After a D&D session, one of my friends told me that they sometimes fired up Copilot while at work and played D&D with it. I was curious as to how Copilot would handle D&D's rules, so I played the popular TTRPG with Microsoft's artificial intelligence. However, I wanted to do more than that; I wanted to see how good it was at making a dungeon, and then guide me through its own creations while I play a hapless barbarian. So, here are the D&D-based adventures that Copilot set for me and how each one went.

Dish's parent company, EchoStar, is selling a broad swath of its 5G spectrum licenses to AT&T for $23 billion. Under the deal, the Dish-owned Boost Mobile will primarily operate using AT&T's growing network - a move that marks "the end of the road for the fourth carrier," says Roger Entner, founder and lead analyst at Recon Analytics.As part of T-Mobile's deal to acquire Sprint in 2019, the Department of Justice stipulated that another company must replace it as the fourth major wireless carrier. Dish came forward to acquire Boost Mobile from Sprint, paying $1.4 billion to purchase the budget carrier and other prepaid assets. Since then, D …Read the full story at The Verge.

While I haven't used Linux for quite as long as some of the other XDA staff, I've used it long enough and hopped enough distros to know that I'm no longer a novice. But you wouldn't know that by looking at my home lab, or the handful of machines I torture weekly with new distros, tools, and tweaks. The one constant in my lifelong learning experience with Linux is that things go wrong; when they do, it's often something serious.

Even if you’re not as much of a tech lover as I am, there are plenty of reasons to deploy your home lab. By letting you self-host a plethora of cool services, a centralized server can help you save money you’d otherwise spend on recurring subscriptions – all while keeping your private data away from the prying eyes of huge corporations. Likewise, you can use your home lab as a testing ground for your favorite computing projects, and gain some experience when things go wrong.

The Hasselblad X2D II 100C comes with some notable upgrades. Hasselblad has just launched the X2D II 100C, the first medium format camera capable of taking true HDR photos. Those HDR images can be instantly reviewed on the new 3.6-inch OLED touchscreen at up to 1,400 nits of peak brightness, which Hasselblad says is 75 percent brighter than the original X2D 100C. Other notable upgrades include using LiDAR to assist with autofocus, a 10-stop in-body stabilization system, an additional customizable button, and a new joystick for controlling camera functions instead of using touchscreen commands.At $7,399, it’s cheaper than its three-year-old predecessor, and still shares some similarities: it takes 100 megapixel photos, comes with 1TB of internal SSD storage, offers similar dynamic range, and the shape is largely unchanged. These don’t overshadow the improvements on the latest model, however, which my colleague Vjeran describes as “one of the greatest cameras I have ever used.”For full specs and a detailed overview of what the Hasselblad X2D II 100C is like to use, check out Vjeran’s review of the camera here.

A lot goes into the kind of FPS numbers your GPU can pump out, such as the core count, architecture, memory bandwidth, VRAM capacity, and drivers, among other things. One seemingly overlooked factor that could be responsible for less-than-ideal GPU performance is the quality of the cooler. The heatsink, vapor chamber, backplate, fan size, and overall build quality of your GPU's cooler determine its cooling performance, and thereby, its maximum clock speeds, minimum temperatures, and lifespan. The differences between different AIB models for the same GPU might be slim, but a subpar cooler could still be chipping away at your maximum FPS.

Today, Framework announced the second-gen Framework Laptop 16 with two industry firsts: the first Nvidia laptop graphics card upgrade you can perform at home in just a couple minutes, and the first complete 240W laptop charging solution over a USB-C cable.But the company’s also revealing some intriguing upgrades that didn’t quite make the cut — including an extra-large haptic touchpad a la Apple’s MacBooks (with no physical click), and the company’s first external graphics module (eGPU).Not everything in the video below is actually coming to market, and some of it won’t be aimed at everyday consumers. Framework CEO Nirav Patel says he’s working to bring the fan-favorite ThinkPad Trackpoint nub to its keyboards, but keeps failing because the team can’t find a short enough nub that it doesn’t poke into the Laptop 16’s screen. But he says a wide haptic touchpad is genuinely in development, one that won’t need the Framework Laptop 16’s modular spacers to give you a full-width palmrest. And if your main concern is just removing those spacers (I occasionally found the uneven surface annoying in my review), Framework says it’ll release 3D files so you can print your own full-width palmrest for the existing touchpad, in any color you like.Here’s a look at that 3D-printed one:Framework also says an eGPU is actually in development that uses the Framework Laptop 16’s GPU modules, but not as a consumer product. Patel says that would make it too expensive to fulfill the team’s main goal: “We want to make sure there is a pathway to reuse graphics modules coming out of the Framework Laptop 16, so they’re not sitting in a drawer or worse going out into a landfill somewhere.”So it won’t look like the prototype you see below, but rather something targeted at makers, he says — perhaps we’ll have to 3D print the case for that one ourselves as well.Patel also says Framework’s One Key Modules for building your own custom keyboards are still in development — “we’re working hard to bring up the manufacturing yield so we can make it available at a reasonable price” — and expects he’ll be able to offer 64GB RAM modules before long. A transparent bezel for the Framework Laptop 16 didn’t make the cut because it turned out too brittle, though the team’s still looking for polycarbonate or resin blends that’d work better.As for why it’s shipping a new Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics module with just 8GB of RAM, Patel says in a Q&A that’s how much is available with a mobile 5070, and that’s how much could fit into the current design, which only has space for four memory packages on the front.While they could have gone with a more powerful GPU, “we’d have to grow the thickness of the graphics module by putting them on both sides of the board,” which would increase the thickness of the graphics bay, which would increase the thickness of the laptop, among other adjustments. “For this generation, 5070 8GB is it,” says Patel.

The world's most famous celebrity couple got engaged, and the first place the news broke was on Instagram. By now, it's not much of a surprise that pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce opted to announce their engagement on the platform on Tuesday - if it's good enough for Beyoncé, it's good enough for anyone.Swift and Kelce are, for the most part, completely unrelatable to the rest of us - due to their wealth and fame, they occupy an entirely different reality that the average person can't even conceptualize. But one thing actually does make them kind of like us: Instagram is the "I'm getting married!" website (it's also …Read the full story at The Verge.

Each handheld pocket features adequate room on the sides, and a layer of padding covering the screen area. Embracer Group-owned CRKD recently launched a backpack, the $99.99 Vortex 1.0. During a recent vacation, I swapped it in place of my go-to for the past eight or so years, the 20-liter Peak Design Everyday backpack, which CRKD has thoroughly cribbed the look of. However, the Vortex has handheld gaming pockets, which helps it stand out, especially at this price.I generally like using the Peak Design backpack, except that bringing it on vacations means that I have to leave my handheld(s) at home. It's not wide enough to accommodate even the original Switch once things are stuffed into its side pockets. The Vortex 1.0, on the other hand, let m …Read the full story at The Verge.

We've spent most of the year talking about gadgets getting more expensive. Thanks to US tariffs, prices are rising every few months, and even small upgrades have come with big price hikes. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the new Hasselblad X2D 100C II will actually be cheaper than its predecessor, coming in at "just" $7,400 for the body. Don't get me wrong. It's far from cheap. But Hasselblad is trying to get this camera in the hands of a wider audience. I've been looking at my account balance ever since I started this review, trying to figure out if I can justify buying one for myself. I probably can't - but not because I d …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've stated multiple times that I believe the seventh generation of gaming, with PS3s and Xbox 360s, were the best era for gaming. Heck, I could go on about the why and how of it for hours. The '90s, however, aren't far behind in that 'best-era-for-gaming' race. We went from the NES to the SNES and then to the N64, while seeing the PlayStation change gaming forever, all before the final decade of the century was over.

2026 is a major year for the first-person shooter genre, because the two most titanic names in the space, Call of Duty and Battlefield, are both coming out in the holiday season. Call of Duty is continuing after last year's Black Ops 6, while Battlefield, having learnt from everything that went wrong with 2042, is back in stride with Battlefield 6.