The cross stitch pattern is by NathNolu on Etsy. If you're reading an Oura Ring 5 review at The Verge, you likely fall into one of two camps: newcomers looking for a smartwatch alternative, or Oura users pondering an upgrade. In the case of the former, this is a great casual health tracker and the best smart ring on the market - but not your best choice if you really sweat the fitness details. If you fall into the latter, you don't need to upgrade.I say this because the Oura Ring 4 came out less than two years ago. The ceramic version, of which I am a big fan, came out less than a year ago. These were major updates over the Oura Ring Gen 3, both in terms of software and in terms of senso …Read the full story at The Verge.

When people discuss which Linux operating system they prefer, they rightfully focus on the distro itself. It's the beating heart of the system, so it's naturally what people gravitate toward first when recommending a system. However, the desktop environment is also a huge part of it; if the distro is the core, then the desktop environment is what people use to interact with it, and a bad environment can put people off.

KDE does an amazing job getting newcomers fully kitted out with the essential apps. When you install Plasma, you also get excellent tools such as KDE Connect, which acts similarly to Microsoft's Windows Your Phone but is open-source. Likewise, Plasma has its own screenshotting tool called Spectacle, which does the job...for the most part.

Microsoft's PowerToys suite recently reached version 0.100, and with it came a much smaller installer, now just 272MB instead of 376MB. That's a 28% reduction, so downloading and installing the app is easier than ever. But that's not all Microsoft has been up to.

I recently went on a trip to my in-law's cottage, and during that time, I still wanted access to my home lab stack. My Proxmox host and the LXCs inside, including a Samba share and Immich photo library, are examples of services that I still needed to be able to reach while being on the other side of the province.

My wife and son spent their weekends exploring and piecing together the mansion in Blue Prince. | Image: Courtesy of Raw Fury I've always been the gamer in the family. When my son was born nearly 11 years ago, gaming was one of the things I looked forward to sharing with him. Pulling up a chair next to me, he would watch as I played Sea of Thieves with friends, often wearing the too-big-for-his-head headset to talk with them, instructing me where to go. Now instead of him watching me play through Clair Obscur, I'm sitting next to him and he battles Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild. His real gaming passion for years has been Minecraft - he appreciates the rules and order, as well as the calming environment of creative mode. He also likes to meticulously stack up …Read the full story at The Verge.

A photo of a lightbulb glowing purple. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The state of the smart home can be frustrating, because it is just so obvious how things ought to work. You should be able to control everything from everywhere. Your spaces should adapt to what you're doing and how you're feeling. Making your home smart shouldn't require renovating, and the smarts should be mostly invisible. All of this is, of course, incredibly hard to pull off - but the goal is pretty clear.Until now, maybe no product has come closer to nailing the smart home than Philips Hue. And on this episode of Version History, we dig into all the things Hue got right. The Verge's David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you grew up with Pokémon as I did, you probably dreamt of owning your own Pokedex. Granted, it wouldn't do a lot of good because there are no Pokémon in this world to scan, but if there were any, you'd be ready to log them.

Most people's folder systems are a bit of a mess if we're being honest. You know the feeling of going in there and finding a screenshot from four months ago you meant to do something with, or a note that trails off mid-sentence because past-you gave up. The bigger the folder gets, the less inviting it is to actually go in and sort out. And no productivity app I've tried has actually helped me stay on top of any of it for longer than a week or two.

I recently wrote about how the RTX 4090 may age better than the GTX 1080 Ti, and one of our readers pointed out something in the comments that I couldn't stop thinking about. It's that the RTX 5080 is the first 80-class GPU in Nvidia's history to fail to beat the previous-generation flagship. When someone puts it that way, you realize just how exceptional the RTX 4090 really was. Either way, it sums up why this generation of Nvidia GPUs feels so strange.

A yard sign opposing a planned data center is displayed along Route 54 in Mount Carmel Township Northumberland County. | Image: Getty Images This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the data center buildout, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedYears before the AI boom threatened local power grids, a small group of protesters set the stage for the battles cropping up across communities today. In 2015, Apple announced plans to build a roughly $1 billion data center in the sleepy town of Athenry, Ireland. The data center's 500-acre site would power Apple's services in Europe, including iTunes, iMessage, and Siri. At th …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I first started building out my Proxmox environment, creating a full virtual machine for every service felt like the safe choice. Each application got its own operating system, virtual disk, memory allocation, and clearly defined place on the server. It looked organized and, more importantly, felt properly isolated. After a while, though, I had several nearly identical Linux installations running just to support small services that barely used the resources I’d assigned them. Moving most of those workloads into Linux containers, or LXCs, made the waste much harder to ignore, because the same hardware suddenly felt quicker, less crowded, and much easier to maintain.