-party developers. Early versions of Call of Duty and Resident Evil installments have been dug up, as have builds of Mirror's Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Dragon Age: Origins. And more is lik …Read the full story at The Verge.