Arc Raiders sure is doing a lot of things right — a fantastic community, emergent gameplay, incredibly impressive enemy AI, and a gameplay loop that's impossible not to get addicted to. At the same time, Embark Studios are doing a stand-up job at spoiling the player base with constant updates, with a major one that rolled around right near the end of the second week.

Hear me out: Kirby Air Riders isn't a racing game, it's an art tool with a racing game tacked on.The game, out now for the Nintendo Switch 2, is the follow-up to the quirky Kirby-flavored kart racer released in 2003 on the GameCube. It features Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai's round, pink, utterly charming child participating in short races where the main feature isn't so much about how fast you go, but how well you can manage the winding courses while fighting the cutest rogues' gallery ever committed to polygons. Unlike in other kart racers, Air Riders has no acceleration button. Instead you're automatically propelled forward, re …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is bringing the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE), which adds a console-like UI while navigating through your game library on a PC with a controller, to laptops, desktops, and tablets. FSE launched with the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, and it has so far only been available on PC handhelds.The expansion to laptops, desktops, and tablets is available as part of new Windows Insider Preview Builds on the Dev and Beta channels and for people in the Xbox Insider Program. To turn on FSE on your PC, “hover over the Task View icon on your taskbar and choose Xbox full screen experience,” Microsoft says. “You can also open Xbox full screen experience in Game Bar > Settings or by pressing Win + F11 to toggle the experience.”However, even if you’re a Windows Insider, you may not have the access to FSE right away, as Microsoft says the feature is “gradually rolling out” with the new Windows Insider builds. It also requires that you have the Xbox app from the Microsoft store.As of Friday, the company has started rolling out FSE to all Windows-based handhelds, too.

Reinstalling Windows can be frustrating for many reasons. It tends to be a very time-consuming process, requiring you to download and install all your apps, updates, drivers, and in some cases even restore data from a backup. There's a lot that needs to be done for a computer to get back to a fully working condition. But it is necessary sometimes, as performance tends to degrade over time, so your best bet is to make the process as seamless as possible.

Arizona's economy was once dominated by the "five C's": cotton, cattle, citrus, copper, and climate. But a new C has emerged that could grow to overshadow the rest: chips. New semiconductor manufacturing facilities are springing up across the greater Phoenix area, stretching across blocks of new roads with names like "Processor Parkway" and "Transistor Terrace." Just outside the facilities, developers anticipating an influx of workers are planning mixed-use residential and industrial zones like mini modern-day company towns. "It should be the sixth C," says Thomas Maynard, senior vice president of business development at the Greater Phoen …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the realm of PC hardware, incremental upgrades have fast become the new norm for those chasing performance or efficiency. And honestly, why wouldn't it? A part of the allure of owning a PC is having the flexibility to customize your hardware and tune it to the beat of your needs and requirements.

A Raspberry Pi can quietly transform an ordinary smart TV into a more capable and flexible entertainment hub. It reduces some of the frustrations of built-in apps and offers a smoother way to access content. It also opens the door to features that many streaming boxes simply do not provide. These changes make everyday viewing feel more convenient and more personal.

Most AI tools let you customize your user experience to an extent, and NotebookLM is no different. You can guide the way it speaks to you through prompts, but there’s a better way to do it. Earlier this year, NotebookLM got a Learning Guide feature which makes studying more interactive and forces you to think more about what you know. And along with this feature came the Custom mode - this is what enabled this entire experiment.

The late 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro was one of the last Intel-powered flagship Macs Apple released before everything shifted to Apple Silicon. Mine had drifted into semi-retirement because it felt bulky for daily writing, and it ran hotter and louder than newer machines. It still worked perfectly well, yet it no longer had a meaningful place in my workflow or a reason to stay powered on. That changed once I realized it could serve as a portable virtualization lab.

The Gemini app produced this image of a second shooter hidden in the bushes with the Book Depository in the background. | AI Image: The Verge via Google Gemini It was really easy getting Google's Gemini app to make an image of a second shooter at Dealey Plaza, the White House ablaze, and Mickey Mouse flying a plane into the Twin Towers. We asked and it complied. There were few filters or guardrails, another sign that the battle over generative AI content moderation and copyright enforcement is not even close to being over.Gemini, which powers the newly enhanced Nano Banana Pro image generator and editor, is ordinarily heavily filtered to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. While there's no official list of banned content, requests for sexually explicit or violent material, as well …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nothing’s Android 16-powered update brings a bunch of new features to its phones, including its own spin on Google’s Live Updates. With Nothing OS 4.0, users can track a delivery, ride, or timer by glancing using the Glyph Interface — the dot-matrix on the Phone 3’s rear, or the system of lights on the Phone 3A and older models.Google’s Live Updates look a little different depending on which Nothing device you use. A GIF shared by the company shows a light on the Phone 3A gradually lighting up to match the progress of a Live Update, while the Phone 3’s dot-matrix shows an animated progress bar. Live Updates can appear on a device’s lock screen, too.In addition to this feature, Nothing is launching its AI-powered Essentials App tool that allows users to create their own widgets by providing a written description to a chatbot. Meanwhile, updates to Nothing OS add more minimalist native app icons, new lock screen clocks, and animations that respond with “sharper tactility and depth, making every swipe and tap feel smoother.” You can now open two floating apps at once and switch between them by swiping up from the bottom of your screen to minimize them, or swiping down to make them full-screen.  There’s also an additional new dark mode with deeper blacks than the original.Nothing is rolling out a few features specific to the Phone 3 as well, such as a “pocket mode” that automatically turns off the device’s Glyph Matrix when it detects that it’s in a user’s pocket, along with new “toys” that display an hourglass and show the position of the Moon on the dot-matrix.Nothing OS 4.0 will begin rolling out to the Phone 3 starting today, before expanding to other devices in the lineup “over the coming weeks.” CMF devices will receive the update before the end of the year, but the Nothing Phone 3A Lite will have to wait till early 2026.

I’m a fan of impulse-buying new hardware for my home lab as much as the next tinkerer. However, one of the most appealing aspects of home labs is their ability to accommodate any sort of hardware – be it an enterprise-grade rig or a budget-friendly Single-Board Computer. Heck, I began my journey into the wild world of servers and self-hosting with a nearly 10-year-old PC, which remains an important experimentation node to this day.