If you're tired of seeing Instagram posts with a seemingly endless list of hashtags, Instagram is making a change to stop that. In a post today, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that the platform will now cap hashtags to five per post."While I know it can be tempting to use more, a few specific tags actually perform better than a long list of generic ones," Mosseri says on his "Instagram advice" channel. "Quality over quantity is key." Mosseri notes that hashtags do help with search, but "don't increase your reach" - instead, you should "focus on working out what kind of content resonates with your audience."Instagram has also worked to …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Steam Winter Sale has returned. For well over a decade now, Valve's PC gaming storefront has offered massive discounts on games around the holiday. If you've been saving money this year and waiting for the right time to buy some PC games, now is the best time to do so. For some of the sale's best deals, you'll want to look at Steam's Featured Deep Discounts page.

For the longest time, GIMP felt like the obvious choice when you wanted a powerful image editor that’s also free. I’ve been using it on and off for some time now, and while I appreciate the flexibility and depth it offers, it comes with a lot of user friction. It still doesn’t have fully-integrated non-destructive editing for all features, and the modal dialogs can make the UI feel quite scattered.

If you ask anyone at XDA what to put on a media center, we're very likely to point you toward Kodi. We're still using Kodi way into 2025, and we've even picked Kodi over other apps in the same space. So, when a new update comes out, you know we have to check it out.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.By all measures, Meta's Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple's second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users."There are consumers who are ravenous to consume the content."That growth is still coming mainly from Meta's other platforms. "We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what's going on in Threads," Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: s …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’re lucky enough to have a bit of time off around the holidays, we have great news: Steam’s annual winter sale kicked off today, and will run through Monday, January 5th at 1PM ET. Now’s a great time to stock up on some of the best games of 2025 at a solid discount, or add some classics to your backlog if you’ve got a hole in your library. Thousands of games are on sale, but we’ve picked out some highlights to help you get started. We were surprised to see Hollow Knight: Silksong for $15.99 ($4 off) given its modest price and how recently it came out. You can also pick up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for $39.99 ($10 off), Silent Hill F for $41.99 ($28 off), and Assassin’s Creed Shadows for $34.99 ($35 off). These games are all on sale just a few months after their release. Some of the most notable remakes and remasters of 2025 have also been discounted. You can snag Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles for $39.99 ($10 off), Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter for $44.99 ($15 off), Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 for $29.99 ($20 off), Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake for $35.99 ($24 off), and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for $41.99 ($28 off). These titles are worth trying even if you’re familiar with the originals. Steam’s sales are an opportune opportunity to pick up older titles that have stood the test of time, some of which you can get for under a couple of bucks. Too many great games fall into that category, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t call your chance to grab Stardew Valley for $8.99 ($6 off), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition for $9.99 ($30 off), Slay the Spire for $2.49 ($22.50 off), Resident Evil 4 for $15.99 ($24 off), Castle Crashers for $1.49 ($13.50 off), Bastion for $2.99 ($12 off), and To the Moon for $1.99 ($8 off). You can go even further back in the history of gaming and pick up collections of 8- and 16-bit games, including the chance to pick up Mega Man X Legacy Collection for $7.99 ($12 off), Castlevania Anniversary Collection for $7.99 ($12 off), and Contra Anniversary Collection for $7.99 ($12 off). There’s a little something for everybody in the sale, and we encourage you to mix and match contemporary and classic games to avoid getting bored.Hollow Knight: SilksongWhere to Buy: $19.99 $15.99 at SteamHollow Knight: Silksong is a tough-as-nails Metroidvania whose boss battles and platforming sequences reward your tenacity as you slowly get better. As Hornet, you’ll cautiously ascend to the top of the world, using weapons and traps to take down over 200 enemies and more than 40 bosses. Be mindful that letting your guard down can be lethal. If you haven’t gotten around to playing the original Hollow Knight, you can pick it up for $7.49 ($7.49 off) during the sale. Read our hands-on impressions. Silent Hill FWhere to Buy: $69.99 $41.99 at SteamSilent Hill F is an exceptional survival horror game set in 1960s Japan. Protagonist Hinako Shimizu is a high school student who has to defeat actual monsters with whatever weapons she can find while also wrestling with inner turmoil caused by familial trauma. Her personal growth, a great script, and terrific score may compel you to replay the game to see all five of its possible endings. Read our review.Resident Evil 4Where to Buy: $39.99 $15.99 at SteamIf you prefer a healthy dose of action in your horror games, the 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 is an excellent choice. Federal agent Leon Kennedy is sent to retrieve the president’s daughter from a remote Spanish village, and ends up uncovering a murderous cult and plenty of gnarly monsters. The original game’s story has been fleshed out, and its script has been reworked without losing all of its campiness. Read our review.Clair Obscur: Expedition 33Where to Buy: $49.99 $39.99 at SteamClair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG with an engaging battle system that rewards you for mastering its dodge and parry system. Pulling off the right parry, which takes time to learn, and you can turn the tide of a battle. The game has an atmospheric soundtrack along with a story our reviewer found heart-wrenching, stirring, and humorous. It won Game of the Year at the 2025 Game Awards, too. Read our review. Assassin’s Creed ShadowsWhere to Buy: $69.99 $34.99 at SteamAssassin’s Creed Shadows has two big strengths: Its setting (medieval Japan) and its two lead characters, Naoe and Yasuke. Each character has a unique gameplay style, which gives you a couple of ways to approach each situation stealthily or by using brute force. Shadows’ open world is huge, and the little activities we found on our way to the big quests, and codex entries offering exhaustive details about the game’s setting made it fun to traverse. Read our review.

The OhSnap Snap Grip 5 next to a Syncwire magnetic ring. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge In 2022, we called a simple magnetic ring from Anker the best MagSafe phone grip, but things have evolved dramatically since then! You can buy two or even three magnetic rings joined at the hip these days to wield your iPhone, recent Pixel, or really any phone if you stick a magnetic case or included mounting ring on the back. But the best I've yet tried are the double-sided $15-$25 Syncwire Magnetic Phone Ring Holder - and, more recently, the $40 OhSnap Snap Grip 5. @verge Just when I thought I'd found the perfect PopSocket alternative for my phone, the fifth-gen OhSnap Snap Grip came along. The magnets are so good now! It's so thin! …Read the full story at The Verge.

My self-hosting home lab setup has evolved into a pretty major part of my home, but it's interesting to me to look back and realize how it all started and how quickly it evolved. I got into this whole idea last year when I had to set up Home Assistant for the very first time, but then this year, after seeing so many of my colleagues talk about what they can do with a NAS and what self-hosting can be used for, I wanted to level up my setup.

Every time the internet goes down, I always spend some time with Google Chrome's Dinosaur Game. In case you've never heard of it, it's a very simple but amusing platformer that only appears if you get a network connectivity issue in Chrome.

ESP32 boards are great for making affordable smart devices and IoT projects. Apart from ESPHome-based projects, you need the Arduino IDE and PlatformIO to set up a full development environment for writing code and compiling it into firmware to flash. Both IDEs are great for development, but unnecessarily heavy to flash a ready-made firmware (.bin) file onto an ESP32 board.

If you thought that high-end PC gaming is an all-exclusive club with passes issued only to those with a flagship GPU and a top-of-the-line processor, you would've been quite right 5 years ago.

OpenAI and Anthropic are rolling out new ways to detect underage users. As OpenAI has updated its guidelines on how ChatGPT should interact with users between the ages of 13 and 17, Anthropic is working on a new way to identify and boot users who are under 18.On Thursday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT's Model Spec - the guidelines for how its chatbot should behave - will include four new principles for users under 18. Now, it aims to have ChatGPT "put teen safety first, even when it may conflict with other goals." That means guiding teens toward safer options when other user interests, like "maximum intellectual freedom," conflict with saf …Read the full story at The Verge.