When I was 16 years old, I wrote my first fanfiction. It was a crossover fic where the cast from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gave the anime dog demon Inuyasha a makeover. It was stupid and poorly written, and yet, to this very day, I remember it fondly. This is exactly what it's like playing Super Robot Wars Y - an exceedingly silly, nonsensical plot featuring characters that have no business speaking to each other all, stitched together by tactical robot action. It rules.Super Robot Wars Y was released on Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam on August 29th. For this blog, I played the demo that covers the game's first chapter with progress carr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Tired of paying for cloud storage every month, I decided to host my own instance of Nextcloud on my home network. I replaced OneDrive and Google Drive with what’s essentially a free platform that allows me to store all my files. Nextcloud is an alternative to cloud storage for those who either don’t want to pay to store their files in the cloud or are concerned about privacy. Whenever you upload something to the cloud, it’s sent to remote servers, which always involves some amount of risk. With Nextcloud and other such self-hosted instances, all your data stays completely on-device, which is a safer option if you work with sensitive information and files. The upsides may tempt you to make the switch right away. That’s exactly what I did, too, after my colleagues at XDA raved about Nextcloud.

Warhammer 40,000 is probably the most popular tabletop wargame in the world, but it doesn't stop there. The universe and its lore have broken free of the tabletop and now have a huge array of novels, TV shows, and video games covering the IP. The games in particular can come in a wild variety of genres, including strategy, shooters, and even racing games.

A screenshot from Panic’s Herdling game. | Image: Panic / Okomotive Herdling is a slow game about herding fuzzy animals through a vibrant natural world. That may not sound particularly exciting, but I found it to be a perfect game to unwind with after a stressful day.In Herdling, you play as a kid who makes friends with and shepherds large fluffy creatures called Calicorns, which kind of look like a mix of a sheep and a woolly mammoth. The Calicorns are adorable, with cute snorts and head shakes that make them feel like real animals. You'll even get opportunities to play fetch, and yes, you can pet the Calicorns. You can also name your furry friends, and the game even suggests ideas, which is why my flock …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you wanted a sense of the current relationship between the tech right and the populists, you had to be sitting in Breakout Room C on the first day of NatCon 5, the annual gathering of the MAGA right's powerhouses. At the end of the afternoon panel on the culture wars ("The Need for Heroism"), Geoffrey Miller was handed the mic and started berating one of the panelists: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who is in charge of the company's AI efforts."I argue that the AI industry shares virtually no ideological overlap with national conservatism," Miller said, referring to the conference's core ideology. Hours ago, Mil …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai is the first robot vacuum mop from the company and the first to use a multifunctional dock. The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot is the company's first combination robot vacuum and mop. It debuted at Dyson's Berlin store during the IFA tech show this week and is a follow-up to the company's 360 VisNav robot vacuum, which launched in 2023. Featuring a new round design, a self-cleaning roller mop, lidar navigation, and Dyson's first multifunctional dock, the Spot+Scrub also comes with an "AI" moniker because it's 2025 and doesn't everything?I spent some hands-on time with Dyson's newest robot floor cleaner and came away underwhelmed. Dyson's traditional vacuums set high expectations, but its robot versions have yet to meet them. I didn't …Read the full story at The Verge.

Of all the hills I was prepared to die on, my allegiance to analog note-taking was the steepest. For the longest time, I was a staunch advocate of the pen and paper, convinced that the tactile feedback of a fountain pen scratching across a page was essential to my thought process. I refused to be one of those people who needed lists on a screen to know what's next in order of business. However, I acknowledged my system was inefficient — ideas scattered across half a dozen notebooks, meeting notes in one and project plans in another, while everyday to-do lists on little scraps were misplaced all the time.

Pencils down. Asking the Pixel 10 to be more than what it is feels greedy.Google's non-Pro Pixel is priced fairly at $799, which is significantly less than the $999 Pixel 10 Pro. It comes with some handy upgrades, like Qi2 charging with built-in magnets. Its AI features finally show promise. It includes a dedicated telephoto lens for the first time. It's a proper flagship and an all-around easygoing Android phone. But if I'm being greedy, then I do have one request: better cameras.The rear cameras on the Pixel 10 are totally fine. For someone who's not picky about image quality, they'd be better than fine. And maybe I'd think they were fine, too, if I …Read the full story at The Verge.

Markdown notes are one of the simplest ways you can take your lists, data, and thoughts digital. It is an efficient system where plaintext formatting alone differentiates headings from list items, notes, and footnotes. However, at scale, markdown notes can quickly turn chaotic. If you're noting down the observations from experimental research, or improving something using iterative data collection, markdown is great for the hurried notes you take without losing focus, but they usually take hours of toil and editing before they're presentable as a research paper.

By default, Windows 11 comes with a lot of pre-installed apps. While you may find use for one or two of them, there's a good chance that there will be a ton of apps left over that you never plan on using, but will still take up space, update themselves, and sometimes run services in the background.

Valve's Steam Deck appeared in early 2022 and helped relaunch the handheld gaming market with a whole new set of devices. But it's been over three years, and despite advances in the handheld gaming PC market thanks to chipmakers AMD and Intel, Valve has yet to unleash a sequel to the highly popular handheld.

Building out a smart home can be fraught with frustration. Every device uses its own hub, and if not that, most definitely its own app. Before you know it, your smartphone is littered with ten different apps to control lights and fans. Solving this problem was my biggest motivation behind getting started with Home Assistant. Instead of juggling multiple apps and dashboards, I wanted a single spot to control everything and that's exactly what I got with Home Assistant. While Home Assistant's near-infinite flexibility allows it to be anything you want it to be, here are three smart home apps that I swapped out for Home Assistant and I wouldn't have it any other way.