Usually, we see SBCs and microcontrollers used to create new things, but you can also use them to breathe new life into old hardware. Such is the case with this 1968 Grundig Musikgerät RF116, which, presumably, had stopped working, so someone took it upon themselves to bring it into the 21st century with an ESP32.

Before recent high-profile hacks raised the specter of AI possibly "killing all humans," our energy systems were already disturbingly vulnerable to cyberattack - and the risk is growing. "We were always prey. We were just kind of surviving at the appetite of our predators," Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety and resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), told me last year. At the time, I was preoccupied with a Department of Homeland Security warning that Iranian actors and sympathizers could target the US with cyberattacks. Last week, I called Corman up to chat about recent incidents of rogue AI a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 144, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, new tech season is here, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I flew out to Los Angeles to try on and write about Snap's Specs. Along the way, I've been marveling at how Apple put the iPhone 18 Pro's Face ID sensor under the display, reading about new Xbox boss Asha Sharma, getting excited for bakes in the new Great British Baking Show trailer, watching Stephen Colbert shave his beard on Jimmy Kimmel, and hanging out at a lot of coffee shop tables to work.I also ha …Read the full story at The Verge.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time per day renaming screenshots. I'm not exaggerating, I promise. In fact, going through this article alone should be enough for you to see why! Every screenshot I take for an article needs to be renamed with a descriptive filename before I upload it, which usually means stopping what I'm doing, figuring out what the screenshot actually shows, and typing out a name that I'll still understand later.

The same calculator has been on most kids' back to school shopping list since the early 2000's and the dominance of Texas Instruments' calculator division goes back even farther. In the next episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Nilay Patel and Victoria Song to tell the story of TI graphing calculators and how one company managed to take over the market and never let it go.This is the second episode of the fifth season of Version History where we're heading back to school. We've already talked about the perilous journeys of The Oregon Trail that many students experienced in the computer lab and over the cou …Read the full story at The Verge.

Halfway through a project in Claude Code, I often realize that the thing I'm building isn't really what I wanted. At first I chalked this up to iteration, and that experimentation is part of the process. But I'd end up scraping my sessions too often or arguing my way back into what I wanted, which is a big waste of tokens.

Linux is the most popular open-source operating system in the world, but its road to this point was not without its perils. Part of its popularity is due to AT&T suing Berkeley over 186 lines of Unix code, which allowed Linux to flourish. Without that lawsuit, who knows where Linux would have been?

PCIe 3.0 has been around for so long that seeing it in a PC today almost makes the entire platform feel ancient. Think about this for a second. The very first PC I built in 2012 with the i7-3770K already had PCIe 3.0 support, and since then, we've gone through PCIe 4.0 and now have PCIe 5.0 on mainstream motherboards. In fact, current-gen GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD are all PCIe 5.0, so pairing one with a motherboard that's still limited to PCIe 3.0 probably sounds like a terrible idea.

I've been using the D-Link DIR-882 for far longer than I probably should've, considering it was released in 2017. To be fair, I've never really had a good reason to replace it because my 500Mbps fiber connection doesn't exactly justify something better, especially when most of my devices don't even support Wi-Fi 7. My desktop PC is where I want the fastest, most consistent connection for competitive gaming, but it's connected over Ethernet anyway.

It's always good to find a new way to put your unused hardware to use, and turning one into a Proxmox virtualisation host is definitely one of the more useful ways. If you have a Raspberry Pi 5 that isn't earning its rent, someone on Reddit has devised a way to turn it into a handy Proxmox tool, although it comes with a handful of downsides.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on streaming platforms, FAST channels, and the future of entertainment, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBefore Netflix fully committed to becoming a streaming service and leaving DVDs behind, the company experimented with the idea of giving its subscribers a physical box that could access high-resolution digital copies of movies. Films would have been downloaded to the box in the evening and become available to users the next day. But …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, my troubleshooting loop has looked the same. A command fails, I hit Win + Shift + S, crop the red text, and paste it into a chatbot. It works, but my error output ends up on someone else's servers, tokens and all. That bothered me more after I let a local LLM loose on my server logs and saw what those logs give away.