Windows 11 is not the most friendly option for an old PC these days, and many (myself included) will recommend switching to Linux to extend the life of a laptop. But Linux distros aren't all the same, and while Ubuntu is a popular pick, it's not without its downsides.

Meta is building a dedicated hardware device for its new Muse AI agent. The product, called Muse Charm, was briefly shown off by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the end of tonight's Meta Connect presentation. It looks almost like a chunky smartwatch without the strap - just a big screen, plus a little lanyard for carrying the device around.The Muse Charm has a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner that you can press to activate and begin speaking to the agent. There appears to be a small camera on the device as well, plus what looks like at least three holes for microphones on the front. Zuckerberg said you don't have to unlock a phone or …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta announced a slate of new wearables during its annual Meta Connect showcase on Wednesday. The star of the event was the new Meta VR Glasses, which pack virtual reality tech into a lightweight smart glasses-style frame with a tethered puck. Meta also announced new pairs of screen-free smart glasses, along with some new AI features and style and frame options. You can catch up on all the highlights from this year's Meta Connect below. Meta VR Glasses bring virtual reality to a lighter form factorMeta's latest wearable offers full virtual reality in a smart glasses-style form factor. Unlike a typical VR headset, the VR Glasses don't h …Read the full story at The Verge.

Just a couple of weeks after launching Muse, Meta announced that it's "working on" bringing the agent to its smart glasses, including the new glasses it unveiled at Meta Connect. Users will be able to activate Muse from their glasses by saying its name and ask it to handle tasks like guiding a workout, logging meals, or helping them shop for products they're looking at. Muse is just one of several major updates coming to Meta's glasses. They're also getting some new accessibility features, like a Hearing Enhancement feature Meta says is "FDA-cleared software for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss." It will be available lat …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Meta VR Glasses. | Photo by Brett Putman / The Verge Meta is launching new VR hardware: a pair of glasses. The new Meta VR Glasses sit on your ears like a typical pair of glasses instead of being strapped over your head, but they still have immersive displays for watching movies, playing games, and getting work done. Imagine a pair of hefty black sunglasses with blacked-out lenses on the outside, but the components of a typical VR headset distributed between the device on your head and a computing puck in your pocket.The idea is to give you a way to experience VR in a much lighter and more approachable form factor than Vision Pro or Meta Quest-style headsets. I got to try the VR Glasses at M …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whether or not LLMs belong in an open-source project, whether they're used for content generation or for finding bugs, is an ongoing debate within the FOSS scene right now. Some communities have banned it, while others have adopted the new tech, although they've had to adapt to a new way of doing things. Such is the case with Canonical, which has announced a new two-week unified patch cycle for Ubuntu because LLMs can't stop finding bugs in the kernel.

VPNs are a lot more useful than skirting around pesky geoblocking checks on websites. In fact, if you're only using it to watch TV shows and movies in another country, you're actually sitting on a valuable privacy tool without realising it. Fortunately, Opera's new feature is here to help people stay safe without having to lift a finger.

The Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses have no cameras. | Photo by Brett Putman / The Verge Walking around Meta Connect 2026, everyone's sporting smart glasses in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes. It's a marked difference here, a tech bubble where "pervert glasses" are not a concern.Outside Connect, the public backlash against wearable surveillance tech - a catchall term that encompasses not just smart glasses, but also smartwatches and AI pendants - is gaining steam. So it's incredibly curious timing that this year, the company is launching Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses: smart glasses infused with Meta AI, but with no camera for recording others.To hear Meta tell it, that's a coincidence. Audio-only glasses have been years …Read the full story at The Verge.

My biggest fear isn’t spiders, heights, cockroaches, or even the faintest sight of blood. It’s needing to log into an account while someone watches me cycle through every password I’ve ever used, hoping one of them magically works.

Google is reportedly nearing the launch of its long awaited Gemini 4 model, after dawdling behind rival developers on flagship AI releases. Speaking with The Information during his first media appearance as the leader of Google's DeepMind division, Koray Kavukcuoglu said that Gemini 4 is currently in its refinement stage, and that the company is aiming to launch the model "much earlier" than the end of the year."Our intention is to, like - as soon as possible - to release an early post-training output because we see the results and we are excited," Kavukcuoglu told the publication, adding that Google would "continue the fast-paced iteratio …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whenever your motherboard reads a temperature sensor or reports a fan speed, the underlying computation is happening not on your CPU but on a chip that came about back in the 1980s. The Super I/O chip is a dedicated microchip on your motherboard managing low-bandwidth I/O devices. Back then, this meant serial and parallel ports, PS/2 controllers, and floppy disk controllers.

Ever since I used my aged GTX 1080 to build a local AI hosting workstation last year, I’ve benchmarked LLM inference tasks across all sorts of hardware, ranging from gaming systems to tiny single-board computers and outdated mobile phones. As you’d expect, devices with NPUs and VRAM-laden graphics cards work best with my local LLMs, and with the right tweaks, can even drive bulky MoE models.