Intel pulled the plug on Optane in July 2022, wrote off more than half a billion dollars in inventory, and walked away from one of the more interesting storage technologies of the past decade. More than four years later, the P1600X, a 118GB M.2 drive Intel built to boot data center servers, keeps turning up in home lab communities and build threads. On paper, it doesn't make any sense: the drive is PCIe 3.0, smaller than most modern SSDs, and any current NVMe will beat it in sequential transfers. The reason why home labbers want it has nothing to do with normal SSD performance, though. It's a specialist, and whether it belongs in your home lab really depends on what you're running.

You can't be a tech enthusiast and not be interested in 3D printing. Recently, I picked up a Bambu Labs A2L printer, a little out of FOMO, but largely because I wanted to add one more tool to my tinkering hobby. While I'm yet to make headway on printing out parts for the hundreds of projects I've been dreaming up, I've certainly printed my fair share of desk toys, trinkets, and tools. Each of these solves a small or large annoyance in keeping my desk tidy.

Apple will add new limits for "full disk access" on Mac in response to risks posed by AI agents, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In an update on Friday, Apple says it's rolling out new controls to "ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action."The change comes just weeks after Inc's Jason Aten found that Meta's Muse AI somehow knew the contents of his messages, despite not giving the chatbot explicit permission to access them on his iPhone or Mac. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back on this report, saying access to Messages is "entirely opt-in. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Dish-owned Sling TV will no longer be offering its Sling Pass feature that allowed people to buy a single day of cable TV programming at a time, as reported by The Desk.The feature was announced last year and offered a day pass, a weekend pass, and a week-long pass option to be able to watch channels like ESPN and CNN without a full-month cable subscription. But soon after it launched, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery sued Sling TV over Sling Pass, though a federal judge ruled against Disney in its request for a preliminary injunction to block the feature."Sling was built to give our customers the ultimate control over their entertainme …Read the full story at The Verge.

Even if you have a fiber internet plan, you might notice that sometimes your smart home devices lag, your video calls stutter, and ping times spike unpredictably while sitting just two rooms away from your router. This is because we blindly trust modern consumer routers running on default auto settings to intelligently manage the invisible radio waves filling our homes. But if you pull out a free Wi-Fi analyzer app, scan the local airspace, and discover a shocking reality: your home network isn't operating in a private vacuum. It's crammed onto a single 2.4GHz or 5GHz channel alongside a dozen neighboring routers stepping on each other's packets.

Many of Netflix's biggest critically acclaimed hits have been the products of its multiyear production deals with noted directors like David Fincher and Shawn Levy. In the past few weeks, though, the streamer has brought some of those partnerships to an end in a way that feels indicative of a larger strategic shift. With rival studios Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on the verge of a megamerger that will reshape the entertainment landscape, Netflix is clearly thinking about how it can continue to hold its own in the ongoing streaming wars. But as the company charts its path forward, its plan to court subscribers might not put so much em …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta now lets you make your own Muse gadgets that feature the company's new AI agent with code that the company open sourced. The company suggests projects like loading Muse on a color E Ink display to show reminders, adding it to an HDMI stick so you can display Muse on a big screen, or putting Muse on a small touchscreen device to make what looks kind of like a DIY Muse Charm."Muse gadgets are open source devices you build yourself," Meta says. "Program an off-the-shelf ESP32 board or set up a Raspberry Pi with our SDKs, then connect Muse to your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you've got lying on your workbench. …Read the full story at The Verge.

I started self-hosting to take control of the services I use every day. Over time, though, I noticed that some of my setup worked better on a desktop than anywhere else. That became annoying whenever I was away from my computer and needed quick access to something running on my server. Instead of treating mobile access as an afterthought, I started looking at it when choosing services for my stack. That changed how I built my setup. I began favoring tools that offered a proper mobile experience alongside their self-hosted versions, without sacrificing the flexibility I wanted.

Shopify merchants: your agentic storefronts setting now shares products with Meta and unnamed startups. Leave it on, and watch what Shopify adds.The post Shopify Now Enrolls Your Store In Every New AI Shopping Channel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

I mostly use my Windows 11 PC for work, and it involves testing a lot of programs and software I have to write about. Because it's not my primary platform, what usually happens is I'll install a program or set something up, use it for testing and screenshots, and then turn off the computer without much of a thought.

This Samsung 27-inch gaming monitor delivers at every level, with impressive colors and contrast, plus excellent performance thanks to its 180Hz refresh rate and 1ms response time. What's even more impressive is the current price, coming in at just $150. This is the lowest price we've seen on this monitor and well below its $250 MSRP. Skip the Prime Big Deal Days event and get this one right now.

I was tired of my titles in my Plex library showing up at random. Even with the best companion apps, I end up flipping endlessly through movies and poster art icons, trying to find something to watch. I wanted a new experience more like linear TV, so I could turn my self-hosted library into a TV station.