While the summer doldrums have hit Washington, the MAGA influencers can never truly go on vacation, especially if they've spent their careers promising to reveal the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. Although their politicians are now in power, they're getting stonewalled, and in the absence of juicy "Epstein files" to feed to their audiences, a new maelstrom of discontent is brewing, one that implicates much more than allegations about a pedophile's sex trafficking ring. The complex rift around Donald Trump's loyalists and the diehard Epstein truthers can no longer be separated from the issue of Israel, and as days pass, vocal criticism of the I …Read the full story at The Verge.

Third-party Windows launchers add what the native Windows Search lacks: custom web searches, instant access to commands, and much faster file searches. Despite their usefulness, Windows launchers had been a novelty to me until Windows PowerToys’ Command Palette sent me down a rabbit hole, through which I discovered Flow Launcher. As I fiddled with Flow's seemingly endless number of customizations and plugins, I kept searching for what else was out there. That’s when I came across Listary.

HDMI 2.1 was supposed to herald a new age of widespread high-bandwidth, low-latency, and lossless media consumption. As far as monitors are concerned, however, that promise hasn't really panned out. Having an HDMI port on your monitor with the HDMI 2.1 spec doesn't automatically guarantee access to the entire feature set of the standard. It all depends on which particular features the manufacturer chooses to implement on your model. Add to that the confusion among consumers regarding which HDMI cable to buy, and it's all a mess that has lasted for far too long.

It's been a tough decade for the Need for Speed series. Between the 2015 soft reboot that became the poster child for wasted potential and the messy Payback, the EA franchise was at risk of losing its popularity. Then came 2019's NFS Heat and 2022's Unbound, which were absolutely solid. With over 100 hours in each, I can confidently state that the series needs to do more of what it did with its last two entries.

Google's NotebookLM is one of the only AI tools I open at least once every day. If you aren't familiar with what NotebookLM is, it's Google's wildly underrated research assistant. I discovered NotebookLM when Google was testing it out as an experiment in Google Labs under the codename "Project Tailwind."

The sudden firing of two high-ranking antitrust officials this week is signaling upheaval at an agency responsible for arguing some of the biggest tech monopoly cases in decades.Two top deputies to Department of Justice Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater were fired earlier this week for what a DOJ official would only explain as "insubordination" in an unattributed statement. Antitrust trade publication MLex reported that termination letters for Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, who also served in the first Trump administration, did not mention the reason for their firing. (Alford later posted a copy of his letter, which he said he framed and …Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ve never paid for Adobe Acrobat for longer than a few months at a time, and every time I’d wonder why I locked myself into a payment just to edit some text on my PDFs. If you’re still forking over a monthly fee for Acrobat to access the same, simple features, you’re getting robbed.

The collaborations between LEGO and various popular brands are always a fun thing to see. Lately, LEGO has been releasing sets that are based on video game consoles, with the most recent one being on the Nintendo Game Boy. Prior to that, the company collaborated with Nintendo on a set that featured the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was out around the same time as their Super Mario series sets. There was even a LEGO set that let people build a PAC-MAN arcade cabinet, which included a miniature version bundled with it. As collectibles, these are fun things for gaming fans to pick up, especially if they love all things related to video games.

Most people consider NAS boxes as just some glorified hard drives meant to transfer and hold data, but only over the network for convenience. But mine doubles, triples, quadruples as a beast that can handle so much more than just being a storage dump. It’s a little server right at my home that does things SaaS companies often charge a hefty monthly fee for. These seven services run on my NAS, not just to offer me some amazing functionality but also to save cash every single month in unnecessary subscriptions.

Fixing my eroded attention span has been a journey. Brick has sort of helped. "We need to talk." Nobody likes to hear those words from their spouse. Especially when it's delivered in a grave tone as you rot on a couch in a grubby blankie, staring like a zombie while doomscrolling. "Wut?" I said, very intelligently.What came next was a compassionate but firm speech about how I was in dire need of an intervention. My attention span, my spouse said, was utterly shot to hell. They'd just asked my opinion about something happening on the TV show we were watching. I hadn't heard them. At all. Apparently, they'd repeated the question three times. Instead, I'd been engrossed in… actually, I couldn't tell you. "You have …Read the full story at The Verge.

The go-anywhere BougeRV CRD2 40. Keeping humans alive at home in post-agrarian societies requires refrigeration. Meat bags on the move must either load up a cooler with ice for a soggy weekend barbecue or do the evolved thing and use a 12V fridge instead.The $509.99 battery-powered BougeRV CRD2 40 refrigerator and freezer combo I've been testing for the last few weeks runs for almost 12 hours on its itty-bitty battery. It charges from a wall outlet or a 12V socket found in cars and portable power stations. It even accepts 100W of direct solar input to stay charged in sunny climates. And if this 40-liter (43-quart) model is too small, it's also available in larger 49-liter …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're in a major city, chances are pretty good that you're happy with your internet service. But if you're somewhere that's a bit more remote, well, that's when something like Starlink becomes an option. The reason why Starlink can work where others won't is because it's a satellite service. It comes from the sky, which means it can pretty much accommodate any location. It's an absolute lifesaver when other internet services aren't available.