Bryan, a food broker from Michigan, wasn't sure if he'd be able to make it to urgent care in time. He started feeling off on Thursday, and by Saturday, he was having to use the bathroom every 15 to 30 minutes."It's no joke about the explosive diarrhea," Bryan, who asked that his last name be withheld for obvious reasons, told me. I met him via Reddit, where I recently spent hours lurking in threads about cyclosporiasis, the explosive diarrhea illness infecting people across the country, and Cyclospora cayetanensis, the microscopic parasite that causes it, which spreads through human fecal contamination. Symptoms - including nausea, loss of …Read the full story at The Verge.

New AI models are dropping faster than most of us can even try them. Anthropic alone has been rolling out Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5, and then Fable 5, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol just went public after weeks of preview. Grok's next version isn't far behind either. The catch with almost all of them is they're built by US companies, which means they now sit under US government review before they even reach us. Fable 5 got yanked globally back in June after a Commerce Department directive, and Sol's release was gated by the same kind of process. So even when a model launches, its availability isn't really guaranteed anymore.

Roblox will be shutting down Roblox Connect, its video calling service introduced in 2023.Roblox Connect let you video chat with other people using your Roblox avatar, which would be able to mimic the movements you were making in real life. You could also run around with people on the call in a shared virtual environment. But in a statement, the company says that users 13 and older "predominantly" chat via the platform's party voice chat functionality for calls."Roblox Connect is being discontinued today, including both the developer-facing APIs and the Roblox Connect feature itself," Roblox spokesperson Angela Allison tells The Verge. " …Read the full story at The Verge.

A recent post on the r/SteamDeck subreddit hints that Valve might soon discontinue official Steam Deck LCD repair parts.

Skelly returns for 2026 with some new capabilities. | Image: Home Depot The Home Depot is once again upgrading its 12-foot-tall skeleton to help keep the viral piece of Halloween decor popular as spooky season creeps closer. Skelly is borrowing some of the tech introduced in the smaller 6.5-foot Ultra Skelly last year, including letting you speak through the skeleton's moving mouth using a mobile app. The new version of Skelly will be available online starting tomorrow for $379 and in Home Depot's stores later this summer, along with a new collection of Halloween characters.Skelly was last upgraded two years ago with eight different animations for its animated LCD eyes, but the new version bumps that to 20 dif …Read the full story at The Verge.

This weekend, cinephiles across the world will march to their local theaters to feast their eyes on Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of The Odyssey. It's on track to rake in anywhere between $80-$100 million in just a few days. People are clearly excited to see how Nolan uses cutting-edge filmmaking tech to make the Homeric classic feel fresh. But another director is trying to capitalize on the buzz around Nolan's project to drum up interest in an Odysseus-focused movie of his own.On Tuesday, film studio Fountain 0 announced that it is working on an AI-generated reimagining of The Odyssey titled Odysseus: The Fall, which will be availabl …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's not often that a motherboard becomes the best deal in the PC market. These are components that launch, sell at roughly the same price for a couple of years, and then disappear from the market. However, in 2026, this pattern seems to be undergoing another change never seen before, thanks to the DRAM crisis and the consequent historic lows in the sales of PC components.

A new teaser for Google's upcoming Pixel 11 lineup reveals that the phones will feature some kind of glowing orb on the camera bar, as reported by 9to5Google.Google's store page for the Pixel 11 has a short video that shows the glowing, color-shifting orb to the one side of the camera bar. The store page doesn't share any more information about it, but perhaps the orb is the "Pixel Glow" light feature that has popped up in Android 17 betas. If I had to guess, the orb will likely have something to do with Google's Gemini AI.We probably won't have to wait too much longer to learn what the orb is all about. Google has announced an August 12 …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm all for making the most of stuff you already own or has been used. It's a large part why we've sourced much of what we've purchased since buying our first home from Facebook Marketplace and other classified sites. You can often find absolute bargains on some top-notch quality furniture, devices, and more. It was only a few days ago we traveled 40 miles to collect a solid wood coffee table with internal storage. The same goes for technology, especially hardware I already own. I've used old phones and tablets as smart home dashboards, but I also have one on my desk as a clock, calendar, and smart home remote.

Most of the day, I'm writing or gaming on my PC, where an Ethernet connection keeps things snappy and consistent. My phone and TV, however, are still susceptible to the mood swings of Wi-Fi, where unexplained latency can creep up anytime. Either YouTube videos would take an arduously long time to buffer, or sharing images and videos on WhatsApp would stall inexplicably. I've tweaked many router settings already in an attempt to remove possible drag on the Wi-Fi, but the performance was still not where it used to be. Bandwidth was not the problem, and I was running out of quick fixes. That's when I decided to experiment with the router's transmit power, a setting that I always kept at 100%. Reducing it actually improved the Wi-Fi speed and latency on my phone, and I wish I'd tweaked it sooner. Lower transmit power can actually improve your Wi-Fi by limiting the interference from neighboring networks and allowing easier communication with client devices.

Recent structural changes are shaking up the entertainment industry. Sony recently announced that it's completely halting physical PlayStation disc production by January 2028, and Microsoft's adjacent roadmap seems to be moving towards an entirely disc-less next-generation hardware footprint too. This was followed by Sony pulling 551 movies and TV shows from PlayStation users' libraries without any refunds or monetary compensation in return.

YouTube is hands down my most-used streaming service. I obviously don't have a problem with my copious use of the platform, but I do have a problem with the direction that it's taking. More often than not, I just want to catch up on the creators that I actually subscribe to. I want to be able to see everything new that they have produced, be it a camera review or a travel video. However, lately,YouTube's homepage is filled with recommendations, short videos, and contentI'm not actually subscribed to. I get it, it's great for surfacing new creators. But what about the creators that I already follow? You might say that I can scroll over to the subscription tab, but it's not a perfect way to follow my own feed.