There is a steep retail price gap between baseline appliances and their smart equivalents. Just for the addition of basic Wi-Fi and app connectivity, you'd be paying a massive price premium, often hundreds of dollars. And even after that, you may still be forced into a proprietary corporate ecosystem with slow cloud APIs, aggressive data tracking, and apps that constantly break whenever the manufacturer pushes a server update. Chasing high-priced native smart appliances isn't the true way forward for many smart home enthusiasts.

Now, if you want to, you can use Google's 3D emoji in your own creations. The company shared some details about how it went about designing the little pictograms and why, as part of World Emoji Day on Friday. Things you might not necessarily worry about in a 2D illustration suddenly become very important when you're talking about a 3D model. Is a smiley face a sphere? A mask? A flat disc? In addition to offering a behind-the-scenes look at Google's design process, it also announced that it would be completely open-sourcing the emoji set:We're handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Now that Amazon's new Fire TV Stick devices ship with their own Vega OS instead of the Android-based Fire OS, my 2022 Fire TV Stick is more valuable to me than ever. Of course, owning a four-year-old unit also means acknowledging that it's just not as fast as it used to be. That's hardly surprising, though, considering the years of cached data, installed apps, and dwindling storage space that accumulate over time.

It’s been ages since I read a newspaper, and I doubt most of us do anymore. For most of us, it is either a news app, different news outlets, or social media like X and Reddit. Every morning, I’d hit the same wall, the same story on three different outlets, each with unique headlines. It's similar for social media apps and newsletters: a headline on X, a rehash on Reddit, and a slower version from a newsletter an hour later. It was never about bad stories or half-baked reporting, but it was a "too much repetition" problem.

The GoPro Max2 can use your earbuds as a microphone over Bluetooth. A 360-degree camera is a great way to ensure you capture every bit of the action, but prices tend to be on the high end for models worth your attention. That’s why it’s notable that the GoPro Max 2 accessory bundle is discounted to $369 at Amazon (a dollar more at Best Buy and GoPro). The bundle is stuffed for being just $70 more than the base camera, containing everything you need to shoot the best angles during all-day adventures. The capable camera can shoot 360-degree 8K video at 30 frames per second, or 180-degree 4K video at 60FPS, and it can attach to the wide ecosystem of GoPro-compatible mounts.GoPro Max 2Where to Buy: $569 $369 at Amazon (accessory bundle) $569 $369 at Best Buy (accessory bundle)In addition to the Max 2 camera, the bundle includes a four-foot extension pole, two protective lens caps, two high-capacity batteries, a 64GB microSD card, a curved adhesive mount, a mounting buckle for GoPro mounts, a mounting finger adapter for cameras, two thumb screws, a wrist lanyard, a microfiber cloth, and a USB-C cable. The standalone camera includes most of those accessories, but has fewer mounts, a single battery, no SD card, and no extension pole. The pole and extra battery are $75 on their own, so you’re getting a solid deal before you even take the free microSD card into account.The Max 2’s six-mic array records in every direction and automatically reduces wind noise. Alternatively, you can connect Bluetooth microphones, too. The 1.82-inch LCD touchscreen lets you quickly check your footage and manage settings, and it’s waterproof up to 16 feet in case you want to take it swimming or surfing. A single battery should last 66 minutes at full 8K, or 90 minutes at 5.6K resolution. The lenses are replaceable, too, in case a bad fall damages them. View this post on Instagram

Sometimes, the tech world produces a device so far ahead of its time that looking back, it's hard to believe it ever existed — and in this particular case, it basically didn't.

Before this industry, I spent three years in financial crime compliance at a major high street bank, which means I've seen more instances of fraud and scams than most people ever will. That makes me instinctively wary of anything claiming to imitate a human voice convincingly, and so, when Kyutai released Pocket TTS, a voice cloning model that's small enough to run on a CPU, I had to try it myself than take the videos at face value.

Every few months, I convince myself that one more layer of sophistication will make my home lab easier to manage. I’ll test a different deployment method, automate another maintenance task, or move a service because the new arrangement looks cleaner on paper. Sometimes it genuinely helps. Other times, I end up staring at a plain Linux container in Proxmox and wondering why I spent an afternoon trying to improve something that had already been working without complaint. LXC containers aren’t the newest or most interesting part of my setup, but they keep winning because I can understand them quickly, repair them without digging through several layers, and then stop thinking about them.

Dave Eggers attends the "The Turning Point: To Be Destroyed" premiere. | Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer tips on being relentlessly prolific, or how to excel in multiple fields. Instead, he apparently laced into the company. According to the Financial Times, Eggers told the staff:"The effect of ChatGPT on educators' lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you've made every teache …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Pixel 10a shipped with a last gen processor. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge Mystic Leaks suggests that the Pixel 11a will return to featuring a flagship-grade processor with the Tensor G6. Rather than the Tensor G5 found in the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro, the Pixel 10a shipped with the previous generation Tensor G4. That was a huge disappointment since, typically, the Pixel a lineup kept the modern processor, but cut corners in other places to keep costs down.The Tensor G6 is rumored to feature the same PowerVR DXT-48-1536 GPU as the G5, but it should still be an improvement over the Mali-G715 in the Tensor G4. The big upgrade is that the G6 moves on from Samsung's Exynos modems and instead uses a MediaTek M90 modem. Tha …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you ask anyone how to safely test a sketchy executable or PowerShell script, the answer will usually involve downloading VirtualBox, VMware, or another similar virtualization suite, followed by finding a Windows ISO, and then spending an evening installing a whole OS within their OS. It's the standard advice, and for a lot of people, that's more friction than they'll ever bother with. Suffice it to say, the executable or the script will likely go straight to the Recycle Bin.

I used Google Drive for years without questioning it. My documents, photos, backups, and personal files were saved across its servers for convenience. OneDrive and Dropbox offered similar experiences, but switching between major cloud providers never felt like a real upgrade.