Battery development in the GM Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center. | Image: Steve Fecht / General Motors Inside General Motors' fast-growing battery labs in suburban Detroit, scientists and engineers are analyzing stresses on lithium-ion cells: desert heat, arctic cold, jungle humidity, enough charging and discharging for a half-dozen Frankenstein reboots. For The Verge's exclusive tour of these secretive labs, I watch researchers peer at cell chemistries down to the atomistic level, using electron microscopes. Others work at a larger scale, all the way up to the Megashaker. Inside a cavernous hall, an enormous sliding test chamber envelops one of GM's double-stacked, 205-kilowatt-hour battery packs - the type that powers hulking models like …Read the full story at The Verge.

Diagnosing a PC performance issue can be tricky, especially if you suspect memory is involved. Chances are, you've heard the advice of "just add more RAM", which is a blanket fix that's as old as PC hardware. It's been around since the days of XP, and it's not entirely incorrect. Modern systems are far better at managing memory than they used to be, and adding more RAM often does little unless you’re running into specific bottlenecks. Heavy multitasking and professional workloads require boatloads of memory; if your PC is used for more than just gaming, you might need to add a couple of sticks to your system.

If you've been looking for a reliable and wireless keyboard and mouse that doesn't cost all that much, this set is going to be right up your alley. The Lenovo 300 combo comes with a full-sized keyboard with a ten-key and an ambidextrous mouse, which means it'll work with all kinds of setups. Of course, the price is what really draws the eye to this model, coming in at just $21 for a limited time. It's great for home, school, and work.

If I had a nickel for every time I've reported on a pocket device with "Air" in the name in the last few months, I'd have two nickels. Fortunately, they're two very different devices, so if you're not interested in Apple's new offerings, perhaps the Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini is more suitable. It's a little handheld that specialises in running retro games, and despite its recommended retail price being pretty reasonable by itself, you can score an additional $20 off if you help back its crowdfunding campaign.

With their lightweight nature and solid isolation provisions, containers are quite useful in home labs when you need to self-host applications without the extra performance overhead of virtual machines. As such, you’ll find plenty of tools designed to enhance your containerization tasks, and these range from barebones container runtimes to powerful orchestration platforms. Kubernetes is one of the most popular container orchestration platforms out there, though its enterprise-grade utilities make it rather overkill for the average home lab.

I have been a fan of David Lynch ever since a friend's older brother interrupted a 13th birthday celebration to insist we all watch Eraserhead. In the realm of horror movies, it's a common way to be introduced to a seminal film: be it in a friend's basement, illicit underage viewings, or a stray recommendation from a pot-smoking sibling. It feels apt, then, that my first introduction to Easy Delivery Co. was a friend insisting I drop everything because a game exists that lets you play as a cat driving a kei truck.I admit, those two things don't immediately correlate. But it's clear that Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, was a major influence …Read the full story at The Verge.

I used to keep every note, draft, project, and list inside Notion. All my pages lived in one workspace, but it quickly became like a messy pile of digital junk. Notion has a lot of muscle, but it can still feel like dragging a suitcase of bricks because there’s just so much going on at once. So a tool that was supposed to help me organize my life just ended up being another point of friction.

While I can fully get on board with the lightweight workloads that containerized services provide, I've always had a problem with the management tools on offer for Windows users. Docker Desktop is a bloated mess, and most of the dashboards I've used to make sense of what's going on in my home lab have more features than I want to learn. I don't need more than the Docker engine running, so I can use Docker Compose in my Terminal, and a way to see which containers I have on the go.

Can you tell if I’m looking at a display, or just pretending for the camera? Outside a florist-cum-coffee shop in upstate New York, a row of vintage cars gleam in the sun. It's unseasonably warm for early October, so there's a veritable crowd of car enthusiasts snapping photos of Ferraris, Porsches, and a vintage Alfa Romeo. Patient girlfriends and wives roll their eyes, sipping on maple matcha lattes and eating pumpkin spice donuts.And then there's me. At my side, my right hand is twitching like I'm a wizard casting a spell. I'm hunched over, bending my head as I stare at a lime green Lamborghini, shouting, "WHAT MODEL CAR AM I LOOKING AT?" (The lot is quite loud, given that several car dads are revving like Dom …Read the full story at The Verge.

Before learning about containers, I used to dedicate a single virtual machine to every service I wanted to run, which is hugely inefficient. Compared to fully-fledged virtual machines, containers are lighter, more specialized, flexible, and easier to set up.

Have you noticed that Windows 11's dark mode isn't completely dark? Sure, it manages to catch most of the newer UI elements of the operating system, but the older elements that have been passed down from Windows generation to generation remain unaffected. This means you'll get the occasional flashbang every time you move files from one place to another, as the file transfer dialog box is not yet included in dark mode.

Fancy some platforming fun? N++ has been around for a while (I remember when it was just a browser game), and it's now celebrating its tenth anniversary on Steam with its TEN++ update. Fortunately, to celebrate the occasion, the game has gone on a pretty steep discount. So, if you're itching to play something but you're not feeling like shelling out the big bucks, you can score N++ on Steam for the low price of $3.74.