It has been a little over a year since I repasted my old Ryzen 9 5900X, which I used to build my PC back in 2020. Until then, I treated thermal paste application as a one-time thing. After all, I used to upgrade my CPU every three or four years, so its temperatures never became concerning enough to make me want to reapply thermal paste. Unlike every other CPU I'd used before, my 5900X always ran on the hotter side. It wasn't unusual to see temperatures spike to 80C while gaming, even with a 360mm AIO.

We've had digitally-created music for a while now, but what if we could get technology to play real instruments for us? Well, that's exactly what one inventive tinkerer wants to achieve. They've created a robot that can pluck the strings on a real guitar, and the end goal is to make a whole band of instruments.

Like most, I had made Acrobat my default for PDFs because everyone suggested it. I didn’t challenge the suggestion because I never had any complaints, so there was never a reason to. I wasn’t shopping for a replacement when I started using Stirling PDF. I installed it on my home server as an impulsive act of self-hosting energy. But once I started using it, I didn’t even notice I hadn't opened Acrobat in a while. In the process, I realized I didn’t just replace Acrobat but also accepted the cost that came with it.

While there's no definitive, 100% accurate way to measure how many people use which operating system, we often turn to StatCounter to get a rough idea. According to the website, Linux usage has been growing since May and has now managed to cross over into the double-digit levels of market share. And while it's always important to take these readings with a grain of salt, it does sound promising for Team Tux.

When Anthropic announced $100 worth of free Fable 5 credits for Claude users, claiming it felt like the easiest decision in the world. Free AI credits are pretty hard to say no to, after all, and more so when they let you use one of the strongest new AI models in the world. However, for a not-so-insignificant number of users, that "free" offer reportedly came with a rather unexpected catch that they only saw when their next billing cycle came around.

I've spent a considerable amount of this year with Linux under my thumbs, whether that's putting CachyOS on my ROG Ally X and then benching handhelds like the MSI Claw 8 AI+ against it. I even put Proxmox on the ROG Ally X, because why not? And somewhere between installing my fourth Proton-GE build and watching SteamOS boot on Intel silicon, it hit me: the vendors have noticed too. For as long as I can remember, Linux gaming was a hobbyist project that hardware makers could politely wave at and then ignore, because the numbers gave them permission to. Those numbers don't say that anymore.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on smartphones and Android, follow Dominic Preston. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBelieve it or not, it didn't all start with Samsung. Royole, a now-bankrupt manufacturer of flexible displays, was the first to release a commercial folding phone, the "charmingly awful" FlexPai. Samsung's first Galaxy Fold followed a year later, plagued by a variety of faults that saw review units break within days. That launch went so badly that it prompted Chinese riva …Read the full story at The Verge.

Those with a mesh Wi-Fi system will know the universally annoying scenario of walking downstairs into your living room and sitting right next to a secondary mesh node or access point. You then open a video stream only for it to buffer endlessly on a single lagging bar of Wi-Fi. It's easy to blame your ISP, your router's range, or even the concrete walls of your home when, in reality, your router isn't failing to transmit. It's actually your smartphone that is stubbornly refusing to disconnect. It is trapped in a sticky client loop, holding on to a faint -82 dBm signal from the upstairs router rather than switching to the pristine -45 dBm node just a couple of feet away.

Tough sell. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge The HP HyperX Omen 15, which I first saw at CES, replaces the HP Victus 15, a longtime bestselling budget gaming laptop. The Victus cost just $800, or less when on sale, and was a good entry point to decent laptop gaming.The Omen 15 has nice little upgrades over the Victus. Its RTX 5050 Laptop GPU can play 2026's latest games, albeit on low-ish settings. But it's also got a brighter 16:10 aspect ratio display with higher refresh rate, and a 1080p webcam to make it a little better for non-gaming stuff. I'd call it a working-class gaming laptop, but thanks to RAMageddon, the Omen 15 starts at $1,200 - a far cry from the $800 that made its …Read the full story at The Verge.

I knew this was a bad hardware match before I started. My UGREEN DXP4800 Pro doesn’t have a discrete GPU; it already spends its days as a NAS, and there was no reason to expect CPU-only AI inference to be pleasant. I installed Ollama anyway, connected Open WebUI to it, and pulled down small 4B models to see whether the whole thing was merely possible or actually useful. It turned out to be both, though with a lot more waiting than I would’ve preferred.

USB flash drives are something that many of us grew up with, and I've owned so many since I started using computers about two decades ago. They've always been cheap and convenient, so I never really had a reason to look elsewhere, especially as USB standards kept getting faster over the years. Today, we have USB4, which supports up to 40Gbps, but if you look around, you won't find a single mainstream USB4 flash drive on the market. That alone should make you wonder why flash drives haven't kept pace.

Illustrators have spent years sounding the alarm about generative artificial intelligence startups training their models on artists' work without permission. They've pointed out how the practice is tantamount to theft, and in response, many gen AI boosters have argued that it's necessary for the technology's evolution. This has led to contentious legal battles, but it's also given rise to a new wave of AI startups like Pippa that market their services as being more ethical than the competition.Like most companies selling access to text-to-video models, Pippa's main product is short bursts of user-generated footage that can be cobbled toget …Read the full story at The Verge.