When you're buying expensive PC components worth $1,000–$2,000, it's only natural to want to protect them from unexpected external factors. Power surges remain one such factor. They might be rare, but they can be fatal to sensitive electronics if the voltage is high enough. Grid outages, electrical storms, or other heavy devices can contribute to power surges that can permanently damage your PC. Most people use surge protectors that are built into cheap power strips, thinking they've done enough to safeguard their expensive rig. However, such surge protectors might not be enough for sustained power surges, and depending on their age, might not offer any protection at all.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on how to work anywhere, follow Thomas Ricker. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedI've worked from home for 20 years. In that time, I've seen technologies supporting remote work advance considerably. But nothing has been as transformative as the arrival of Starlink, SpaceX's internet service that lets me "work from home" anywhere I choose, be it from the open road, forest, or desolate beach.SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites in 2019 to provide data in the l …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you've been anywhere near the PC hardware scene lately, you already know that things are getting grim. It's not just "GPU scalpers" levels of grim, either. I'm talking "entering an existential crisis for consumer hardware" levels of grim. Thanks to the global RAM and VRAM inflation, and companies like Micron dramatically pulling out of the consumer DRAM market because AI companies keep buying memory by the warehouse, we're now officially in full-blown RAMflation.

Windows 10 has now officially reached the end of its lifespan, except for Microsoft's extensions and various other tweaks. That said, many people are still using the operating system; some (myself included) don't want to upgrade a processor or be forced to a new OS, while others have mission-critical software that doesn't work with Windows 11. If you're holding back because of hardware restrictions, there's a good chance your computer is a bit on the older side.

I recently stumbled across an image editor and viewer so small that I could email it to all my friends as a joke — and it would still be a smaller attachment than pretty much anything else I could send. The aptly-named Minimal Image Viewer is just 20.5kb in size, but is capable of handling even large, high-resolution photos with ease. It also has a lot going on under the hood. Does it compare with Photoshop or GIMP? No, not even close. But it's not meant to.

The PC hardware industry might shower the lion's share of hype and coverage on gaming GPUs, but workstation graphics cards are every bit as impressive, only for different workloads. If the "home labbers" among you are chasing affordable GPUs for your budget setup, you might want to look at old and used workstation GPUs instead of their gaming siblings. These cards might not feel like much in games, but they are more than capable as compute cards in home lab setups. They're not only highly affordable on the pre-owned market, but also surprisingly power-efficient. They offer the reliability that home lab users seek, and many of them can fit in any home lab setup.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 108, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope your holiday shopping is going well, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Ariana Grande and pelvic floors and Josh Shapiro and Las Vegas, finishing and then immediately rewatching The Chair Company, working by the light of this extremely rad MoMA lamp, installing a bunch of Hue Dimmer Switches around my house, trying desperately to hide the giant box that came with my new Frame TV, wondering if my 12,983 minutes of Spotify time this year …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google didn't invent the concept of smart glasses, but it did help make them mainstream. In retrospect, 13 years after their launch, this is both a good and bad thing. Glass made a lot of people dream about new ways to use computers without staring down at screens all day. Glass also made a lot of people realize just how bad it might feel to have a world full of face computers. Which is more predictive: Glass, or Glassholes? And can you even have one without the other?For this episode of Version History, we go back in time and tell the story of Google Glass. David Pierce, Victoria Song, and tech journalist David Imel trace the product's be …Read the full story at The Verge.

If I had to come up with a list of components for an ideal home lab, I’d be at a loss. That’s because a home lab is essentially an isolated environment where you can tinker with computing projects without the fear of breaking anything important. Depending on your needs, even a mere Raspberry Pi running a bunch of containers can constitute an experimentation lab.

Year Walk. | Image: Simogo It may be hard to believe now, but the App Store was once a thriving place for inventive indie games. The ubiquity of the iPhone coupled with the relative ease of development for the platform meant that smaller studios were able to get their games in front of huge audiences, leading to a great time of experimentation that unfortunately didn't last. But if you want to relive those better days, Simogo's new collection is just the thing.You might recognize the name Simogo from more recent titles, like the noir mystery Lorelei and the Laser Eyes or the vibrant interactive pop album Sayonara Wild Hearts. Before that, though, the studio was a cr …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's easy to think about AI as a sort of existential battle between human and machine. Maybe it will be, someday, in a Skynet sort of way. But there are also lots of people trying to figure out how to use AI not as a replacement for human creativity and thinking but as a tool meant to augment those things.Sari Azout is one of those people. She's the founder of Sublime, a platform dedicated to curation, creativity, and ideas. Sublime is all about taste, which makes it slightly surprising that there's a huge amount of AI powering the way it works. But to Azout, it all makes sense.Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Ca …Read the full story at The Verge.

Thermal throttling is one of those problems most of us keep hearing about long before we actually experience it. I remember seeing the term thrown around constantly in various Reddit posts when I looked up performance tweaks in my early years of PC gaming. The way people talked about it made me think thermal throttling kicked in the moment a component hit a specific temperature and instantly cut my performance in half. That idea stuck with me for years, even though modern CPUs and GPUs don't necessarily work like that.