For the longest time, whenever I wanted to lower CPU temperatures, the first thing that usually came to my mind was upgrading the cooler, adding more case fans, or even replacing the thermal paste with a higher-quality one. I never stopped to consider whether the CPU itself was drawing more voltage than it actually needed. It took me a while to realize modern CPUs run hot out of the box simply because manufacturers set conservative voltage settings to ensure stability across chips with different levels of silicon quality.

In the realm of extraction shooters, Arc Raiders has come on to the scene, made its way to the very top spot, and been declared the greatest extraction shooter ever made, all in the span of a fortnight (pun not intended). There's a lot of chaos and tension that comes with the looter-shooter genre, and yet somehow, Arc Raiders has birthed one of the most wholesome, cooperative, and friendliest online communities in gaming right now.

If you're an indie rock fan of a certain age, the name Stereogum will probably conjure strong feelings. The site was launched "January 1st, 2002, on a whim," founder Scott Lapatine told The Verge. Originally, this early staple of the music blog era was focused almost entirely on music discovery and posting MP3s. "It was the early days of like Windows Media Player and Real Player," Scott remembers. Today, the site is focused on music journalism and has just relaunched to keep up with a media landscape being overrun by AI.Lapatine has been with Stereogum from the beginning, and watched as both the music and media world rapidly changed around …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the longstanding duopoly between AMD and NVIDIA, Intel GPUs emerged as a breath of fresh air in the mid-range segment with their Battlemage graphics card lineup. The Arc series of GPUs garnered attention from the press, tech reviewers and enthusiasts alike and were well-received by the tech community at large, indicating that while Team Blue still trails in market share, it is clear that they are catching up fast when it comes to their silicon.

I'm a self-confessed data hoarder, with a veritable army of hard drives inside my NAS units, holding my digital life together. They have documents, media files, programs and everything else collected over the years, and they've not only been storing data. Those hard drives used to hold my virtual machines as well, running Home Assistant to keep my smart home in order, media servers to keep me entertained, and all manner of home lab experiments.

I've run a Jellyfin server for several months now. It's been a huge help in cutting down on streaming costs, especially for comfort shows I fall asleep to. After all, who wants to pay a subscription just to watch Friends? Optimizing and maintaining the server has been a learning experience, but the great thing about Jellyfin is that anyone, even a complete beginner, can start a server and learn the ins and outs of it over time. That said, there are a few lessons I learned the hard way that I wish I had known before I set the server up. The time I spent figuring out the cause of the problems could have been better spent watching multiple movies.

Over the years, I have tried enough NAS operating systems to know that most of them are designed to cater to a particular kind of user. Some are made to be beginner-friendly, while others are better suited for experiments. But all of them want to lock you down to their own ecosystem, which is especially true for pre-built NAS models that you get off the shelves. When you want to try something even mildly unconventional, you will start to notice the constraints.

It’s safe to say Zapier once became the household name for automation, and rightfully so. The tool gives you a simple way to automate mundane tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time. You get built-in triggers and processes that are useful. But Zapier is not free once you exhaust 100 tasks per month. I wouldn’t mind paying for it if I hadn’t found a better tool that’s completely free, source-available, and can be self-hosted — n8n. It has become all the rage in 2025 and is already valued at $2.5B. I have been using n8n extensively to automate my workflow, and it has made my life easier and has also saved me money.

I've always enjoyed being on the cutting-edge of PC peripherals. The main genre of games I enjoy, combined with my work, means I get exposed to a lot of the latest stuff. Inevitably, I get sucked into buying a new peripheral with some new "must-have" quality or feature, and to be honest, very few have ended up staying on my desk for good. These 5 features aren't bad or lack usefulness, I just don't find myself using them at all anymore.

What do you get the man who says he has everything? It's a tough question - and one you have a limited amount of time to answer, given the holidays are nearly upon us. You could try dropping subtle hints or asking friends and family for suggestions, but they might save their best ideas for themselves. Fortunately, if you're struggling to come up with something, we have more than a few ideas. With the help of Verge staffers, we've compiled suggestions for dads of every make and model. It doesn't matter if he's the type to get up early to prep the smart smoker or if his idea of a perfect Sunday is watching his favorite team absolutely crush …Read the full story at The Verge.

The cover goes as hard as the album does. There's something irresistible about music that sounds as if it's coming apart at the seams. The Black Dresses are masters of barely contained chaos. All of their records feel as if they're in danger of collapsing into pure noise at any moment. But never have they so expertly woven the various threads of their sound - glitchy percussion, pummeling guitars, irresistible pop hooks - together as they do on Forever in Your Heart.The Canadian duo of Ada Rook and Devi McCallion crafts something undeniably catchy from abrasive electronics, metallic percussion, death-metal screams, and off-key warbling. The opening track, "PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! …Read the full story at The Verge.

Running into issues with my Windows PC gets tiring fast. By the time I'm staring at the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), it's already too late. Looking up a cryptic STOP code might point me in the right direction, but it doesn't help catch the problem before it becomes catastrophic. Even when the system doesn't crash completely, I'm left with a weird glitch and the unenviable task of sifting through Event Viewer logs. While this is a great place to catch culprits, it also logs everything my system does, and there are plenty of debugging and security suites out there that cost a pretty penny because they know where to look for those needles in the haystack when my PC is already so far gone that I've got no other choice but to look for this root cause.