Two months before it changed its name to "Meta," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it's shutting that space down: "Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February 16, 2026," reads the note tucked away on a help page.Meta will also no longer sell its headsets and software as a service for businesses, another help page reads: "We are stopping sales of Meta Horizon managed services and commercial SKUs of Meta Quest, effective February 20, 2026."Me …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using a media server on your utilities bill, inside your home, seems like a lot of work until you go about setting one up. The feeling immediately turns to regret that you should've done this sooner and saved so much on cloud subscription costs. That was my experience in a nutshell, switching from cloud providers to self-hosting for media, and the price delta only gets wider with time as a NAS gets pricier upfront and streaming services we hoped would replace cable TV become the very evil they sought to destroy, riddled with ads and confusing bundle pricing.

Down the street from the Los Angeles Angels' stadium in Anaheim, a crowd gathers to watch two homes burn. In less than 30 minutes, one structure is reduced to its smoldering, blackened wood frame, while the other, thanks to simple changes to its design, is remarkably unscathed. Of course, this was the point of the demonstration, which was held last June by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) at a firefighting training center.The heat from the burning demo home is fierce as we stand outside under a bright, cloudless sky. The plume of thick, black smoke is what eventually pushes me back from the front of the audience. …Read the full story at The Verge.

As technology has evolved, OLED displays have become more and more common on all kinds of devices. Phones were first to make this a mainstream feature, but now you see a lot of laptops with OLED screens built-in, as well as many OLED monitors, especially for gamers.

Overclocking a Raspberry Pi is one of those projects that feels like a rite of passage. It is cheap, reversible, and gives you a tangible sense that you are getting more out of the hardware you already own. Even better, the results can appear immediately in areas you actually notice, such as UI responsiveness and light compile time. That’s the hook that keeps people trying it again every time a new Pi generation lands.

As someone who tests and writes about productivity tools for a living, NotebookLM is hands-down the tool I find myself using most. It’s packed with just the right features that don’t feel like AI purely for the sake of AI, and it’s clear that it’s designed to solve a specific problem — retrieving information with minimal (close to none) hallucinations.

While making your own locking system can be quite tricky, not all of them need to be of the highest security possible. Sure, if you're creating, say, a lock to protect your property or your deepest, darkest secrets, then, yes, you'll want to go all out on the details and buy only the best components. However, if you're making something just for fun, where the contents aren't incredibly important to your well-being, you don't need to splash out for it.

We've all chased lower CPU temperatures at some point. After all, who wouldn't want a CPU that runs cooler, quieter, and sustains higher boost clocks? In fact, I used to panic every time my CPU exceeded 80 degrees while gaming and try every method to lower it because I always felt like that was affecting my performance in some way. I'd start second-guessing my cooler, thermal paste, and airflow, assuming that if I could just shave off a few degrees, my games would feel smoother and more responsive.

This is one of those products that's all about the looks. If you love nostalgic designs, and are a fan of Nintendo products, then this 8Bitdo N30 wireless mouse is going to be right up your alley. The best part is that it doesn't cost all that much right now, with a substantial discount knocking it down to just $20.

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.Last month, Netflix made the surprising decision to kill off a key feature: With no prior warning, the company removed the ability to cast videos from its mobile apps to a wide range of smart TVs and streaming devices. Casting is now only supported on older Chromecast streaming adapters that didn't ship with a remote, Nest Hub smart displays, and select Vizio and Compal smart TVs.That's a stunning departure for the company. Prior to those changes, Netflix allowed casting to a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Isn't there a special kind of pain reserved for watching a franchise you grew up worshiping slowly turn into an IP-shaped logo on a corporate roadmap? Plenty of games that once used to define eras — which were all we could talk about at school, at LAN cafés, in comment sections — are a husk of their older selves today.

Windows’ problems are often discussed as if they’re the result of bad decisions layered on top of an otherwise sound foundation, but I'd argue that a lot of what plagues Windows actually comes from its legacy roots. Microsoft keeps trying to stabilize Windows by refining update processes, adding safeguards, ways to "backup" data, and offering rollback options, but the underlying model hasn’t changed in decades. The operating system is still mutable at its core, which I think is the primary issue.