Buying second-hand hardware is smart if you want to keep the costs down, but it turns out that anti-cheat mechanisms in video games are getting so advanced that they can blacklist specific components from confirmed cheaters. Someone discovered this the hard way when they purchased a second-hand CPU, put it into their PC, and then got immediately banned from Valorant when they booted it up.

My colleague Cameron Faulkner models a pair of Xreal glasses. | Photo: Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Why am I suddenly buying up every 3D Blu-ray I can find after 3D became one of the biggest tech flops of all time? The technology's finally ready for 3D movies to shine, more than 15 years since James Cameron's Avatar wowed me on the big screen and went on to become the highest-grossing film worldwide. Video glasses are giving me the experience I've always desired.I've always loved 3D movies, but viewing them was awkward. Walking into a movie theater with a pair of polarized glasses, I would only get half the resolution and roughly half the brightness, since those glasses had to split one reflected image between my two eyes. Almost every …Read the full story at The Verge.

After more than 6,000 miles of driving with Google Maps, I have learned that I shouldn’t follow the blue route without thinking. It is good at getting me from point A to point B, but the route it suggests isn’t always the route I actually want to take.

For a lot of smart home weather automations, you rely on a weather report pulled from an API station located elsewhere. This means it can completely ignore the blazing sun baking your front patio or the microclimate pocket trapping cold air in your backyard. Relying on commercial weather services, whether that's OpenWeatherMap, AccuWeather, or Weather Underground, means your smart home is tied to external internet connectivity. API rate limits and delayed telemetry updates can leave your HVAC running blindly during a sudden temperature swing.

Google adds fact-checking to its AI content guidance, Gemini links show UTM tags, desktop CTR fell in Q2, and a judge dismisses two AI suits.The post Google Wants AI Content Fact-Checked, Gemini UTM Tags – SEO Pulse appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

The N100 mini PC has been an automatic recommendation for home lab use since it was introduced, and it earned that spot legitimately. It's low power with cores powerful enough to run a decent collection of services on, and it doesn't cost a fortune to leave running 24/7. It's still a good mini PC, but if you're entering into the market today and looking for something brand-new, the N150 costs about the same. Just don't overpay for it, because the N100 is still a worthy node in many respects.

As someone who loves experimenting with home servers, I’m no stranger to botched projects bringing down my virtualization nodes. However, a lot of my home labbing, data archival, and productivity needs are met by self-hosted services deployed as Docker containers, and losing them would be a huge problem for my everyday tasks. If you’re wondering, here’s a list of applications that I’d deploy first and foremost if my home server ascends to tech heaven.

About three months ago, Google offered me a deal for the Plus subscription tier where I got it at a ~75% discount for three months. It was a really good deal for improved storage space, more Gemini usage, and, the most important part for me, access to the Gemini Pro model. Unfortunately, Google has seemingly decided that the Plus subscription tier is too much of a good thing, as it's losing Pro access later this month alongside a restriction to the free tier.

After buying multiple displays over the last year, I've seen "HDMI 2.1" plastered across a cable box or a product description on Amazon way too many times. Buying a new HDMI cable, to me, seemed as simple as searching for HDMI 2.1 and adding the first cable that comes with the 2.1 tag.

Playing chess digitally, either versus a bot or a player, is always a great way to get some practice in and learn some strategies. But there's something about a physical chessboard that just feels right, you know? It's like owning a physical version of a book, a CD for your album, or the game box for your fave title.

Whether or not 2026 will become the 'year of Linux' is highly debatable, but one thing that's objectively true is that it's the year when lines were drawn in the sand over AI use in Linux projects. Now, COSMIC is the latest development team to make its stance known, as it declares a hard pass on all LLM-created content, including comments and descriptions.

I never set out to fill my Windows PC with open-source software. It happened gradually as I found tools that fit the way I work better than some of the alternatives I had tried. The surprising part came later when I realized how many of these tools were connected to Microsoft. Some are fully open source, while others have an open-source foundation with Microsoft's own additions. I had been using them for years without really thinking about where they came from. Here are a few that have become regular parts of my Windows setup, and the Microsoft connection surprised me.