A fire burns in a pavilion during the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference in Belém, Pará state, Brazil, on November 20th, 2025. | Photo: Getty Images "It's a wrap … Don't forget to buy an 'i survived Belém' shirt," reads the opening line of an email I got Saturday, the final day of highly anticipated United Nations climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil. The email was sent from Shravya Jain-Conti, the US climate diplomacy lead at the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC), who's been following these events for years. While she sometimes has tips on where to snag a cup of coffee along with her email updates to reporters, the T-shirt tip was a first as far as I've seen.I've been mulling over these negotiations since last year, mapping out potential funding opportunities to make a t …Read the full story at The Verge.

At the start of the year, had you asked me if the new Battlefield or new Black Ops would be the better-received shooter of the year, I probably would've bet on Call of Duty. Black Ops 6 was one of the series' best games in years, and Battlefield had been struggling for over a decade. It was Activision's fight to lose, and somehow, it seems like it's doing just that.

It turns out that you can do more with Steam Deck parts than you may first assume. For instance, just over a year ago, we saw someone grab a busted Steam Deck off eBay, extract the still-good hardware, and then create a mini PC with it. It goes to show, just because a Steam Deck's screen is busted, it doesn't mean you can't put that perfectly good motherboard to use.

Everyone has their own preferences, but you really can't go wrong with an ultrawide monitor. While screen real estate is typically going to be the biggest benefit, the ultrawide aspect ratio is also going to allow for better use, allowing you to virtually place multiple screens side by side.

I don't know about you, but I think there's something special about loading an operating system onto a brand new SBC. To me, it feels like smashing a bottle against a ship before it's launched, an official "breaking in" of new hardware. And for a while now, people have relied on Raspberry Pi's official Imager to get an operating system on their SBC.

When Windows 10 went out of support last month, roughly ten years after release, many were confused about whether to upgrade or keep running their existing iteration. Experts who recommended upgrading to Windows 11 cited security as the primary concern. That got me thinking, aren't people still using Windows XP and Windows 7, operating systems that were released 24 and 16 years ago, respectively?

When Windows 10 went out of support last month, I hesitantly upgraded my secondary laptop to Windows 11 because of all the security concerns. I knew I had to upgrade someday, so why not do it right away and get used to the latest iteration? Even if I had opted for the free Extended Security Updates (ESU), it was just for one year, after which I would have been forced to switch, anyway. But surprisingly, my experience with Windows 11 was completely different from what I had initially anticipated.

Valve's recently announced Steam Machine spawned wide discussion across the PC hardware world, and while much of the conversation was cautious excitement over an Arch Linux-based machine in the living room, a lot of it also centered around the potential price-to-performance ratio the Steam Machine may offer. We don't know the pricing of the Steam Machine yet, but based on the specs, we can assume it won't follow a standard console pricing scheme.

"Developing superintelligence is now in sight," says Mark Zuckerberg, heralding the "creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today." Powerful AI "may come as soon as 2026 [and will be] smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields," says Dario Amodei, offering the doubling of human lifespans or even "escape velocity" from death itself. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI," says Sam Altman, referring to the industry's holy grail of artificial general intelligence - and soon superintelligent AI "could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing …Read the full story at The Verge.

When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series was first released, they got scalped pretty hard. It was very difficult to find a card selling for MSRP, and whenever someone found a source of sensibly-priced cards, they'd get snapped up within moments. Fortunately, those days seem to be over (touch wood), as we're now seeing the RTX 50 cards selling for what they should be going for. Add the Black Friday sales on top of that, and suddenly you have a whole range of cards selling for prices we could only dream of seeing earlier in 2025.

If you're preparing yourself for a GPU upgrade in the upcoming sale, think again before buying an entry-level or budget graphics card. It might be the only GPU you can afford in this market, but your investment might not give you the returns you're hoping for. Budget GPUs aren't what they used to be a few years ago. While I was able to play modern titles at 1440p on my GTX 1660 Ti back in 2019, today's lower-end GPUs are riddled with dismal performance, inadequate VRAM, and unimpressive value for money. The gaming industry moved on before budget GPUs had a chance to catch up. So, save up for a mid-range GPU, and invest in these impactful upgrades for now for a much more impactful return.

Sure, you can go all out when buying a laptop, but it becomes more challenging to find something that hits all the right marks while also staying on a certain budget. We think this Dell 15 manages to hit the sweet spot, delivering enough power and coming in at a price that's easy to afford. At just $400, you get everything you need.