There’s gold at the end of those AI travel queries. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge I was starting to doubt it would ever happen, but I finally found a regular, helpful use for AI: vanlife travel planner. I'm not a student and I don't code. I am, however, on day 48 of my van tour through Europe with my wife and dog. We travel without a specific itinerary, chasing the wind and sun while working our 9 to 5 jobs. AI's mastery of travel planning has made it an unexpected but irreplaceable expert. So much so that we've grown increasingly dependent upon the free versions of Gemini and ChatGPT to help choose our next destination. It all started with a simple query. Tired after a 25km hike with only a few hours left of daylight …Read the full story at The Verge.

Epic Games is teaming up with arguably its biggest game development rival, Unity, to bring games made using Unity’s engine into Fortnite. The change will mean that Unity games could sit alongside Epic’s own suite of experiences as well as those created by third-party developers using the Unreal Editor for Fortnite — and it opens the door for significantly more games to be available to play within Fortnite.“Just like the early days of the web, we believe that companies need to work together in order to build the open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says in a statement. “Working alongside Unity we’re helping developers build fun games, reach bigger audiences, and find success.”The change represents an important step in Epic’s long-running vision of turning Fortnite into an open metaverse that’s a big 3D social space with a huge number of experiences to participate in with your friends. Epic has been marching down this path for years with Fortnite itself by putting an increased focus on creator-made experiences and making browsing through those experiences in the Fortnite lobby feel like scrolling YouTube. You can even check out experiences on the web — and buy new Fortnite outfits in your browser, too.Right now, Fortnite is a closed ecosystem, meaning that creators can only make games for the platform using Epic’s tools, can’t (yet) easily drop those games into Unreal Engine to bring them to other platforms, or bring experiences built on other engines into Fortnite. But even in 2023, Tim Sweeney was telling The Verge how much he believed in the future of interoperable game engines being key to his vision.Epic has had some success expanding Fortnite from being a battle royale into a broad, Roblox-like ecosystem with games from outside creators. By the end of last year, it had 70,000 total creators that published nearly 200,000 “islands,” or Fortnite’s term for experiences. But the Unity Editor, which is designed to help developers build their games once and run them across multiple platforms, has more than 1.2 million monthly active users. Even a fraction of those developers also bringing their games to Fortnite could add a lot to the platform.The plan is to allow Unity games to come to Fortnite next year, Matt Bromberg, President and CEO of Unity, tells The Verge.The partnership potentially gives developers another potential avenue to find an audience and monetize their games, which could be a lifeline for smaller developers amid continued industry struggles and layoffs. It could also consolidate even more power into Fortnite, which is already a behemoth. But Sweeney actually envisions a world for Fortnite that’s much more decentralized — more like the open web.“Fortnite’s still this big thing operated by Epic completely,” Sweeney says. “But there will be a day when you can, from the program that’s currently called Fortnite, go to other sites that are completely controlled by other companies. We have nothing to do with them. We make no revenue from them. We don’t have commercial agreements with them. They’re just like websites on the web.” Today’s news with Unity is the first opportunity for “the rubber to meet the road” of engines that are operating together.For now, whether a creator makes a Fortnite experience using Fortnite’s tools or with Unity, Sweeney says there will be a review process to ensure that it’s “ratings-compliant and works adequately.” But in the future, “as this evolves into a completely open system, we’d only have reviews for stuff that we host, and anybody would be able to put anything anywhere, and people would be able to browse to it like you do in a web browser today.”Allowing Unity games will “greatly expand the developer base,” Sweeney says. “The challenge of building content in Fortnite today is you start from scratch.” You can’t currently take an Unreal Engine game and deploy it into Fortnite — that’s something that Epic is aiming for with Unreal Engine 6, which is likely years away. Ironically, Sweeney says, “publishing Unity games into Fortnite will happen before publishing standalone Unreal Engine games into Fortnite.”There’s a second component to today’s news, too: Unity will bring support for Unreal Engine to the commerce management platform it announced last month, which lets developers manage their digital storefronts across many platforms from all inside Unity Engine. That was pitched at the time as a way to make it much easier to deal with the complexities of different storefronts and payment processors.Bringing support for Unreal Engine to the platform gives developers “more choice around how they build stores and how they manage those stores,” Bromberg says. “Ultimately, I think the thing that Tim and I couldn’t agree any more strongly on is that having more choice and more places where developers can build things and giving them more control over their destinies is the most important thing we can do to help the gaming ecosystem.”

The Game Awards nominations just dropped, and with them, comes the annual ritual all gamers secretly love: celebrating the deserving, arguing about the questionable, and rallying behind the brutally snubbed. 2025's lineup is stacked, which isn't surprising at all, and plenty of games are rightfully getting their flowers.

Windows 11’s File Explorer works, but it lacks the features that would make it easier to use. After using the Files app from the Microsoft Store, I didn’t go back. I was able to do and enjoy things I didn’t with the default one. For example, with the Files app, I could add a “Photos tag” to an image I wanted to access quickly.

The promise of the public cloud often comes with the silent killer of cost creep and a loss of data control. The solution wasn’t a bigger server or dozens of SSDs; it was a radical simplification. What if you could achieve the same seamless file access, real-time synchronization, and remote functionality without the hefty recurring fees?

Valve just made a huge splash in the VR market, announcing a streaming-first VR headset alongside a compact PC and a new controller. The Steam Machine and Steam Controller are making ripples of their own, but the Steam Frame might just be the most disruptive product Valve has announced since the Steam Deck. It might not boast the cutting-edge specs you'd expect from a 2026 VR headset, but the secret ingredient might just be Valve's SteamOS ecosystem powering the goods.

I really think the world needs more cyberdecks. They're cool portable computers, usually powered by slim yet capable hardware, packaged inside a case that makes you feel like some sort of hacker as you use it.

Not having enough storage can easily become a huge problem, which is why it's always a good idea to expand when you can, so you're never in a situation that leads to deleting files you still need. Although storage used to be pretty cheap just a couple of years ago, prices have risen and pretty much stayed the same for a good chunk of time now, making it hard to pick up storage at a good price.

Most journaling apps want you to free-write into the void. They promise mindfulness through blank pages and gentle prompts, but I kept abandoning them after a week. The problem was that I needed structure, not serenity. So I built my own journaling system inside ClickUp, a project management tool designed for teams shipping software, not people tracking their feelings. The free tier gave me enough room to create a "daily wins" tracker that finally made burnout visible before it became a crisis.

The MS605 has an articulated installation plate allowing the angle of the sensor to be adjusted. | Image: Meross Meross has announced a new version of its MS600 presence sensor that’s now battery-powered, so installation isn’t limited to places where you can camouflage a power cord. A single CR123A battery powers the new MS605 presence sensor for up to three years. Battery life may be reduced in high-traffic areas if the sensor is activated more frequently. It’s available for preorder now through Meross’ online store and discounted to $34.99 for a limited time.The switch to battery power is made possible by another new feature: support for Matter over the low-power Thread protocol. The MS605’s year-old predecessor was also Matter-compatible, but over Wi-Fi. You’ll need to make sure you have a Thread-capable hub somewhere in your home to use the MS605 with Google Home, Apple Home, or Alexa, but it doesn’t have to be a Meross hub.The MS605 has a similar design to the older MS600 and carries forward its articulated mounting plate, allowing the sensor to be angled up to 90 degrees and rotated 360 degrees. It’s been upgraded with an IP67 waterproof rating so it can now be used outdoors. It also offers the same combination of light, passive infrared (PIR), and 24GHz mmWave radar sensors used to detect people in motion or standing still, and to differentiate inanimate moving objects, like a window curtain, from humans. The only real downside to the battery is that the MS605’s range has been reduced to 6 meters (from 12) for motion and 4 meters (from 6) for presence detection.

A blog post published Tuesday night by Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has details on what caused its “worst outage since 2019,” pinning the issue to a problem in the Bot Management system that is supposed to control which automated crawlers are allowed to scan particular websites using its CDN.Cloudflare said last year that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network, which is supposed to share the load to keep websites online in the face of traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. But today’s crash disconnected many of them, knocking out everything from X to ChatGPT to the well-known outage tracker Downdetector for several hours and resembling recent outages caused by problems with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.Cloudflare’s bot controls are supposed to help deal with problems like crawlers scraping information to train generative AI. It also recently announced a system that uses Generative AI to build the “AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect ‘no crawl’ directives.” However, it says the problems today were due to changes to the permissions system of a database, not the generative AI tech, not DNS, and not what Cloudflare initially suspected, a cyberattack or malicious activity like a “hyper-scale DDoS attack.”According to Prince, the machine learning model behind Bot Management that generates bot scores for the requests that travel over its network has a frequently updated configuration file that helps ID automated requests; however, “A change in our underlying ClickHouse query behaviour that generates this file caused it to have a large number of duplicate ‘feature’ rows.”There’s more detail in the post about what happened next, but the query change caused its ClickHouse database to generate duplicates of information. As the configuration file rapidly grew to exceed preset memory limits, it took down “the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module.” As a result, companies that used Cloudflare’s rules to block certain bots returned false positives and cut off real traffic, while Cloudflare customers who didn’t use the generated bot score in their rules remained online. For now, it lists four specific plans to keep this kind of problem from happening again, even if the growing centralization of internet services may make these outages inevitable:Hardening ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files in the same way we would for user-generated inputEnabling more global kill switches for featuresEliminating the ability for core dumps or other error reports to overwhelm system resourcesReviewing failure modes for error conditions across all core proxy modules

If there's anything I've learned from the XDA Developers writing team, it's that you don't get between a tinkerer and their coffee. Tech-heads are at their nicest when they've had their morning caffeine; without it, they go through a similar transformation that Bruce Banner takes when he becomes The Hulk.