Google Earth can display a Street View timeline of certain locations, like New York’s Vessel sculpture. Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time.Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you can look through images captured across different years — just like you can in Google Maps. Last year, Google launched the ability to view historical satellite and aerial imagery, which was previously only available in the Earth Pro desktop app.Google is also planning to roll out a new feature that gives professional users “AI-driven insights” about the planet. That includes information about tree canopy coverage, allowing users to see where an area is more heavily shaded and which places might benefit from cooling approaches. It will also offer access to land surface temperatures, which professionals can use to see which areas of a city are hotter. These insights are rolling out in the “coming weeks.”

For once, the unflappable Hideo Kojima was overwhelmed. Even close to four decades of game-making experience didn't prepare him for his biggest tribulation so far: developing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach during the covid-19 pandemic. "I thought I can't pull this off. [I can't] meet people or scan people, or shoot with people. I almost gave up. And also the staff were all remote, and I became sick as well. I thought it was just the end of the world," he says through an interpreter as part of a group interview in Sydney. "I've been creating games throughout my career, but Death Stranding 2 was the most difficult challenge."Even his initial scouting of Australia, where Death Stranding 2 is predominantly set, had to be carried out remotely via Zoom, with Kojima painstakingly directing a local contact to document the landscape on his behalf. "Looking at it from a camera and to be there is totally different, so that's disappointing."For Kojima, those experiences led to a different approach for the sequel. His own sense of isolation that arose from having to develop Death Stranding 2 with a remote team saw him reconsidering its tale - yet it's also this isolation that led to Koj …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been using OPNsense tonnes lately, mainly as the gateway to my home lab shenanigans. Most of this has been accomplished with various virtual setups, but that has its problems that I find myself fighting more than doing any substantial work. The biggest issue I have is that the virtual network adapters frequently change assignments when I return to the VM after a while, and it has become a dealbreaker.

Mini PCs can pretty much do anything you need them to do, so long as you get one that meets your needs. While you can use this one from GMKtec as a standard PC to get things done, we like to think that it has more potential as the base of your home lab, becoming a powerful hub that can handle all your data and expansion that you can throw at it.

The Super Nintendo is one of the most important gaming consoles of all time. It wasn't just a haven for platformers and RPGs — for an entire generation of gamers, it was where they first learned the rules of sports they hadn't even played in real life yet. Whether it was football, wrestling, Formula One, or even tennis. In the 16-bit hardware of the SNES, these games made gamers live and breathe all the sports in the world.

The fighting game genre has an incredibly dedicated base of players who are willing to play games everywhere. No matter what type of platform it may be, if fighting games are available, players will go there and play them. Now that the Nintendo Switch 2 is finally on the market, a few big fighting games will be on it, with possibly more titles making their way over. Although games like Street Fighter 6 have been available on other platforms, that doesn't mean people will avoid picking up the game for the Switch 2, especially if they're looking for something that interests them to play on their newly purchased console. But there needs to be more than just this for the genre to really take off on the Nintendo Switch 2.

Uber customers in Atlanta now have the option of hailing a driverless Waymo robotaxi, the company announced today. Atlanta is the second market, after Austin, to play host to Uber and Waymo’s burgeoning autonomous ridehail partnership.At launch, Waymo’s vehicles will be available exclusively on the Uber app in Atlanta. The two companies first announced a deal to put Waymo’s robotaxis on the Uber app back in 2023, indicating that Austin would be first, followed by Atlanta. Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in Atlanta; customers who open Waymo One will be redirected to Uber’s app.Waymo’s vehicles will only operate within a 65-square-mile service area that includes Atlanta’s Downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don’t drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider: simply calling an Uber in Waymo’s service area doesn’t guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Like in Austin, the companies will start with a small fleet of vehicles and grow from there.Customers can increase their chances of being matched with a Waymo vehicle by opting into autonomous rides in the Ride Preferences section of their Uber app. The rides will cost the same as a typical UberX, Uber Comfort, or Uber Comfort Electric ride. Once the Waymo vehicle arrives, customers can unlock the door, open the trunk, and start the ride from the Uber app. Rides can also be started by pressing the button on the rear touchscreen in the vehicle. Uber will manage fleet services, including vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, EV charging, and depot operations. The company is contracting with Avmo (formerly Moove Cars) to handle these tasks. Waymo is still responsible for vehicle testing, roadside assistance, and certain elements of rider support. The companies will obviously share in the costs and the revenue produced by the robotaxi service, though both companies have declined to share the split.Uber and Waymo, former rivals turned unlikely partners, have said they will work together to get more people to use driverless vehicles. But the partnership isn’t exclusive; Uber also is working with over a dozen other autonomous mobility companies, including sidewalk robot operators for its Uber Eats business. The company says it has quickly grown to an annual run rate of 1.5 million robotaxi and delivery robot trips on its network. While many Atlanta residents will be experiencing a driverless car for the first time, Waymo isn’t new to the city. The company first started gathering mapping data and manually testing its vehicles in Atlanta back in 2018. Fully driverless testing started in January 2025, followed by early passenger trips in May 2025. For those keeping score, there were approximately 283 days between identifying Atlanta as a future robotaxi city and launching the service on the Uber app. Waymo’s success depends partly on narrowing that window for future cities in order to prove its scalability, while keeping an eye on safety. Waymo currently conducts approximately 250,000 rides each week in its four main markets. The company has also said it will launch in Miami and Washington, DC with its own Waymo One app.

If you’ve been enjoying Hades on mobile via Netflix, you better get in those last few runs while you still can. First spotted by Engadget, and confirmed via the Netflix app, Supergiant’s Greek mythology-inspired roguelike and 21 other games are being delisted from the service next month. Several titles, like Braid, Katana Zero, and yes, Hades, were available on mobile exclusively via Netflix, meaning that when those games go, that’s potentially it for them on Android / iOS.Here’s a full list of the games leaving Netflix next month. Most games depart the service July 14th, but Hades goes a little earlier, on July 1st. (Carmen Sandiego, however, doesn’t have a confirmed date for delisting, only that it’s “leaving soon.”)Battleship Braid, Anniversary Edition Carmen Sandiego CoComelon: Play with JJ Death’s Door Diner Out: Merge Cafe Dumb Ways to Survive Ghost DetectiveHades Katana ZeroLego Legacy: Heroes UnboxedLudo KingMonument ValleyMonument Valley 2Monument Valley 3Rainbow Six: SmolRaji: An Ancient EpicSpongeBob: Bubble Pop F.U.N.TED TumblewordsThe Case of the Golden IdolThe Rise of the Golden IdolVineyard ValleyThe Verge has reached out to the developers of the games that had their mobile versions available exclusively via Netflix to ask if they had plans to distribute them as premium titles. In an email, Nigel Lowrie, a spokesperson for Devolver Digital, wrote, “We are looking at bringing games that leave services like Poinpy, Katana Zero, and Death’s Door to mobile stores as premium titles.” He also said that the developer for each of these games has its own timeline for when that will happen, but Devolver is working to get them up on mobile storefronts “as soon as possible.” Devolver Digital has some experience with this, as Exit the Gungeon, which had a mobile version available exclusively via Apple Arcade, will become a paid game on iOS and Android after it was delisted from Apple’s gaming subscription service last year.In the Discord server for Color Gray Games, the developer of the Golden Idol series, Andrejs Klavins, the games’ lead designer and programmer, wrote, “This is all recent news for us and all the practical implications have yet to be worked out.” The statement suggests that some developers were only recently told their games would be leaving the platform and not something that was necessarily pre-planned.This removal of third-party games, many of which had decent, mainstream success outside of Netflix, reflects the platform’s shifting games strategy. It has halted its acquisition spree and, in October of last year, Netflix closed the new studio it spun up to produce a multiplatform AAA game before it could release anything. In an interview with The Verge at the Game Developers Conference in March, Netflix’s new president of games, Alain Tascan, said, “We need to find our voice.” Netflix plans on streamlining its offerings to focus more on games that are tied to Netflix-owned shows, multiplayer party games, games for kids, and “mainstream” titles that have their own large fan bases. And when you look at the numbers, that strategy makes sense.According to data from Appfigures, a mobile analytics company, the most popular game on Netflix is — coming at no surprise — Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with an estimated 37 million downloads. The next most popular, though it has less than half the downloads of San Andreas, is Squid Game: Unleashed, a tie-in game for the Netflix-produced Korean social thriller Squid Game. Those two games aren’t going anywhere for now. But if you’re a fan of any of the games above, they will be leaving soon, so try them while you can.

Home Assistant can integrate with practically everything, but most of the time, when we say "everything", really, we're usually talking about the countless brands making smart home devices. However, thanks to the massive community behind it, you really can integrate with just about everything. It's not just your smart lights, random sensors, and router that can be added to Home Assistant; it's a lot more, too.

One thing's for sure — Microsoft has taken every opportunity it gets to remind Windows 10 fans that the operating system is reaching its End of Life status this October. The Redmond-based giant hasn't been subtle about it at all, and is doing everything within its power to get people to upgrade to Windows 11.

At a pristine, multimillion-dollar lab on the Manhattan waterfront, just down the street from a men's homeless shelter and the medical examiner's office, a slice of summer plum is being converted into fragrance code. This is the work of Osmo, a fragrance tech startup claiming to build artificial olfactory intelligence. Osmo has parlayed this innovation into offering turnkey fragrance compounding that promises a 48-hour sample turnaround from initial client prompt. In the time it takes your Amazon Prime order to arrive, you may now order a custom perfume. Traditionally, creating a fragrance isn't fast. After a client provides a brief - usually a mood, memory, or concept - a perfumer begins weeks or months of formulation trials, compounding and revising dozens of modifications, or "mods." Each must settle before it can be evaluated for balance, projection, and drydown. Raw materials often need years of cultivation. Bottling, regulatory reviews, packaging, and testing follow. From concept to shelf, a single perfume can take six to 18 months - even longer in luxury. And like fine wines, fragrance materials vary with climate concerns. One year's yield will not smell like the next one …Read the full story at The Verge.

Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools. The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement.The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior vice president of customer experience at Verizon, told The Verge that the Verizon AI assistant will transfer customers to a human agent either upon request or if it’s unable to handle the enquiry it’s been given.Butler says the company had “worked very closely with Google” to prevent the Verizon AI agent from hallucinating by creating small language models that are personalized to Verizon services and customers. “To date, we are seeing north of 90 percent accuracy with very minor mistakes being made.”Verizon says it’s now providing a so-called “Customer Champion” that will leverage Google’s Gemini and Cloud AI models to help customers resolve “complex issues.” The press release is vague, but in 2025 we’re going to assume that those champions are still humans utilizing Google’s AI tools. The goal is for customers to contact Verizon once, and for the champion to then provide updates via the My Verizon app, text messages, or call backs.Verizon is also expanding the operating hours of its live customer service agents and introducing 24/7 live chat support that can cater to “diverse customer schedules and preferences.”