Rode’s Wireless Micro Camera Kit includes a charging case to extend the battery life of its receivers and mics. | Image: Rode Last November, Rode launched its Wireless Micro microphone system that paired two tiny lavalier mics with a small receiver that connected to your phone’s charging port. Rode later gave that product a free upgrade, sending out another receiver that let the mics connect to digital cameras, too. Now, the company is launching an updated version of that receiver with an OLED screen — but this time, it’s charging for it.The new version of Rode’s wireless camera receiver is now available as part of a Wireless Micro Camera Kit that bundles it with two Wireless Micro lavalier mics and an additional wireless receiver used to connect the mics to mobile devices using their USB-C or Lightning ports. The kit is priced at $149, which is what Rode’s Wireless Micro system was initially priced at when it launched last November (minus a camera receiver) before getting a price cut earlier this month to $99 when new color options were introduced. Rode’s wireless lav mics still don’t offer as much functionality as DJI’s offerings like the Mic Mini or Mic 3, but they’re more competitively priced.As with the original, the new receiver is designed to sit atop cameras by connecting to their cold shoe mount while audio from up to two wireless mics is delivered to the camera through a USB-C or 3.5mm audio cable. Battery life is estimated to be up to seven hours and is maximized by the receiver only powering on when it’s connected to a camera. The receiver’s runtime can be further extended to up to 21 hours using the Wireless Micro Camera Kit’s charging case when you’re away from a power source.The 1.1-inch OLED screen shows details about the battery life and signal strength of the receiver and wirelessly connected devices. It works alongside three buttons for navigating and adjusting various settings including gain assist levels, but for ease of use the receiver can also make those adjustments automatically to suppress volume spikes and ensure all the audio coming into the camera is perfectly balanced.

It's strange to think how many of the best, most memorable video games out there started as pen-and-paper campaigns around someone's kitchen table. Before they became cinematic, controller-clutching experiences, they were dice rolls, character sheets, and fueled by nothing but pure imaginations.

The Samsung 990 Pro has been around for a few years now, but is still one of the best Gen4 SSDs that you can buy. This particular model comes with a heatsink, allowing for better sustained performance, even in tight spaces. We gave this SSD high marks when we reviewed it, and it's perfect for upgrading the storage on your PC, laptop, gaming console, and other compatible devices.

Xbox sales have been tanking for a while now — and the story hasn’t gotten any brighter. Microsoft just released its Q1 2026 earnings and Xbox hardware revenue was down 29 percent year-over-year. Last quarter, it was down 22 percent. Down 29 percent in the first two quarters of 2025, down 42 percent in Q4 of 2024… You get the picture. As tariffs and inflation take their toll, Microsoft has dramatically increased the prices on its gaming hardware, with the Series X now starting at $599.99. Microsoft’s response has been to deemphasize the console and pursue an “Xbox everywhere” strategy. That has yielded some success on the content and services front, though revenue there was largely flat this quarter, only growing one percent year over year.Microsoft would obviously like to see more growth there. The company has reportedly been pursuing dramatic 30 percent profit margins there, leading to layoffs and cancelled projects. But the company’s outlook for Q2 isn’t much rosier. It expects Xbox hardware revenue to continue to decline, and content and services to continue low-single digits growth. Microsoft did see hardware growth from Windows OEM and Devices, with revenue increasing a modest 6 percent year over year. The company stopped reporting Surface earnings separately, so it’s unclear how those devices are performing. They had been on a steady decline for several years.It’s Azure and cloud services that remain the driving force behind Microsoft’s ascent. The growth of its intelligent cloud services is substantial. Revenue increased 28 percent year over year to $30.9 billion, with Azure specifically growing 40 percent. More broadly, Microsoft Cloud revenue was $49.1 billion, an increase of 26 percent from Q1 2025. The company’s cloud divisions and Azure have been growing steadily for several years now. In total, Microsoft reported $77.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 18 percent from the same time last year. And its net income was $27.7 billion, up 12 percent. While those increases are largely driven by the company’s various cloud offerings, its productivity and business processes still account for a significant portion of its income ($33 billion).Update, October 29th: This article was updated with details from Microsoft’s earnings call. The headline was also updated to specify that it was hardware sales that were down.

Kat Abughazaleh, who has announced a campaign for Illinois' 9th Congressional District, carries yard signs into her campaign office Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Palestinian American and Democratic candidate for Congress in the 9th District of Illinois, has been indicted by the Department of Justice on charges connected to protests outside an ICE facility. The indictment alleges that Abughazaleh and a handful of other protesters conspired on the morning of September 26th to prevent an ICE agent “from discharging the duties of his office, and to injure him in his person or property.”The indictment accuses Abughazaleh and the other protesters named in it of banging on an ICE agent’s car and attempting to stop it from entering an ICE facility by physically surrounding it, scratching the word “PIG” into the car, breaking a side mirror, and breaking off a rear windshield wiper. As MSNBC reports, other defendants include Michael Rabbitt, a Cook County Democratic Committee member, and Cat Sharp, a candidate for the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and the charges of assaulting an officer can carry prison sentences of up to eight years.A video of Abughazaleh being thrown to the ground by an ICE agent outside the Broadview facility went viral in September, and on the same morning as the incident cited in the indictment, she posted a video on X of her and other protesters surrounding an ICE vehicle. As MSNBC notes, in recent weeks, right-wing accounts have repeatedly posted about her videos, calling for her to be arrested and tagging US Attorney General Pam Bondi. At the same time, Trump has said that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be jailed for allegedly “failing to protect” ICE officers. The Trump Administration has also charged or threatened criminal charges against others who’ve opposed his agenda, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Abughazaleh, who has a background as a journalist and influencer on social media channels like Twitch, posted a video today responding to the indictment, stating:“This is a political prosecution, and a gross attempt to silence dissent, a right protected under the First Amendment. This case is a major push by the Trump administration to criminalize protest and punish anyone who speaks out against them. That’s why I’m going to fight these unjust charges.”Abughazaleh goes on to note that “ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and teargassed hundreds of protesters.” She also calls out the Trump administration for “weaponizing the federal justice system” to scare protesters, but vows “we’re not going to be silent.” “This case targets our rights to protest, speak freely, and associate with anyone who disagrees with the government.” 

Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, has experienced an outage just one week after issues with AWS took out swaths of the internet. The issues impacted Microsoft’s services that run on Azure, including Microsoft 365, Xbox, and even Minecraft. Other companies, like Capital One, Alaska Airlines, and Starbucks, also had outages that were linked to the problems with Azure.On Azure’s status page, Microsoft’s messages have linked the outage to an “inadvertent configuration change” and DNS problem. As Microsoft reported its earnings on Wednesday afternoon, its main website continued to load slowly as the outage dragged on.An update on Microsoft’s status page at 7:40PM ET included this information:Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, customers and Microsoft services leveraging Azure Front Door (AFD) may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors. We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue.Affected Azure services may have included, but were not limited to:App Service, Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Communication Services, Azure Databricks, Azure Healthcare APIs, Azure Maps, Azure Portal, Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Desktop, Container Registry, Media Services, Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management, Microsoft Entra ID (Mobility Management Policy Service, Identity & Access Management, and User Management UX), Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Sentinel (Threat Intelligence), and Video Indexer.The AFD service is now operating above 98% availability. While the majority of customers and services are mitigated or seeing strong improvement across affected regions, we are continuing to work on tail-end recovery for remaining impacted customers and services. We have revised our mitigation time and are currently tracking toward full mitigation by 00:40 UTC on 30 October 2025, though we will communicate if mitigation is achieved sooner.The Xbox Support X account also says that gaming services have recovered to their pre-incident state; however, some players said they needed to restart their consoles to reconnect.At 12:25PM ET, Microsoft 365’s status account on X said the company is investigating reports of “issues accessing Microsoft 365 services and the Microsoft 365 admin center.” A Microsoft 365 update posted at 1:02PM ET said the company “identified portions of internal infrastructure that are experiencing connectivity issues,” and that it’s working to “reroute affected traffic to restore service health.” Meanwhile, Xbox’s status page still wasn’t loading, but that has since come back online.The outage stretched beyond Microsoft’s services, as Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines said they were “currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites” due to issues with Azure. The airlines advise customers to see an agent at the airport to get their boarding pass if they couldn’t check in online.Community Fibre, an internet provider in the UK, similarly confirmed that some customers may have experienced issues due to the Microsoft outage. Additionally, Kroger told customers that its site and mobile apps were “experiencing an unexpected outage,” while Starbucks’ and Costco’s websites and apps weren’t loading, and users reported issues with Capital One.A global outage impacted the Microsoft Azure platform today where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, causing a disruption to key systems, including our websites.Our teams worked quickly to stand up our backup infrastructure to allow our guests to book and…— Alaska Airlines News (@AlaskaAirNews) October 29, 2025Our configuration deployment and traffic rebalancing is showing steady service health improvement for the various affected M365 services. Some users may experience residual impact until availability fully recovers. We're monitoring for an extended period to ensure service health…— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 29, 2025All Xbox Services have recovered to their pre-incident state. Thank you for your patience while we addressed this issue.— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) October 29, 2025Update, October 29th: Added details on recovery.

Having built and deployed a few firewalls before launching one at home, I'd like to think I know a thing or two about getting it right. Thankfully, if you're choosing between OPNsense and pfSense, it's difficult to get it wrong since even as a default installation. Both are fairly secure and will do a stellar job at keeping unwanted parties from gaining access to your local area network (LAN). But there are still some things I wish I had been told when I built my first firewall.

At a Senate hearing Wednesday on government censorship of tech platforms, a Meta executive expressed regret to Republican lawmakers for failing to speak out more against the Biden administration's requests that it remove health and election misinformation, including satire. Google, meanwhile, held firm in its stance, saying that evaluating - and often rejecting - government content requests is business as usual. Democrats questioned why Congress was relitigating years-old moderation decisions instead of the Trump administration's recent speech crackdown - even as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) hopes to recruit them for a new anti-jawboning bill. An …Read the full story at The Verge.

Running a self-hosted stack feels great. You spin up your first container, set up your first Nginx reverse proxy, maybe a Plex or Jellyfin server. It all feels great running your server, owning your hardware, software stack, data, and defining your own rules. Except when it comes crashing down. Trust me, as a seasoned self-hoster, even I'm guilty of losing track of what's happening under the hood. As your stack grows, containers crash, memory spikes happen, hard disks or SSDs start filling up, and you find yourself SSH-ing into your machine trying to make sense of everything.

There are a lot of different ways to go if you're looking for a new mouse. But if you want something that's a little different, that promises better comfort than the traditional mouse, we think this one from Logitech is going to be a good choice.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is getting ready to dump even more AI-generated posts into your social feeds. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company will “add yet another huge corpus of content” to its recommendations system as AI “makes it easier to create and remix” work that gets shared online.“Social media has gone through two eras so far,” Zuckerberg said. “First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the Creator content.” Though Zuckerberg stops short of calling AI the third era of social media, it’s clear that the technology will be heavily involved in what comes next.Zuckerberg said that recommendation systems that “deeply understand” AI-generated posts and “show you the right content” will become “increasingly valuable.” The company has already begun embedding AI tools across its apps and is now experimenting with dedicated AI social apps, too.Meta CFO Susan Li said people generated over 20 billion images within the company’s new Vibes app, which serves up a feed of AI-generated videos, similar to OpenAI’s Sora. “I think that Vibes is an example of a new content type enabled by AI, and I think that there are more opportunities to build many more novel types of content ahead,” Zuckerberg added.Meta reported revenue of $51.24 billion this quarter, up 26 percent year over year, but took a one-time $15.93 billion tax charge associated with President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

As a PC user, diagnosing performance issues, blue screens, and weird behavior comes with the territory. Windows is often the culprit behind many of these problems, but it also has a built-in diagnostic tool you've probably never taken seriously. Event Viewer is an underrated tool that offers deep insight into everything that happens on your PC. It keeps a log of every single occurrence on your system, from system and application to security-related events. These detailed logs can offer you unprecedented clarity about why your PC has been acting up. Instead of rushing to third-party tools, you ought to check out Event Viewer first.