Sometimes it feels like keeping your floors clean is one of those never-ending chores, which is why it's nice to have a versatile robot vacuum take it off your hands. The Ecovacs Deebot X11 robovac / mop hybrid is designed to do just that, and it's now $699 ($400 off) at Amazon and directly from Ecovacs, which is a new low price. The Deebot X11 is the latest version of one of our former top picks for the best robot vacuum / mop. While the Matic has since taken its place in our rankings, the X11 remains an excellent option, especially at nearly half the price. It combines powerful 19,500Pa suction along with a handful of features that make …Read the full story at The Verge.

The mini PC was always lumped in with netbooks and NUCs. They were great for getting basic work done, but as soon as you'd command one to do anything slightly more demanding, they would choke under their own weight. That's no longer the case, as modern mini PCs, even more affordable ones, come rocking more powerful Intel and AMD processors, allowing you to easily work and game on a device more compact than a box of tissues. This is how I can run Proxmox on a few mini PCs to create the ultimate low-power home lab cluster.

A scene from The American Experiment, one of the Netflix titles to use generative AI | Image: Netflix Netflix says roughly 300 titles on its platform used generative AI, most of which occurred in post-production. The streaming service revealed the news in its second-quarter earnings report released on Thursday, saying it's "increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost."It also provided some examples of titles that used AI, including The American Experiment, Glory, and Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri. These shows used the technology to "create highly complex sequences," including "enhanced crowds, historical battle sequences, and worldbuilding establishing shots." During Netflix's call with …Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ve been sitting on the fence about the Lifetime Plex Pass for months. I was waiting for Plex’s occasional discount windows to pop up so I could grab the lifetime subscription at a relatively low price. Instead, Plex announced that the lifetime Pass pricing tripled from $250 to $750, effective July 1st. The company claims that the new price “reflects the real, ongoing value” of the software.

The Nvidia Shield TV Pro is closing in on seven years since its 2019 launch, which should make it an easy device to ignore when there are newer streaming boxes with fresher processors, better wireless standards, and years of software support ahead of them. Somehow, the opposite has happened: every time I look closely at the current streaming-device market, I find another reason to wonder why so many newer products still ship with compromises that Nvidia avoided years ago.

If you had gathered a congregation of Linux gamers into a single room and asked them which distro they use, you'd get a pretty predictable spread of answers. Distros like CachyOS, Pop!_OS, Bazzite, and Ubuntu flavors are typically among the most popular answers, but Fedora almost never gets mentioned. It has a reputation for being a "developer's distro" that doesn't lend itself well for gaming, but the truth is, Fedora is one of the most competent bases for a gaming machine in 2026, and it's the basis for some of the more popular gaming distros today.

Kalshi users betting on what President Donald Trump would say during his speeches were reportedly up against tough competition: the president's teleprompter operator.ABC News reports that federal investigators believe Gabriel Perez - Trump's teleprompter operator since 2016 - used inside information to make bets on Kalshi, a major prediction market platform that allows users to bet on just about everything. One category that Kalshi offers is "mentions" markets, in which users try to predict what an individual will say during high-profile events.Perez is accused of betting on what Trump would say during more than a dozen events, including …Read the full story at The Verge.

CD sales are apparently going up, reportedly thanks to fans realizing they're an affordable way to support their favorite artists. According to a new report from research firm Luminate, 16.3 million CDs were sold in the first half of 2026 in the US, a 16 percent increase year-over-year. The growth in CD sales was driven by "collection building, price accessibility, massive albums such as BTS' ARIRANG and a strong K-pop release schedule," Luminate says.Even if you remove K-pop sales from the data, CD sales still went up in the US, increasing 6.7 percent. And it appears that some people aren't even buying the CDs to listen to them, as Lumina …Read the full story at The Verge.

Call me old-school, but I prefer being able to access my photo library from files and folders on my computer much more than through a web app. Years ago, Google Photos could be linked to Google Drive, but that got killed. Later, I moved over to Immich, and once again, unless I go digging into my NAS over SMB, file access is something that I'd forgotten about. RAW file and folder access is convenient when you just want to grab an image, edit a RAW file, or upload something quickly, but increasingly, if you want to use modern self-hosted tools, the world appears to be moving away from it.

Samsung’s art TV looks right at home alongside real paintings. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s Frame is different from your average 4K TV. Its biggest selling point involves what it does when you aren’t actively using it. It can display art, turning your living room into a gallery. The Frame has bezels that make it look like — you guessed it — framed art, and its matte finish can replicate paintings more naturally than your typical glossy-coated TV.Amazon currently has the 55-inch Samsung Frame on sale for $697.99, about $200 lower than its typical price. The deal is on the 2025 model that features a 4K QLED panel, 144Hz refresh rate with variable refresh rate, and HDR10 Plus support.Samsung The Frame (2025)Where to Buy: $899.99 $697.99 at Amazon (55-inch) $899.99 $699.99 at Best Buy $1697.99 $897.99 at Woot (65-inch)The Frame connects with a single cable to its included One Connect box, which contains a bunch of inputs. The box has four HDMI ports (two that support 4K at 60Hz, one with eARC for soundbars, and one that supports 4K at 144Hz for gaming), two USB-A ports, a coaxial plug for an HD antenna, Ethernet, and optical audio. Like other art TVs, the Frame underperforms in a handful of ways that might matter to you compared to other similarly-priced TVs. Our analysis of the Frame and its competitors showed that they generally have lower maximum brightness, lackluster picture quality and color accuracy, and poorer black levels, all of which can have a negative impact on how movies, TV shows and games look. Despite its drawbacks, the Frame might be a nice compromise between dominating your living room with a TV or hanging up a painting.

After installing and reinstalling apps, building the browser and file cache, and applying system updates, any OS starts to become bogged down. That is especially true for Windows on low-capacity drives. Adding RAM and an SSD to an older machine instantly improves performance. But what about adding a second SSD?

New York Governor Kathy Hochul might have just signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in the state, but she's not against using the technology herself. During an interview with Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, Hochul said that her team is using "AI to analyze every single rule, regulation, [and] policy" to check for outdated legislation.Some of the antiquated laws mentioned by Hochul in the interview include a $25 fee required to take a dog hunting, or a stipulation that pregnant people need a permit to work after midnight. Hochul added that it "probably would have taken five years at the staff level" to review all of the laws in the stat …Read the full story at The Verge.