The idea of the perfect home media server often starts with excitement and quickly goes into an endless cycle of manual maintenance. After all, you shouldn’t have to be a full-time system administrator just to ensure your favorite shows and movies are available in the best quality.

Building an SFF PC is no easy task. But the satisfaction you get at the end when it's all complete makes it worth the extra effort. If you've been thinking about building an SFF PC of your own, we think this Gigabyte motherboard is a good place to start, offering a size that's easy to work with and delivering features that should satisfy most people. The best part is that it's actually quite affordable as well, coming in with a stellar discount that knocks 38% off its usual retail price, dropping it down to just $150.

The Department of Defense is announcing its own "bespoke" AI platform, GenAI.mil, and Google Cloud's Gemini will be the first AI tool available on it, according to a press release.Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who has dubbed himself Secretary of War, though the name has not been legally changed by Congress) promised that the platform "puts the worlds [sic] most powerful frontier AI models directly into the hands of every American warrior" and will "make our fighting force more lethal than ever before." In a video, Hegseth says that "the future of American warfare is here, and it's spelled A-I." Today, we are unleashing https://t.co …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you've ever built or owned a PC, chances are, you're no stranger to the occasional storage failure. SSDs indeed fail, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly, and almost always when you least expect them to. What makes this failure so unsettling is that they don't show signs of failure like the traditional hard disk drives most of us grew up on. There's no clicking, no grinding, and most of the time, no warning whatsoever. One day, your system boots instantly; the next, the drive disappears like it never existed.

Prices for components are seeing a steep increase lately, making it more expensive to build a new PC. And while you can find some deals on parts, some folks are looking to the prebuilt market in order to save. Now, I get it, a prebuilt PC isn't for everyone, but if you're someone that doesn't have the time or the knowledge, it's a good one to go with, especially now with so many different options being available.

Tailscale might be known for remote access with TLS baked in, but it can be so much more. The software-defined networking system the developers have built enables easy management and hardware-agnostic networking that's secure, scalable, and superb.

If you're having a stressful holiday season, the answer is McDonald's - at least, that's what a now-removed AI-generated ad suggested, as reported by Futurism. Set to a song calling holiday season "the most terrible time of the year," the ad shows AI-generated people falling victim to a slew of wintery woes, including family dinners, shopping, caroling, baking cookies, and putting up a Christmas tree, each of which goes wrong somehow. The ad concludes by telling viewers to "hide out in McDonald's until January's here." McDonald's has unveiled its own AI-generated Christmas ad that somehow looks even worse than Coca-Cola's.Terrible AI vi …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's an old saying on the internet: If it has a screen, it can run DOOM. At this point, it's not even a joke, to be honest. It's a scientific constant. For over three decades, players have found increasingly deranged ways to make id Software's 1993 masterpiece run on devices that were never meant to display anything more than a pixelated clock. What this has resulted in is a bizarre yet brilliant catalog of ports that straddle the line between technological marvel and trashpost energy.

Future Call of Duty releases will no longer include back-to-back launches of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games, Activision announced on Tuesday. The past four releases in the series have been Modern Warfare II (2022), Modern Warfare III (2023), Black Ops 6 (2024), and Black Ops 7 (2025), but moving forward, Activision wants to offer "an absolutely unique experience each and every year," according to a blog post.Black Ops 7 came out in November to mixed reviews, and in Europe, the game had a "disappointing launch," The Game Business reports. Ahead of the game's release, Treyarch Senior Director of Production Yale Miller told CharlieIntel th …Read the full story at The Verge.

Some ESP32 boards become community favourites because they're small, cheap, or easy to flash. The ESP32-A1S (known also as the "AI Thinker") became popular for a different reason: it promised an audio-capable board on a budget years before the modern wave of ESP32-based smart speakers, dev kits, and AI modules. But despite being one of the few ESP32 boards designed from the ground up for serious audio work, featuring an onboard ES8388/AC101 DAC/ADC, dedicated amplifier circuitry, headphone jack detection, and a layout meant for real playback rather than just experimentation, it never quite earned the mainstream recognition it deserves.

Hello and welcome to Regulator. If you're a subscriber, you are stalwart and true, and if you're here from the internet, prove your chivalry and worth by subscribing to The Verge here. (And if you're David Sacks: we said what we said.) As of Tuesday, President Donald Trump has committed to signing some sort of executive order that would do something that would give him some federal control over AI regulation. I state this in the vaguest of terms for two reasons: First, there's still no good constitutional rationale for an executive order to override laws that states pass for themselves, let alone on artificial intelligence, and the vers …Read the full story at The Verge.

For a while, the Call of Duty series had a very particular release schedule; at least, since Black Ops made its introduction. It used to be that the company released a Modern Warfare game followed by a Black Ops game. However, in recent years, we've seen the holy schedule fall apart, with two Modern Warfare releases in the space of a year, followed by two Black Ops releases back-to-back.