As a perpetually absent-minded person, I've always loved the thought of a smart home that could automate the tasks I always forget. It's a nice thought, but the state of the smart home means that several large companies control the bulk of it, and no one company makes enough devices to use those in your home exclusively. I've got Home Assistant set up to fill the gaps between functionality and control.

Before the time when Nintendo dominated the console space in the 80s, and long before the console wars of the 90s took over the world, video games had a different industry leader. Atari was the company that captured the attention and minds of young people who played games at home or in the arcades, and it was a force to be reckoned with. The Atari 2600 is one of the most important video game consoles of all-time, and is still beloved to this day by people who did and didn't grow up during its heyday. The console itself was released at a point when video games as a medium were young and still evolving, with titles that were at the starting point of creativity with limited technology that pushed people's imaginations. You couldn't go anywhere in the late 70s or early 80s and not see a fan of Atari's home video game system.

Have you tried disabling Windows Updates? If you have, you'll know that you can't keep them down for long. Microsoft will allow you to turn them off for a limited time, but once your period is up, the OS will download and install the newest updates whether you want them or not. It wasn't always like that, but it became the norm once Microsoft wanted people to update their operating systems and get the newest fixes.

How it startedI carry a lot of different phones around, and I rarely get questions about them because most people stopped talking about which phone they own around 2017. I could be using an unreleased iPhone 18 Pro Max Air Ultra to pay for my coffee and nobody would raise an eyebrow (present company excepted, of course). To the majority, a phone is a phone; no matter who makes it or what software it runs, they're all roughly the same size and shape. Unless that phone happens to be a flip phone. Flip phones attract attention from the kind of people who have seen every type of phone in existence, which makes sense: they're very obviously d …Read the full story at The Verge.

Using a popular app or service is a double-edged sword. On one side, you have all the nice benefits and features that the service provides; there's a reason why it's the most popular offering on the market, after all. However, whenever an app gains traction, scammers and hackers are always close behind to leverage its popularity to spread their wares as far as they can. After all, what good is trying to spread viruses and scams on a service nobody uses?

When Microsoft first started rolling out Copilot, it felt like the AI assistant was everywhere. However, as time goes on, the Redmond giant finds new and inventive ways to show us Copilot in the hopes that we'll use it. For a while, the Start menu was a safe haven away from Microsoft's LLM; unfortunately, it seems that an upcoming update will change that.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 94, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, did you hydrate today, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I'm visiting LinkedIn way too much because of Mini Sudoku, looking at the fake texts in Apple's marketing materials, marveling at tiny doodles on microchips, listening to Taylor Swift's New Heights podcast episode, learning about model railroad power debates, reading about the death of expertise, catching up on my favorite HGTV home renovation show, and watching a very good drumline.I also have for you some …Read the full story at The Verge.

The adoption rate for Wi-Fi 7 is steadily climbing, and will get another big boost in a month or so when the next iPhone is launched. That's good news even if you're not planning on upgrading, because Wi-Fi 7 brings a few neat tricks that make the network faster for every device connected wirelessly, even if they're using previous Wi-Fi numbers. And Wi-Fi 8 is already underway, with a recent release from Qualcomm giving us more information on the next generation of wireless connectivity.

Windows is becoming challenging to run on old hardware due to its focus on robust security mechanisms and demanding UI. Linux becomes the obvious pick in such cases. It’s the perfect candidate to revive an old laptop or PC that is struggling or not supported by Windows. However, not all Linux distros are created equal; some focus on performance, some want to be a visual spectacle, and some try to strike a perfect balance.

By now, it's well-established that AI has become an incredibly important part of education. Some use it to cheat, some use it to make studying a little easier, and some use it to learn faster and smarter. Admittedly, I’ve done both at some point, but I lean more toward using it to actually improve how I study and retain information.

Artificial Intelligence software is more popular than ever, and cloud-based AI systems feature the most powerful models. OpenAI's GPT-5, X's Grok 4, Anthropic's Claude 4, Meta's Llama 3, and Google's Gemini 2.5 are all massive large language models used for a variety of purposes, including text and image generation, document summaries, and conversation partners.

Power consumption can be a major concern when it comes to home labbing, and for a few reasons. Not only does higher power draw typically correlate with higher temperatures (and thus, either more throttling or louder fans), but it incurs a cost, too. Adding a new server to your home can actually have a noticeable impact on your energy usage, and whether it's for environmental reasons or purely cost-saving reasons, chances are, you would see an increase in power draw as a negative thing. I found a neat way to reduce energy usage, and it cut down my usage by about 25%.