The Microsoft Zune is mostly just a footnote in tech history. Microsoft spent years - and vast sums of money - trying to create a true competitor to Apple's iPod, without ever coming close to actually pulling it off. The Zune was simply too little, too late.You know what's surprising about the Zune, though? Microsoft made a lot of the right bets with the Zune. The company saw - well ahead of most of the rest of the tech industry - that adding social features could make its product stickier. It understood that these pocketable devices might eventually be useful for much more than just music. And it had a bunch of interface design ideas that …Read the full story at The Verge.

Lake Mungo is haunting and heartbreaking. Found footage movies are tough to pull off. For every classic like The Blair Witch Project or Rec, there are 100 movies like Slender and Megan Is Missing that are, at best, forgettable, and at worst, an affront to the very concept of cinema. My personal favorite, though, is Lake Mungo, a slow burn mockumentary with found footage elements that manages to be both creepy and emotionally wrenching. Oh, and it's gloriously concise at under an hour and a half. Lake Mungo is, first and foremost, one of the most convincingly realized mockumentary ever made. If you told someone it was a legit documentary about a supposed haunting, there's a chance …Read the full story at The Verge.

Developers of all scale work with APIs all day long. Whether building APIs, debugging them, or integrating them into an existing project. You've probably come across APIs when trying to connect multiple self-hosted tools as well. Now, I'm no expert, but my previous experience with using Postman for API testing has been anything but easy. The feature set is complex, and while Postman can accomplish a lot, it can be overkill for users with simpler needs.

Note-taking is a part of modern life. Whether it's for work, study, or daily journaling, everyone needs to capture and manage their ideas. People often juggle between popular apps like Evernote and Google Keep, trying to find the perfect fit. However, the truth is, there are many great options out there built for users who demand more.

Asus is expected to update the ROG Ally X with the new AMD Ryzen Z2 series APUs in the near future, to match up with the recently launched ROG Xbox Ally X. Of course, Asus could simply call this future handheld the ROG Ally 2, but Asus doesn't tend to go for numerical iterations on any of its existing laptop or desktop brands, so that feels unlikely.

If you've got to work from home on a laptop for any period of time, there are a few inconveniences built into the laptop experience that make a hybrid work environment somewhat lacking. While there are a number of laptop accessories you can buy and home office upgrades you can snag to make working off your laptop easier, the one small change I made to my home office that really made a difference was a simple USB-C adapter.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the real-world effects of Trump's tariffs, follow Mia Sato. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedThe economists tried to warn us. From the beginning, trade policy experts cautioned that tariffs would raise consumer prices and wouldn't create the American manufacturing renaissance that the Trump administration promised. One thing that I wrote about tariffs back in February keeps popping in my head: When I asked economists and policy folks what high tariffs would actu …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you have a computer desk at home, chances are you're either using a big desktop computer with a monitor and other peripherals, or you're just using a laptop with everything built in. Those are fine solutions, but they're limiting in their own ways. A desktop PC and setup isn't really portable, and a laptop by itself isn't the most efficient in terms of the productivity you can get at home.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 104, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy belated Halloween, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about lotteries and Jennifer Lawrence and religious AI, shame-watching Finding Mr. Christmas, turning MyMind into my daily journal / commonplace book, learning a lot about Taylor Sheridan for some reason, letting James Hoffman teach me about cold brew, attempting to replace most of my laptop time with iPad Pro time, and trying my very best to not eat all our Halloween candy ahead of time. …Read the full story at The Verge.

When PC gamers seek motherboards, they focus on numbers such as that of the M.2 slots, USB ports, or even the PCIe slots. Choosing a motherboard for your CPU means you'll be looking at many boards based on your budget and needs for features and performance. The interesting thing is: any motherboard you buy will have the same amount of currency (given it's from the same chipset) to spend: the number of PCIe lanes available.

There is no more chaotic activity than willfully entering a grocery store without a list.I know. Some people thrive on vibes-based grocery shopping. They can come up with meals on the fly, buy what's on sale and work around that, or follow some bizarre "3-3-2-2-1" rule or whatever I'm always seeing on Instagram. I am not one of these people. But while I know a list is essential for my survival at the store, I've never been able to work out a reliable meal planning and grocery list-making system. Every week I write out a list by hand, and every week I forget something crucial. So I asked myself, as I so often do when confronted with a pro …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s NotebookLM is many things. It’s not just a study buddy for stressed-out students or a research assistant for academics. It’s surprisingly flexible, and honestly, half the fun is figuring out creative ways to use it.