Digital dice rollers are really cool. Whether you use them for accessibility reasons or you're simply tired of rolling a D20 clean off the table for the thousandth time, they're convenient to have on hand. Best of all, because they're so easy to make, you don't need to purchase one if you don't want to, which opens up possibilities of tweaking and editing it to your liking.

When it comes to your NAS’s speed, adding new or upgrading existing hardware is a solid option. But sometimes, you don’t have to go that far. You can easily get by making some tweaks on the software side and make a much bigger difference on your system. The idea is to iron out any minor inefficiencies — when you identify and fix a lot of them, it all adds up, and your NAS starts feeling as fast as the day you first set it up.

China and the US have “made progress” on granting permission for ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American consortium, fulfilling a nine-months-overdue legal requirement. After saying a tentative deal had been reached Monday and that approval would come Friday, President Donald Trump’s administration has issued an update that leaves the current status ambiguous and the details bare-bones.“I just completed a very productive call with President Xi of China. We made progress on many very important issues including Trade, Fentanyl, the need to bring the War between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TikTok Deal,” Trump posted on Truth Social, noting he and Xi Jinping would meet at the APEC Summit in Korea in October. “The call was a very good one, we will be speaking again by phone, appreciate the TikTok approval, and both look forward to meeting at APEC!”“Appreciate the TikTok approval” makes Xi’s benediction sound like a done deal. “We made progress,” however, does not.TikTok posted an equivocal response on X. “We thank President Xi Jinping and President Donald J. Trump for their efforts to preserve TikTok in the United States,” it said. “ByteDance will work in accordance with applicable laws to ensure TikTok remains available to American users through TikTok U.S.”This leaves us in effectively the same place as we were earlier this week, when the Trump administration announced a “framework” agreement had been reached; not long after, it extended the January 2025 sale deadline for the fourth time. Reporting on Tuesday indicated that the deal could actually take 30 to 45 more days.The expected buyers are a consortium that includes Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz, and Susquehanna International Group, with ByteDance reportedly retaining a share just shy of 20 percent, as mandated by a divest-or-ban law Congress passed in 2024. They’re expected to develop a version of the app with a new recommendation algorithm walled off from Chinese control.TikTok users, meanwhile, are still in the dark about the future of their app — hoping another trade war won’t throw a wrench in the agreement, with no hard timeline for resolution in sight.

Well that was awkward. Meta ran into some spectacularly embarrassing technical issues during the live demos of its new smart glasses this week, and now we know why. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, explained in an Instagram AMA why two notable demos — an influencer asking the AI assistant for cooking instructions, and Mark Zuckerberg attempting to pick up a WhatsApp call — failed. “When the chef said ‘hey Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Meta Ray-Ban’s Live AI in the building,” said Bosworth. “We had routed Live AI traffic to our dev server, in theory, to isolate it, but we had done it for everyone in that building on those access points. We DDoS’d ourselves, basically.” So yeah, it wasn’t the Wi-Fi, as Zuck claimed on stage. @verge Some of the most impressive smart glasses in the industry were presented at Meta Connect 2025, but presenters had some of the biggest demo failures we’ve seen live in a while. In addition, part of the keynote included a sit down discussion with James Cameron and ended with a run into the horizon with Diplo. It was a weird evening. #metaconnect #meta #markzuckerberg #tech #techtok ♬ original sound – The Verge The video call issue was “more obscure,” according to Bosworth, and involved a “never-before-seen bug” that occurred because the Display glasses had gone to sleep at the same moment that the device received the call notification. Bosworth says that the bug has now been fixed, but acknowledged the onstage demo was a “terrible place for that bug to show up.”Even with the technical blunders, Meta providing an honest live product demonstration is a nice break from the usual fare of pre-recorded videos and generative AI errors that companies like Apple and Google showcase these days.

When new PC users enter the fray, hoping to avoid the most common PC building mistakes, they're susceptible to dodgy advice. From CPUs and GPUs to motherboards and storage, the PC community has no dearth of opinions for the novice PC builder. While most of this advice is well-intentioned, some myths surrounding PC hardware can be harmful to the average user, especially their wallet. Here are the myths you should keep an eye out for if you're new to PC building.

I used to loathe smart home products, believing them to be little more than marketing fluff and rather pointless gimmicks, but I have grown to appreciate what modern devices can do for the home. Previously, you could use smart plugs to toggle various devices and appliances, which could range from light fixtures to a washing machine, depending on what you wished to achieve. But these smart plugs can do much more than that, thanks to more recent advances in technology. In my own smart home, I have transitioned from using these rather simple products for turning stuff on and off to relying on them for much more, including energy consumption tracking, security, and more.

It feels like we’ve reached total saturation when it comes to streaming services, but apparently people are happy to sign up for one (or two) more services if they include live sports. According to Antenna, a firm that tracks the streaming industry, the new ESPN service and Fox One signed up about a million new subscribers in just 10 days. And that number doesn’t include those signing in through a cable subscription or coming over from an existing Disney+ sub. Antenna didn’t specify how many people signed up for ESPN versus Fox One, though according to Front Office Sports, most of the subscribers are for ESPN. With the NFL season just getting underway it’s no surprise that many were eager to sign up for a service that would let them watch live football without cable. Fox One includes Fox News and Fox Business, but the real draw is livestreams from Fox Sports, FS1, FS2, and local Fox affiliates. These are, of course, just early results and it remains to be seen if both services will see continued success when the football season ends.While you can subscribe to ESPN’s new offering for $29.99 a month, or Fox One for $19.99 a month, bundles will continue to be a big part of Disney’s strategy. The company is even planning to offer the two under a single sub for $39.99 starting October 2nd. 

There are a ton of open-world survival crafting games out there now, but it's always worth it to pay homage to the ones that helped pioneer the genre. One such title was Don't Starve, which was released back in April 2013 to critical acclaim. Even today, the game holds up really well.

Nick Fuentes, the leader of a Christian based extremist white nationalist group speaks to his followers, ‘the Groypers.’ in Washington D.C. on November 14, 2020 The only true surprise about this latest MAGA influencer civil war is how quickly it happened, given the circumstances: Charlie Kirk, an ubiquitous presence, influential political force, and seemingly everyone's best friend, had been dead for barely a week before everyone began fighting each other for a piece of him. The indictment of Tyler Robinson, released Tuesday, cited, among other things, the Discord chats that he sent to his roommate wherein he appeared to confess to the shooting. Its contents were strong enough for the power brokers of MAGA world - all the way up to President Donald Trump himself and his cabinet - to begin a rapid, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Let's be clear, this laptop isn't going to be for everyone. But if you need something that's affordable that can do the basics, like getting online and punching up some documents — this laptop is going to be for you. For a limited time, you can score this 14-inch HP laptop for just $155. As you can imagine, this discount from Best Buy won't last long. It's a 24-hour deal so we suggest you act quickly.

Security researchers employed ChatGPT as a co-conspirator to plunder sensitive data from Gmail inboxes without alerting users. The vulnerability exploited has been closed by OpenAI but it’s a good example of the new risks inherent to agentic AI.The heist, called Shadow Leak and published by security firm Radware this week, relied on a quirk in how AI agents work. AI Agents are assistants that can act on your behalf without constant oversight, meaning they can surf the web and click on links. AI companies laud them as a massive timesaver after users authorize their access to personal emails, calendars, work documents, etc.Radware researchers exploited this helpfulness with a form of attack called a prompt injection, instructions that effectively get the agent to work for the attacker. The powerful tools are impossible to prevent without prior knowledge of a working exploit and hackers have already deployed them in creative ways including rigging peer review, executing scams, and controlling a smart home. Users are often entirely unaware something has gone wrong as instructions can be hidden in plain sight (to humans), for example as white text on a white background. The double agent in this case was OpenAI’s Deep Research, an AI tool embedded within ChatGPT that launched earlier this year. Radware researchers planted a prompt injection in an email sent to a Gmail inbox the agent had access to. There it waited. When the user next tries to use Deep Research, they would unwittingly spring the trap. The agent would encounter the hidden instructions, which tasked it with searching for HR emails and personal details and smuggling these out to the hackers. The victim is still none the wiser.Getting an agent to go rogue — as well as managing to successfully get data out undetected, which companies can take steps to prevent — is no easy task and there was a lot of trial and error. “This process was a rollercoaster of failed attempts, frustrating roadblocks, and, finally, a breakthrough,” the researchers said. Unlike most prompt injections, the researchers said Shadow Leak executed on OpenAI’s cloud infrastructure and leaked data directly from there. This makes it invisible to standard cyber defenses, they wrote. Radware said the study was a proof-of-concept and warned that other apps connected to Deep Research — including Outlook, GitHub, Google Drive, and Dropbox — may be vulnerable to similar attacks. “The same technique can be applied to these additional connectors to exfiltrate highly sensitive business data such as contracts, meeting notes or customer records,” they said.OpenAI has now plugged the vulnerability flagged by Radware in June, the researchers said.

Data hoarders, especially media hoarders, have a common problem. Storage space, no matter how many terabytes you have, starts running short way too quickly. Maybe it's all the 4K Blu-ray disks that you ripped in lossless quality, or even high-bitrate files for a multi-season TV show. The fact of the matter is, space is never enough. And on a NAS, where space is precious, sooner or later you realize that your video library could do with some optimization. It's a roadblock I've stumbled into several times as someone who hosts a media library spanning tens of terabytes for my family members. Sorting through thousands of files and optimizing manually is out of the question due to the sheer commitment it requires. That's where Tdarr steps in. This self-hosted tool can scan your entire video collection, make intelligent decisions on your behalf about what needs to be transcoded and what needs to be remixed, and then automate it. Once configured, Tdarr essentially turns into a background task that keeps your media server NAS lean and future-proof.