Considering switching operating systems seems to have become almost idiosyncratic for the average Windows 11 user. Perhaps on a Monday you'll realize that the Windows recovery environment is broken and can't help you when your SSD develops an issue, costing you hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. On a random Tuesday, you might come to notice that File Explorer is broken after a routine update. Then maybe on a Friday you'll spend thirty minutes disabling its adware so that your desktop can stop trying to sell you OneDrive storage.

Putting together a home lab can be as simple as reusing an old desktop or buying a new mini PC and calling it a day, but you can make better use of older hardware you may have lying around that goes beyond full systems. It's actually one of the most satisfying parts of building and running my home lab, providing old parts with a second life. Instead of sending everything to e-waste, we can easily repurpose older stuff to get even more from existing purchases.

For most drivers, Apple CarPlay is a glorified jukebox and a GPS navigator – nothing more than a mirrored screen for Spotify and Google Maps. But if you are only using it to find the nearest coffee shop or skip a track, you are probably scratching of what your dashboard can actually do.

Beast Industries, owned by YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson, announced on Monday that it has acquired Step, a banking app designed for teens and young adults. The move comes a couple of months after Donaldson announced plans to start a new YouTube channel centered on personal finance and investing. His main channel has 466 million subscribers and has long been one of the most popular on YouTube, frequently featuring videos where Donaldson gives away huge sums of money. MrBeast's other business ventures also include a chain of ghost restaurants, the Feastables snack brand, and an upcoming phone service company called Beast Mobile. This is …Read the full story at The Verge.

A screenshot of a demo from the Fluorite engine. Using a game engine in a "digital cockpit" is useful for things like step-by-step 3D tutorials about a car, mapping the environment around your car, and offering more natural controls, explained Jamie Kerber, an employee of Very Good Ventures, at the FOSDEM 2026 conference. She's a lead engineer on Fluorite, a game engine for use in cars developed by her company as well as Toyota Connected North America and the Automotive Grade Linux project, as reported earlier by Eurogamer and Game*Spark.Epic Games has made a big push for car companies to use Unreal Engine to power those in-car interfaces and visualize them for design and marketing, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Riot Games is already "reducing the size" of the team working on its recently-released free-to-play fighting game 2XKO, according to a post from executive producer Tom Cannon. The game, set in the League of Legends universe, launched in early access on PC in October and hit consoles just a few weeks ago.2XKO has been in development for years, with Riot first announcing the project under the codename Project L in 2019 as part of broader plans to expand the company's lineup beyond League of Legends. While some of Riot's expansion ideas have worked out, including Netflix's animated series Arcane and the tactical shooter that would eventually …Read the full story at The Verge.

Although home labs are versatile enough to accommodate any ol’ computing device, certain systems are far too underpowered for hardcore projects. Take the Raspberry Pi, for example. Sure, it can double as a reliable self-hosting node with lightweight containers, but unless you opt for CLI images and use a high-end RPi 5 model, the average Raspberry Pi’s VM deployment capabilities are pretty limited, and the same holds true about its compatibility with virtualization platforms.

One year and nearly 2,000 pages of documents later, a group suing to uncover what the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was doing at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says the agency has withheld relevant documents "in bad faith" and is asking a court to allow discovery and depositions to draw out the information. "Thus far, the Defendant has sought to delay document production, and when pressed by this Court to act, Defendant has produced only sanitized email threads," Arthur Belendiuk, attorney for advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh, who together filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) re …Read the full story at The Verge.

Valentine's Day often comes with more pressure than it needs to. At heart, though, February 14th is about showing appreciation for the people you care about in ways that feel thoughtful and sincere. And while big displays of romance can do that, it's often the quieter, more personal gestures - or a meaningful gift that makes life just a little more enjoyable - that matter most.Below, we've rounded up gift ideas that, in our experience, do just that. Some are practical picks, like a pair of noise-canceling earbuds meant to help you focus or a pair of USB-C hand warmers for those cold, blustery days back east. Others, such as Renpho's eye ma …Read the full story at The Verge.

How often do you copy things on your computer? If you're like most of us, the answer is pretty often. While Windows has a built-in clipboard manager, it doesn't offer much beyond the most basic features. As for macOS, its clipboard manager is hidden by default (and only available on machines running Sequoia or later). But that's a missed opportunity, because a clipboard manager is something every OS should provide. And of all the options available, Ditto is hard to beat.

Ads will appear as labeled “sponsored” links. | Image: OpenAI ChatGPT users may soon start seeing ads in their chats, as OpenAI announced on Monday that it's officially beginning to test ads on its AI platform. They'll appear as labeled "sponsored" links at the bottom of ChatGPT answers, but OpenAI says the ads "do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives you." Currently, ads will only show up for users on the free version of ChatGPT or the lowest-cost $8 per month Go plan. Users in the Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education plans won't see any ads, so anyone who wants to avoid them has to pay at least $20 per month for the Plus subscription. There is one loophole - OpenAI notes that users can …Read the full story at The Verge.

Motorola makes some of the best foldable phones you can buy. And the Razr Ultra sits at the very top, featuring a sleek design, impressive power, and an eye-watering price tag. Luckily, we're now seeing a stellar discount that drops the price down to something more reasonable. For a very limited time, you can score this Razr Ultra bundle for just $800. That's a whopping $700 off the original retail price, and comes with a free pair of wireless earbuds.