It's always a hassle when a computer becomes so problematic that it's essentially unusable, and setting up a USB drive to help recover broken PCs is not typically a simple process. Depending on the kind of issues a computer is facing, you may need a wide range of different tools, which makes it difficult to be ready for anything.

Do you ever have these weird moments where you want to rewatch advertisements that you saw on TV as a kid? I have. Not the actual TV shows, mind; the adverts that fill the time between them, the stuff that was meant to be the filler between the actual entertainment. For some reason, watching the ads specifically gives me a ton more nostalgia than the actual shows.

I'll admit it; I lose stuff all the time. Growing up, I wished I had some way of making my lost items beep at me, so I could find them more easily. Alas, the technology wasn't available at the time (and it was long before AirTags were introduced), so I had to resort to the tried-and-true method of digging under pillows and beneath chairs until I found it.

A screenshot of the Dia browser. The wait(list) is over for The Browser Company’s Dia, its AI-powered follow-up to Arc. If you have a Mac, that is.The Browser Company, which was acquired by software giant Atlassian for $610 million last month, said “Dia is now open to everyone on MacOS.” It’s the first time Dia has been widely available since launching in June. It’s one of several tools from firms like Google, Opera, and Perplexity making AI central to surfing the web with features like chatbot assistants and AI-powered shortcuts. There’s still no word on when or if The Browser Company plans on making Dia available on Windows. 

This isn’t the thinnest foldable phone around, but it is thin enough. Google's third foldable features plenty of improvements from its second, from a world-first IP68 rating to magnetic Qi2 charging, brighter displays, and a bigger battery. But one area it hasn't improved is the size and shape - in fact, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is a gram heavier and a fraction of a millimeter thicker than last year's 9 Pro Fold. In fairness, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold was noteworthy for how thin and light it felt by foldable standards. But the industry moves fast, leaving its successor one of the thicker new folding phones on the market.Over the last year, Oppo, Honor, and - most importantly - Samsung have all traded blows in purs …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Meta Rab-Ban Display has some seriously fancy glass. iFixit has broken down Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, revealing that the tech inside isn’t what makes them special — it’s the glassmaking. iFixit explains that the glass lenses use a reflective geometric waveguide system that bounces some of the light out to the wearer’s eyes at specific angles via partially reflective mirrors, which helps prevent other people from getting a glimpse of the screen when they look at you.This works alongside the micro-projector in the right arm, a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) device that bounces light from three LEDs to provide a 600×600-pixel grid image. The geometric waveguide lenses differ from older “diffractive” systems used in other AR glasses, which bend and split light instead, sometimes causing the user to see little rainbow artifacts or flash “eye glow” light at onlookers. The downside is that the glass used in the Ray-Ban Display is expensive to manufacture, with iFixit speculating that Meta may be selling the glasses at a loss. iFixit had to split the arms and frame in half to conduct the teardown, noting that Meta didn’t provide a means to clip them back together again for situations like battery replacements. “Any repairs here are going to need specialized skills and specialized tools,” iFixit teardown tech  Shahram Mokhtari said in the video, adding that it’s “very clear that the first iterations of these smartglasses are going to be unrepairable.”

It's easy to trash motherboard audio — we've been doing it for decades. While it's true that on-board audio on motherboards used to be terrible, things have come a long way in the last 10 years. Motherboard manufacturers take signal isolation much more seriously than before, and use dedicated, high-quality audio chips that provide a clean audio experience that's more than enough for most users. Motherboard audio is no match for an external DAC, but you shouldn't jump to the latter before giving the former a fair chance.

PCIe bifurcation has firmly planted itself as a necessary technology in consumer PC hardware. At its simplest, it’s just the process of dividing the lanes from a single PCIe slot into multiple smaller groups. For instance, you can take a full x16 slot and split it into four x4 slots, allowing for multiple devices to share that same set of lanes.

As a kid, there was one game I loved playing on my friend's PC. It was called Descent, and it did something that games these days still very rarely do. It utilized a "6DOF" (six degrees of freedom) control scheme, allowing you to pilot a spaceship and navigate around a base infested with rogue drones. Because gravity isn't a factor in deep space, there was rarely a clear distinction between "up" and "down," which made the tunneled levels feel particularly labyrinthine as you tried to figure out which way you were going.

Microsoft is getting ready to release a new OneDrive app on Windows next year that will include a photo gallery, people view, AI-powered slideshows, and editing features. It’s part of a number of new features coming to OneDrive in the coming months, including a new Photos Agent and AI-powered mobile editing.The new OneDrive app on Windows is a big redesign compared to the existing desktop app. Instead of a tiny flyout on the taskbar, it’s a full app that’s a lot more like OneDrive’s mobile app. It includes a new gallery view of all your cloud photos and a dedicated people view that detects faces in photos and lets you name them.OneDrive on Windows will also work with local photos soon, letting you edit images and then keep them locally on a drive or upload them to Microsoft’s cloud storage service. Microsoft is also adding even more Copilot integration into OneDrive, with a new Photos Agent that will be available for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers. It’s like a chatbot for your photos, letting you ask for a collection of holiday photos, or to recall particular points in time. Copilot will then find photos and allow you to build albums, too.OneDrive on iOS and Android is also getting AI mobile editing soon, with the ability to turn photos into animated styles. You’ll be able to easily clean up blurry or duplicated shots from the mobile app, and a new moments tab has already started rolling out that surfaces older photos and “on this day” memories.Microsoft has also launched a big update to the way OneDrive users share documents. A new “hero link” feature means you can simply copy the URL of a OneDrive document instead of having to share special links to people. It’s identical to the way Google Docs has operated for years, and finally makes it easy for people to request access to files instead of getting an ugly access denied message.

The obsession with building a perfect second brain has made apps like Obsidian quite popular; however, the sheer complexity and the constant need for community plugins to unlock functionality can create more friction than flow.

The Raspberry Pi was a truly exciting computing device for me during my college years. It could run a full-fledged modified desktop and serve a crucial role in small IoT devices. However, I didn’t like the idea of pairing it with a breadboard, connecting wires, figuring out resistors, voltage, and the electronic aspects of it. I preferred software-focused projects that could leverage the available ports and hardware to build something purposeful with a Raspberry Pi and another gadget or device.