There are plenty of different streaming devices available on the market, and picking the right one for what you need is essential. I purchased a Roku Stick — thinking it would be straightforward to use. It is cheap and has the essential apps you'd expect and a store where I can pick from what is missing.

I use Pangolin for exposing my self-hosted services publicly and Tailscale for private external access. Both work as expected. While I was setting up Headscale as a self-hosted alternative to Tailscale's cloud control server, I ran a few ping tests between devices on my home LAN. Surprisingly, some replied at 5-19ms (direct), others at 88-102ms (relayed through Tailscale's DERP). That made me wonder why traffic was detouring when both devices were on the same network. A few days ago, I was going through Pangolin’s changelogs, and the latest 1.21 update claimed to support same-network detection. That one line in the changelog made me ask myself: does this feature actually deliver what Tailscale couldn't? But the honest answer to this question took more digging than I expected.

In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC - a scenario that would have left a lot of people very upset and placed me in deep trouble. I wasn't irresponsible, I had local backups, but at some point I found myself in custody of so many important files that it scared me. And no matter how many redundancies I could build at home, they'd all still be in the same place - a risky bet. So I bought a subscription to Dropbox. Years later, it's still one …Read the full story at The Verge.

Resizable BAR is one of those features that we've come to appreciate in recent years because it can give a free performance boost in some games. It's essentially a PCIe feature that lets the CPU access the GPU's entire frame buffer at once, rather than in smaller chunks. AMD calls it Smart Access Memory (SAM), but it's the same underlying technology. To set it up, just enable Above 4G Decoding and Resizable BAR in the BIOS settings, and you're good to go. Or so I thought.

Tines launched 3B at the end of July, and its entire pitch is that you can vibe code safely, as credentials never touch generated code. API keys live in connectors and get injected by a proxy outside the execution environment, so the model writing your workflow can't read them even if you ask it to. I said I'd be testing this with a local model, and providing your own model is what the free tier expects after you use your $50 credit allowance. I suspect that most will bring their own cloud-based subscription, but I was especially curious how a local LLM would handle it instead.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about how AI is changing our daily lives, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedLong before ChatGPT became a thing, educators and editors frequently used anti-plagiarism tools to see if writers were being honest about their work. These tools work by comparing a written work against a database filled with content from across the web, scholarly articles, and more to check for matching sentences and phrases. Some, like Turnitin, offer a percentage th …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have bounced between Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and even Nextcloud over the years, and for the most part, they all did the same basic job well enough. My files stayed synced, I could access them from almost anywhere, and switching services rarely felt like a major upgrade.

Mark Zuckerberg's yacht "The Launchpad" | Image: Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg's super yacht, Launchpad.Michael Love, a passenger on the Wilderness Legacy, posted on Bluesky that the captain announced the Launchpad was closer, but "repeatedly refused to respond," which was met with booing from the passengers. The AIS tracking (embedded below) seems to support that the Launchpad was closer to the vessel in trouble, but then stopped near the entrance …Read the full story at The Verge.

Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged. "I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Does anyone actually enjoy pulling Cat6 through the walls of a finished house? I know I don’t, and I’ve even got existing Cat5e that I can use to pull the better cable into place. That’s why I’m currently using wireless backhaul to paper over the problem, which works well enough that I don’t have to worry about the problem (yet).

I might be slightly exaggerating, but I think we're at the stage where we write more prompts in a day than we write actual messages to real people. It's depressing, dystopian, and disturbingly accurate. I write prompts from both the perspective of a journalist whose primary beat is AI and a subscriber to nearly every AI tool under the sun.

Sadly, there hasn't been a new episode of No Dogs in Space since July of 2024. Part four of the podcast's series on Can wrapped up an abbreviated season three, which focused on experimental rock. Don't get me wrong, I loved seasons one and two, but the show seemed to be gearing up for a deep dive into Krautrock, and I was hype. Unfortunately, that episode ended with hosts Marcus Parks (Last Podcast on the Left) and Carolina Hidalgo declaring they were going to do another season on punk (the topic of season one), only for the feed to go quiet. If you're a music obsessive, this is a must-listen podcast. Over the course of 73 episodes, the hu …Read the full story at The Verge.