Running into issues with my Windows PC gets tiring fast. By the time I'm staring at the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), it's already too late. Looking up a cryptic STOP code might point me in the right direction, but it doesn't help catch the problem before it becomes catastrophic. Even when the system doesn't crash completely, I'm left with a weird glitch and the unenviable task of sifting through Event Viewer logs. While this is a great place to catch culprits, it also logs everything my system does, and there are plenty of debugging and security suites out there that cost a pretty penny because they know where to look for those needles in the haystack when my PC is already so far gone that I've got no other choice but to look for this root cause.

What do you get the man who says he has everything? It's a tough question - and one you have a limited amount of time to answer, given the holidays are nearly upon us. You could try dropping subtle hints or asking friends and family for suggestions, but they might save their best ideas for themselves. Fortunately, if you're struggling to come up with something, we have more than a few ideas. With the help of Verge staffers, we've compiled suggestions for dads of every make and model. It doesn't matter if he's the type to get up early to prep the smart smoker or if his idea of a perfect Sunday is watching his favorite team absolutely crush …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've always enjoyed being on the cutting-edge of PC peripherals. The main genre of games I enjoy, combined with my work, means I get exposed to a lot of the latest stuff. Inevitably, I get sucked into buying a new peripheral with some new "must-have" quality or feature, and to be honest, very few have ended up staying on my desk for good. These 5 features aren't bad or lack usefulness, I just don't find myself using them at all anymore.

Quick: tell me how old you are by telling me which app you used to download free music. Was it Napster? Kazaa? Usenet? Gnutella? WinMX? Morpheus? The Pirate Bay? Were you, I don't know, sending your friends songs on AIM or BBM? The possibilities are endless. For a decade or so, if you were online, you were probably stealing music.For this episode of Version History, we're telling the story of one of the last big names in file sharing: LimeWire. If the era of mainstream access to free music (mostly on college campuses and other fast networks) starts with Napster, it almost certainly ends with LimeWire. LimeWire was, in many ways, design …Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s safe to say Zapier once became the household name for automation, and rightfully so. The tool gives you a simple way to automate mundane tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time. You get built-in triggers and processes that are useful. But Zapier is not free once you exhaust 100 tasks per month. I wouldn’t mind paying for it if I hadn’t found a better tool that’s completely free, source-available, and can be self-hosted — n8n. It has become all the rage in 2025 and is already valued at $2.5B. I have been using n8n extensively to automate my workflow, and it has made my life easier and has also saved me money.

Each half is compact, and they fit together for easy travel. Hall effect gaming keyboards aren't uncommon. But Asus' ROG Falcata is the only one that's also a split ergonomic keyboard, aimed at alleviating wrist, hand, or arm pain. For the luxury of having it all, you'll pay $419.99, enough to buy a nice Hall effect keyboard and a split ergonomic one. It'd be worth it if the Falcata truly represented the best of both worlds, but I'm split. As a Hall effect board, it succeeds, offering a wealth of customization options, including the ability to let you adjust each key's actuation point by as little as a hundredth of a millimeter at a time. But if you're buying it for ergonomics, like me, then maybe n …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on Hollywood trends and streaming culture, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedOnce upon a time (read: a few years ago), there were a pair of upstart streaming services called Quibi and Go90 that were supposed to appeal to phone-addicted millennials. These platforms were supposed to compete with Netflix and Amazon by offering up short-form videos designed to be watched on the go. Both services were touted as being the future of entertainm …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're an indie rock fan of a certain age, the name Stereogum will probably conjure strong feelings. The site was launched "January 1st, 2002, on a whim," founder Scott Lapatine told The Verge. Originally, this early staple of the music blog era was focused almost entirely on music discovery and posting MP3s. "It was the early days of like Windows Media Player and Real Player," Scott remembers. Today, the site is focused on music journalism and has just relaunched to keep up with a media landscape being overrun by AI.Lapatine has been with Stereogum from the beginning, and watched as both the music and media world rapidly changed around …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm a self-confessed data hoarder, with a veritable army of hard drives inside my NAS units, holding my digital life together. They have documents, media files, programs and everything else collected over the years, and they've not only been storing data. Those hard drives used to hold my virtual machines as well, running Home Assistant to keep my smart home in order, media servers to keep me entertained, and all manner of home lab experiments.

In the realm of extraction shooters, Arc Raiders has come on to the scene, made its way to the very top spot, and been declared the greatest extraction shooter ever made, all in the span of a fortnight (pun not intended). There's a lot of chaos and tension that comes with the looter-shooter genre, and yet somehow, Arc Raiders has birthed one of the most wholesome, cooperative, and friendliest online communities in gaming right now.

Over the years, I have tried enough NAS operating systems to know that most of them are designed to cater to a particular kind of user. Some are made to be beginner-friendly, while others are better suited for experiments. But all of them want to lock you down to their own ecosystem, which is especially true for pre-built NAS models that you get off the shelves. When you want to try something even mildly unconventional, you will start to notice the constraints.

For the longest time, whenever I wanted to lower CPU temperatures, the first thing that usually came to my mind was upgrading the cooler, adding more case fans, or even replacing the thermal paste with a higher-quality one. I never stopped to consider whether the CPU itself was drawing more voltage than it actually needed. It took me a while to realize modern CPUs run hot out of the box simply because manufacturers set conservative voltage settings to ensure stability across chips with different levels of silicon quality.