It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right in your web browser, complete with multiplayer?  These are unofficial versions of games, so they may sit in a legal gray area. It seems unlikely that Nintendo, for example, is particularly happy about people finding ways to play The Legend of Zelda on non-Nintendo hardware. Many of these projects are also made with the assistance of AI, which, for some people, is a non-starter given ethical or environmental concerns surrounding the technology.Below, you’ll find our coverage of gaming decomps, recomps, and all the other ways gamers are reverse-engineering games to go previously unimaginable places. Here’s a video of Half-Life: Alyx running natively on a Vision Pro. Just think: You could be playing Halo in a web browser right now. This unofficial Lego Racers remake runs in your browser with split-screen and online multiplayer. How an online community took back the Legend of Zelda

The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum and robo-mop, and it's also now the first to escape the FCC's Roomba ban. Well, sort of - because the Matic wasn't banned to begin with. Here's what's actually happening: On October 2nd, the FCC added the original Matic, model 4MA0001, and its charging dock model 4DK0008 to its ban waiver list. That allows the FCC to approve these radio products for import, marketing, and sale. But the Matic doesn't need a waiver, because its radios were already approved years ago. The FCC's foreign drone, robot, and router bans only keep future products from getting imported into the United States, not existing o …Read the full story at The Verge.

While I continue building and managing my home lab, I keep a handful of browser tabs open. One shows the Proxmox dashboard for my HP ProDesk 600 G6, with the different VMs and LXCs on the mini PC. A second tab is the router's admin page, a third is Home Assistant, and a fourth is Jellyfin. Switching between these tabs is faster with keyboard shortcuts, but it can get tiring.

People in Utah can now use AI to get a prescription for acne treatment. On Monday, healthcare startup Nolla Health announced that users in the state can scan their faces using its app, allowing its AI system to analyze acne severity and autonomously write a prescription, as reported earlier by Bloomberg.The service is launching as a pilot program with gradually loosening physician oversight. Two physicians will approve each AI-generated prescription before they're issued for the first 100 patients, but will start reviewing them only after they're prescribed for up to 500 patients. "After that, physicians review a sample of at least 10% of …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google's John Mueller says AI training crawlers usually don't offer sitemap submission and suggests default sitemap names or RSS feeds to help them find sites.The post Google’s Mueller Says AI Crawlers Access Sitemaps & RSS In His Logs appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

I got my current work laptop when I was a broke student. Granted, I’m still a broke student, but back then, all I really knew was that I wanted a MacBook and that my bank balance was embarrassing to look at. So, I went with a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, figuring it would be enough for the kind of work I do.

The retro game PC port world keeps kicking things up a notch.

For the vast majority of people, which DNS their network uses is an afterthought, and by default, it's usually set to the one their ISP runs for them. That's not a bad thing, but most ISPs select their DNS server for ease of support if something were to go wrong with your connection, not because it's the fastest or most impervious to outages. Changing it on your devices one-by-one can take up a good chunk of your time, and it's not even possible to do so on some devices. The best course of action is to change it at the router, and it takes just a few minutes to do so.

Google is fighting back against SERP tracking. The explosion of AI agents may cause it to clamp down harder.The post Google Is Fighting SERP Tracking. AI Agents May Make It Worse appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

RAM prices have shot up so much in the last year that a 32GB DDR5 kit can cost more than a flagship gaming CPU like the 9800X3D. That's a tough pill to swallow if you're planning to build a new PC today, but it's even worse if you're upgrading from an older AM4 build. And those who remember these kits being available for just $100 early last year will probably have an even harder time convincing themselves to pay four or five times as much. It's why many gamers I've talked to are totally fine sticking with AM4 until prices come down.

Google Maps is great, and Waze is even better when I need up-to-date road-condition information. Between road reports and effective rerouting, it makes getting where I want to be exceptionally easy. But a navigation app is more than that. Whether it relies on a constant data connection or collects more information about me than I'm willing to share.

The Apple Watch 12 just launched, and you can now save $50 by buying it on Amazon. The discount isn't steep, but it's the best price we've seen from any retailer, dropping it down to $350. This is the price for the 42mm Wi-Fi/GPS model, and three color options are on sale.