I found VPaint while stumbling around the internet recently. A new graphics tool, I thought. It seemed exciting to me. But I soon realized VPaint is actually an old graphics tool, left in its experimental beta phase, and it's barely been updated much in the last decade. But that doesn’t make VPaint a bad tool. In fact, it’s got some features I’ve not seen anywhere else and might become part of my open-source creative toolkit. Its developers are working on more experiments that encompass the vibe of VPaint for the modern day, and I’ll happily incorporate these tools into my creative workflow, especially animation.

OPNsense is a powerful firewall software package that can take your local area network (LAN) from zero to hero, replacing ISP-provided hardware with a custom device you have full control over. One advantage of replacing your ISP router with an OPNsense-powered firewall is the unlocking of many advanced features, many of which are often omitted from ISP router firmware. Here are some OPNsense features you're likely not using that could massively improve your home network, some involving a single setting change.

I've been a PlayStation fanboy since the PS3 era, and I'm not even ashamed of it. Sure, I had an Xbox 360 — I'd begged my folks for it to play Halo 3. But once I beat the campaign, that console collected dust while I spent every waking minute out of school playing on my friend's PS3.

Now that we're about halfway into the first year of President Donald Trump's second term, we can take stock of his administration's destruction of online environmental resources. It's worse than last time. It's also, seemingly, just the beginning - paving the way forward for the president's polluting agenda.A watchdog group that monitors publicly-available environmental data has recorded 70 percent more federal website changes during Trump's first 100 days in office in 2025 compared to the start of his first term in 2017. Federal agencies are taking broader swings to ax public resources from their websites this time around, the report sh …Read the full story at The Verge.

This EcoFlow portable power station was a huge help in making sure my family didn’t breakdown during sweltering temps in the Tennessee mountains. | Photo: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge I recently returned from a family camping trip to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I live in South Carolina, so in mid-July, a trip to the mountains is usually an excellent way to seek out cooler temperatures. Not this year. Thanks to this summer's heat dome, I was facing a week of feels-like temperatures upwards of 100 degrees - and no air conditioning. I went into planning mode. We were camping in our Rockwood Mini Lite RV, which meant we had a fridge, access to power outlets, and water. But the campground didn't have electrical or water hookups, so we needed our own power and some portable cooling. Normally, y …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the aftermath of itch.io pulling the sale of over 20,000 pages of adult content, the creators of that work are left feeling betrayed, exhausted, and fearful. The number of platforms that permit the sale of adult material is shrinking, and there's no guarantee the ones that remain will still permit it in the future. But now, with their livelihoods at stake, many creators and their communities have begun to push back and search for new ways to thrive."Before [itch.io], the NSFW comics community would grouse and complain and share feelings of anxiety," said Brad Guigar, a smut comic artist. "This time around, we're actually doing something …Read the full story at The Verge.

AI now powers everything from search tools to video calls, but some laptops still struggle to run those features smoothly. That’s because some CPUs aren’t built to handle real-time AI tasks efficiently. When you first bought a computer, you probably looked at the CPU and RAM specs, but not whether it had an NPU. That’s starting to change.

Have you heard of Dwarf Fortress? If you haven't, you really should. Released back in 2006, its two developers have been adding more and more features to it over the years. Now, almost twenty years later, the game is chock-full of content, systems, and stories waiting for you to explore.

Over the decades I've been into computing, I've been an early adopter of many networking features, but I've always had to balance budgetary constraints with the needs of the devices on my home network. Plus, I never really stayed in one place long enough to want to wire up my home for fast Ethernet. Instead, I prioritized mobility and wireless stability, and it's taken me some time to unlearn these ways now that I'm more settled.

It's been quite the month for Google's AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM. The team has been dropping update after update. If you haven't been actively keeping up, Google finally began rolling out the much-awaited Video Overviews a couple of days ago. Though the feature is only now starting to appear on most people's accounts, I luckily got access to it last weekend and talked about three ways I'm already using it in a separate article.

We've all grown up playing some games that we fell in love with, always wanting more through sequels, expansions, or just replays. Now, while we might have grown up significantly, it's a shame that some amazing game franchises couldn't, mainly because they never got closure.

While Windows 11 catches a lot of flak for being filled with bloatware and not providing a lot of the features actually want, Microsoft has been putting a lot of good stuff into its side project, PowerToys. And while I've written at length about some of my favorite features like FancyZones, there's one that often gets overlooked, called Mouse Without Borders.