Ever since I tried Raycast a few months ago, I've sworn by its usefulness in my day-to-day. It started on macOS, but it has since expanded to Windows in an official capacity, and to a lesser extent, to Linux thanks to the Vicinae project. macOS is still where I use it the most (because that's where I spend the most time), but it's incredibly helpful on all my machines.

Despite the Wii being a global hit, some of its cooler features never made it out of Japan. One of them was the Demae Channel, which let you order food from the comfort of your Wii. It was a joint collaboration between Nintendo and the Japanese food delivery service, Demae-can, and the close partnership is likely the reason we never got an equivalent app in the West.

Linux has been around for a long time now, to the point where there's still code within the kernel relating to technologies that people don't really use anymore. However, there's always the chance that someone is using said tech (and knowing how people love their retro hardware, there usually is at least someone), so the code is maintained and kept around.

Meta is "temporarily pausing" the ability for teens to chat with its AI characters as it develops a "new version" of the characters that will offer a "better experience." The company made the announcement in an update to a blog post from October where the company had detailed more parental controls for teen AI use. The change blocking teens from accessing the characters will go into effect "starting in the coming weeks.""Since we announced our plans to build parental controls for AI characters in October, we started developing a new iteration of AI characters generally (i.e. for both adults and teens)," spokesperson Sophie Vogel tells The …Read the full story at The Verge.

TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance - TikTok's Chinese parent company - and a group of investors closed a $14 billion deal to spin off the platform's US operations, introducing a new slate of American executives.The Silver Lake investment firm, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and the cloud giant Oracle will each have 15 percent stakes in the new TikTok US Data Security (USDS) Joint Venture LLC. ByteDance will still hold a 19.9 percent stake in the company, in line with the divest-or-ban law that went into effect last year - though the deal was pushed th …Read the full story at The Verge.

A lot has changed since AI chatbots became a thing, starting with ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. But for the majority of people, learning has still largely remained the same. While you'll definitely come across people using AI to cheat a little here and there, that's unfortunately often the extent of it. For many, learning something new involves going a more traditional route, like picking up a textbook, taking a linear course, and spending hours grinding through information at a pace that just isn’t necessary anymore.

The few times I've seen someone fall for, or almost fall for, a scam, it's usually because their mind has gone into autopilot while trying to achieve something else. It's usually because the scammer has made them believe that something bad is happening, so the victim tries to log into their accounts ASAP to fix the non-existent problem, giving away their account information to a phishing website in the process.

We know it's not the best time to build or even upgrade a PC. But if you've been thinking about it anyway, and wanted a powerful CPU that's now down to a great price, this AMD AM5 chip might be just what you're looking for.

Casio SX-C1 sampler prototype on display at NAMM. Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But at the bottom, there are 16 rubberized pads for triggering samples with crunchy pixelated number labels on them.The device on display on the show floor was not fully finalized, so the specs are subject to change. Casio says that the final version will have 16 voice polyphony and record samples at 16-bit / 48kHz. It will also have 10 banks of samples, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Can we please appreciate how poor these designs are? None actually feature a cat ON a donut, and one doesn’t even have a finished face. | Image: Microsoft / The Verge (via Canva) Microsoft is giving its Paint and Notepad apps on Windows new AI capabilities for editing text and making digital illustrations. The updates are currently rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Windows 11 Canary and Dev channels, and include features that feel oddly niche or advanced for such simplified apps, such as AI text improvements in Notepad and the ability to instantly generate coloring book pages in Paint.The latter feature is aptly called "Coloring book," and lets you make blank coloring templates in version 11.2512.191.0 of Paint based on a text prompt. Users can access this feature by selecting the Coloring book option from the …Read the full story at The Verge.

There is no shortage of file transfer apps available for quickly passing files between your devices, and faster transfer methods from your NAS, but in my house, there's one method that beats them all. That's the humble USB drive, which works on almost every device I own, is never slowed down by Wi-Fi or networking glitches, and has been the most dependable method for me for years.

Just over a year after it briefly disappeared from app stores, TikTok in the US is now part of a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. With approval from both the US and China closing on the schedule laid out in December, ByteDance's ownership of the new joint venture is now only 19.9 percent to satisfy the terms of the divest-or-ban law signed in 2024 by President Biden. The other 80.1 percent is owned by investment firm Silver Lake, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX - the three "managing investors" that now hold 15 percent stakes - and several other smaller investors, like Michael Dell's family investment firm.A press releas …Read the full story at The Verge.