Vince Zampella, who had a major hand in developing franchises like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Battlefield, died in a car crash on Sunday, NBC Los Angeles reports. He was 55.NBC Los Angeles and CBS Los Angeles report California Highway Patrol responded to a single-car crash at around 12:45PM local time on Angeles Crest Highway in Altadena. An Emergency SOS request came in via satellite from an Apple device, according to the CHP's incident log.The Highway Patrol did not identify Zampella, but CHP officer Marissa Mcintire sent over a press release about the crash that says:Preliminary investigation indicated Vehicle #1 was traveli …Read the full story at The Verge.

Spotify says it has launched new protections against "anti-copyright attacks" after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna's Archive announced it's ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, "We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify, ordering by popularity descending. While this only represents 37 percent of songs, it represents around 99.6 percent of listens." The first torrent released says it contains metadata, such as album art, song title, and artist name, belonging to 99.9 percent of Spotify's 256 million t …Read the full story at The Verge.

Bazzite, a Linux distro that has a lot in common with Valve's SteamOS, is designed specifically with gaming in mind, offering a console-like experience that ditches the majority of Windows 11's most annoying features.

The ability to mix and match different hardware components is a neat aspect of home labs, but the real fun begins once you start tinkering with all the operating systems, container runtimes, and virtualization platforms at your disposal. These days, Proxmox stands at the apex of the home lab ecosystem, with XCP-ng, Harvester, and ESXi following closely behind it.

As someone who has played a lot of LEGO video games over the years, one of my absolute favorites is the LEGO Batman series. Even though I have a deep love for all the LEGO Star Wars that have come out, it was LEGO Batman that really drew my attention to the franchise. Most people who grew up building LEGO sets have many memories of the fun they had constructing cool vehicles and locations full of adventure. So seeing that combined with a legendary property like DC Comics is a match made in heaven for me.

Ever since end-of-year recap season began this year, one thing I've seen consistently across all social media platforms is people asking for a ChatGPT Wrapped. Given that practically every service the average person uses ended up launching a year-in-review, it only makes sense that people would want a recap for the one AI that’s been part of nearly every conversation this year.

Ahead of CES 2026 getting underway in early January, Birdfy has announced two new camera-equipped smart bird feeders that can identify and capture visitors in slow motion. The Birdfy Hum Bloom is specifically designed to attract and record hummingbirds using a nectar bulb that mimics flowers they're naturally attracted to, while the Feeder Vista introduces a 360-degree camera and a bottom-up feeding system that doesn't obstruct views. Both feeders are expected to be available in Q2 of 2026 but pricing hasn't been announced.The Birdfy Hum Bloom is built around an 8MP camera that can capture 4K video of hummingbirds at 20fps. Capturing 120fp …Read the full story at The Verge.

Bitcoin culture, by nature, is anarchical and chaotic. It has to be, given the nature of Bitcoin itself and the people who adopted it: free-market libertarians who've gone all in on turning computer code into a form of money divorced from central banks, government intervention, and traceability. In short, it's the exact opposite culture of Washington, DC, home of the federal government, where everyone agrees that the American dollar exists and is worth X amount because the government says so.So it was a bizarre shock to K Street, the corporate lobbying heart of the nation's capital, when it was announced that Pubkey, a Bitcoin-themed dive …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're looking for a last-minute gift for that special Switch 2 owner in your life, Nintendo's eShop holiday sale has arrived just in time, with steep discounts on several first-party Nintendo games. As usual, the sale is pretty good, but one particular deal immediately caught my attention.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had earned another Game of the Year award by the Indie Game Awards last week, but the organization has since announced that the award would be retracted because developer Sandfall Interactive used generative AI during development. The Indie Game Awards also rescinded the Debut Game award given to Expedition 33.Here is the Indie Game Awards' explanation, from an FAQ:The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself. When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously remarked, "The more you buy, the more you save," but as PC users, spending the most can often cause the most headaches. It might sound counterintuitive, since performance and features typically scale with price, even if the relationship doesn't stay linear. However, buying the most expensive PC upgrades can actually be worse, especially if your rig isn't prepared for them. Flagship CPUs, OLED monitors, and the fastest RAM can offer the best performance on the market, but only under ideal conditions. In some scenarios, these components can be more trouble than they're worth.

I come from an era where you could find microSD cards almost everywhere. Inside Handycams, Sony Ericsson phones, BlackBerry handsets, MP3 players, and early smartphones long before internal storage became generous or affordable. For the longest time, they were the easiest way to carry your digital life in your pocket. In late 2025, they're still very much alive for things such as powering game libraries on the Nintendo Switch, expanding storage on the Steam Deck, for Raspberry Pi projects, and even some security cameras, drones, and dashcams.