Gaming has undergone a lot of changes in the past few years, with many things contributing to the increased pricing for playing games on consoles. With news about Xbox Game Pass Ultimate increasing its price for subscribers and new PlayStation games getting more expensive over time, it's getting tougher for families to introduce kids to games without breaking their bank account. But while some people will be OK navigating through a lot of the ongoing shifts in the hobby, others have looked for better ways to still enjoy gaming with their families in cost-efficient ways. And luckily for them, they can get the best of all worlds with Nintendo Switch Online and a Nintendo Switch 2.

Over the past few years, I've been increasingly surprised at the fact that so many high-end computer peripherals are still coming out with USB Type-A cables or dongles. I reviewed many Keychron keyboards costing upwards of $100, yet they always shipped with a USB Type-A dongle, and so did Logitech's MX Master 3S, which I've been using for a few years.

For years, Adobe Acrobat Pro has felt like the only way to get serious work done, whether you need to merge documents, edit text, sign an NDA, or convert files with reliability. However, that costly assumption is exactly why I regret spending money on it. Enter TinyWow: a powerful web-based tool that handles the vast majority of my PDF, image, and file conversion needs with zero installation and surprising speed.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the downward spiral of the internet, follow Adi Robertson. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBack in 2018, two years after the UK government decided to implement mandatory hard age gates on adult websites, it floated an idea called the "porn pass." The porn pass was a physical card you'd buy by handing over your ID to a brick-and-mortar shop attendant. It would contain authentication information that would act as a low-tech anonymization system, letting you verif …Read the full story at The Verge.

Last week, for James Bond Day, Amazon revealed updated poster art for the movies. But fans immediately noticed that the super spy’s signature Walther PPK was conspicuously missing from every image. In some cases it had clearly and rather clumsily been Photoshopped out. Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan were left awkwardly holding thin air, in the posters for Dr. No and Goldeneye, respectively. Roger Moore seemingly received a body transplant on the cover Live and Let Die, and for A View to a Kill his arms were lengthened to inhuman proportions to coverup his firearm.Unsurprisingly fans went into a tizzy about the alteration. Some were simply astonished that Amazon would do this to such an iconic property, others accused the company of being “woke.” Since then the thumbnails have been quietly updated to use stills from the movies, though fans were quick to note that all the images chosen also gunless. At least one, the still for Skyfall, still appears to have been altered to remove a firearm. At the time of publication Amazon had yet to respond to a request for comment.On the plus side, Pierce Brosnan’s empty hand provides solid fodder for memes.

Version History It's important to remember that two decades ago, text messages cost 10 cents. Each. Back when we measured our cell phone plans in minutes, and when even 3G connections felt fast, text messages were a huge business for wireless carriers and a huge expense for anyone whose kids learned to T9-type just a little too quickly. Then BlackBerry, nearing the peak of its powers, did something remarkable: it cut the carriers out entirely. Before WhatsApp and Telegram, before iMessage and RCS, there was BlackBerry Messenger. And while we don't use BBM anymore, we owe it a debt of gratitude. And a few dimes.In this episode of Version History, our new s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Paperless-ngx is a life-saving tool if you want to digitize and self-host all the documents, invoices, and receipts in a centralized store. I use it because I accumulate hundreds of purchases, documents, paperwork, contacts, quotations, and more in a year. While keeping a physical copy is a good practice, most of these resources exist in either image or PDF format. Paperless-ngx auto-tags documents, which makes it very easy to narrow down your search. I integrated it with Paperless AI a while ago, which utilizes a local LLM to analyze my entire collection.

We got our first proper look at the upcoming Wonder Man series, but Marvel has a whole slate of shows in the works. Other than Wonder Man, though, the company didn’t roll into New York Comic Con with a firm release date for anything. The best we got were some broad release windows and few tantalizing details for what’s in store.Season two of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is set for release in fall of 2026. A lot of details are still unknown, but head of Marvel Television and Marvel Animation Brad Winderbaum did say the story would feature a “black, oozy substance.” Let’s just hope the show handles that particular story arc a little bit better than Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 did.X-Men ‘97 is also getting a season two, which is set to premiere in the summer of 2026. Eric and Julia Lewald, the writers behind X-Men: The Animated Series, as well as the Larry Houston who directed most of the original series are joining the show as executive producers.Before that, though, we’ll be getting another season of Daredevil: Born Again in March, with a third season confirmed to be in the works. The first season of Born Again was a bit uneven, but the back half was surprisingly strong. We’re intrigued to see how the show evolves, and even more so now that Krysten Ritter is back in the mix as Jessica Jones.Lastly Winderbaum confirmed that VisionQuest is scheduled to close out the storyline that began with WandaVision sometime in 2026. Though no more specific timeframe was given.

We’ve been so worried about deepfaked politicians, AI musicians, virtual actresses, and phony satellite imagery that we didn’t even consider the dangers posed by precocious teenagers. Kids are using AI to create images of a disheveled, seemingly unhoused person in their home and sending them to their parents. Understandably, they’re not thrilled and in some instances call the police. The prank has gone viral on TikTok and, in addition to giving parents agita, has become a headache for law enforcement.The premise is simple enough: kids use Snapchat’s AI tools to create images of a grimy man in their home and tell their parents they let them in to use the bathroom, take a nap, or just get a drink of water. Often they say the person claims to know the parents from work or college. And then, predictably, the parents lose their cool and demand they kick the man out. The kids, of course, record the whole thing, and post their parents reactions to TikTok, where some of the clips have millions of views.Where things go from problematic to potentially dangerous is when the prank carries on for too long and parents call the authorities. Calls of a home invasion, especially involving children are treated as high priority by police, so pranks like this tie up valuable resources and could actually put the pranksters in danger. Round Rock Police Patrol Division Commander Andy McKinney told NBC that it could even “cause a SWAT response.”The Salem, MA police department summed it up best in a statement saying, “this prank dehumanizes the homeless, causes the distressed recipient to panic and wastes police resources. Police officers who are called upon to respond do not know this is a prank and treat the call as an actual burglary in progress thus creating a potentially dangerous situation.” So, while we all love a good prank, maybe let this one go.

For years, I ignored the security of my home network. I knew better than to click on sketchy links or visit dodgy websites, so I figured it didn't matter. But now that I have gotten married and my wife and I entertain guests much more often than I used to, I've started to discover the cracks in the armor of my network. My entire network can be put at risk by a single guest with a malware-infected laptop, including well-meaning but clueless parents.

Get ready to ask “WTF?” a lot. Spooky season is upon us, and traditional horror films like Bring Her Back (excellently gruesome) or The Evil Dead (stone cold classic) are obvious choices for a cozy movie night at home. But, if you're looking for something that's a bit more weird than wicked to get you in the Halloween spirit, I highly recommend the 1977 fantasy horror film House.Describing House is an exercise in futility. Here's the basic plot: A girl goes to spend the summer with her aunt after her widower father brings home a creepily sedate woman and declares that he intends to marry her. When she arrives at the countryside home, with six of her friends in tow, stra …Read the full story at The Verge.

Ask any tinkerer about the ideal home server platform, and you’ll hear the name Proxmox pop up fairly often in the conversation. Between its LXC support, terrific virtualization performance, cluster capabilities, and low system requirements, Proxmox has a lot of advantages over its rivals. Go deeper into the PVE rabbit hole, and you’ll find an extensive list of features that make Proxmox perfect for advanced home labbers.