Whenever buying new hardware, it's all too easy to get caught in the "bigger number better" mantra and lose sight of which specifications are the important ones. I'm not immune to that misstep, and when I expanded my home lab earlier this year, I was on the hunt for some NVMe SSDs to cache data for my existing NAS, and to fill the empty slots in my new all-flash NAS.

We've all been there, haven't we? Gaming throughout our childhoods, our best teenage years, making memories of team plays with squad mates we still talk about. And yet, despite being known as 'gamers' in our collective friend groups, there's always a time when we just couldn't, for the life of us, pick up the controller and play something.

For years, the gold standard for complex trip planning was simple: hire a travel agent. You pay for expertise, organization, and peace of mind. But times have changed. I recently discovered a better and infinitely more personalized way to build the trip of a lifetime using Google’s AI tool: NotebookLM.

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X handheld gaming PCs are expected to change the Xbox brand, expanding Microsoft's console line into the handheld space. With the Xbox Ally and Ally X landing just next month, the hype for the new Asus and Xbox co-branded devices is pretty high.

We all love a good, well-written video game antagonist, don't we? A villain who is fleshed out, hard to sympathize with but easy to understand, and you can almost see how they could've been the hero in their own story. On the other hand, it is just as much fun to see a villain just be a straight-up monster who is pure evil just because that's who they are.

Email isn't exciting, but no one can deny that it still sits at the heart of everyday life and productivity. For open-source users, Thunderbird has been the long-standing favorite, and for good reason. It offers flexibility and control without locking you into a subscription. But Thunderbird is far from perfect. In fact, the app has a bit of a reputation for slow updates and general sluggishness. Betterbird fixes that in more ways than one.

So, Windows 10's end-of-life date is fast approaching. By the time October is over, Windows 10 will have fallen out of support. While there are plenty of official ways to score a free year of security updates, some people will choose to upgrade to Windows 11 instead.

For most of his career Larry Ellison has been content to quietly let Oracle be the company, behind the company, behind the technology that makes headlines. Its biggest products being cloud computing and database products that it sells to enterprise customers like DHL, Northwell Health, and Fanatics. But, now in his 80s, Ellison has begun a second act shifting from Silicon Valley pioneer, to media mogul.Compared to many of the other people at the top of the Forbes Billionaires list, Larry Ellison tends to keep a low profile. That's not to say he hasn't seen his fair share of headlines, especially in recent years. But he, and his company Ora …Read the full story at The Verge.

Siri’s new logo. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman Apple is testing Siri’s upcoming revamp using an internal chatbot called Veritas. The company’s struggles as it tries to keep pace in the AI race are no secret. The next-gen Siri has been delayed multiple times and the debut of Apple Intelligence was met with a tepid response. Veritas gives Apple the ability to quickly develop, test, and collect feedback on new Siri features like “search[ing] through personal data… and perform[ing] in-app actions like editing photos.“According to Gurman Veritas resembles other chatbot apps like ChatGPT and Gemini. Employees type requests, have back and forth conversations, and can even revisit old exchanges to dig deeper on a particular topic. But, at least for now, it doesn’t appear like there’s any plan to release it to consumers. (Which Gurman believes is a mistake.) Instead Apple plans to keep its internal chatbot just that, internal. Instead it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple is going to rely on Google’s Gemini for its AI-powered search.

For years, OneNote was my digital home. It was the trusty workhorse for every meeting note, project brainstorm, and idea dump. However, as my workflow evolved, its isolated, static nature started holding me back. After trying out Microsoft’s new Notion rival for a week, I made the risky decision to abandon my entire OneNote structure and shift completely to Microsoft Loop.

When I built my first PC well over a decade ago, I didn't care much about the hardware besides the CPU and GPU. When it came to RAM, all that mattered to me was the capacity and speed. I remember going through listings on Amazon without any clue what half the other numbers meant. CAS latency, voltage, ranks, and even things like XMP profiles were just meaningless jargon to me at the time. In fact, I prioritized capacity so much that it never became an issue in the seven years I used that PC.

In the sprawling, hyper-competitive world of PC peripherals, choosing a new mouse feels like a declaration of identity more than a simple purchase. I've been branded on Discord servers by the mouse I use, and there's a clear set of features that set gaming mice apart from the ones that truly mean business. However, a good mouse, at its core, is an extension of your hand — a tool that should fade into the background, seamlessly translating your intent into action on the screen. The perfect mouse is the one that has exactly the features you need and none of the ones you don't.