Automation is, nowadays, an important part of any system. From a smart home built with Home Assistant to the management of teams, there are countless solutions out there built for automating workflows in a quick, easy, and secure way. Open‑source projects like n8n gave developers a taste of that power without enterprise price tags, but there are other options out there, too. That's why I've been trying out Tines, and I've been loving it so far.

We've seen the base model of the Mac Mini go on sale plenty of times before, dropping to just $500, which is an absolute steal for what you get. But if you're someone that's looking to grab one with a little more RAM and storage, this model should be right up your alley.

Home Assistant may have a beginner-friendly UI, but you shouldn’t underestimate its capabilities. Thanks to integrations (especially those of the HACS variety), blueprints, and trigger-action workflows, there are tons of cool projects you can build with Home Assistant. Throw in the Node-RED add-on, and you’ve got a powerful automation server that can control every aspect of your smart home.

The year 2001 was a monumental time for gaming, as that November marked the release of the original Xbox from Microsoft. At that point, the games industry changed forever, as another giant entered the ongoing console war between multiple companies. To many, the first Xbox console went on to have a library of games that would help reshape the landscape of the console market, impacting multiple game genres in ways that would be felt through the decades. Not only was it the console where franchises like Halo began, but it was also the jumping point for online gaming becoming mainstream with features like Xbox Live. And through its five-year lifespan on the market, the Xbox accumulated a great library of amazing, boundary-pushing games.

If you're planning a move, you may suddenly find yourself with a lot of excess stuff and not enough space for it in your new digs. You may be consolidating two separate households into one, or going from a large home into a small apartment - either way, you're going to be leaving behind a lot of your belongings. It's hard to get rid of things you've lived with for years, but besides the psychological toll it takes, it's also difficult to do on a practical level. You have to figure out how to dispose of your electronics, used clothing, old books, and other items responsibly without adding to the world's excess trash - especially when just dumping them into the garbage isn't an option.Reusing and recycling old and unneeded stuff has become an important aspect of the push to preserve the world's environment. Many states and urban areas have mandated the recycling of tech, metals, paper goods, or other substances, but even if you live in an area where the law doesn't require it, you probably still want to do the right thing.The problem is finding how and where you can get rid of your stuff with the greatest advantage to you and the least amount of damage to the environment. This …Read the full story at The Verge.

Running your own private cloud at home is a great way to shave off subscription fees every month, but even if you're not running a stack of containerized services, you probably still need to be able to access your home network while away from it. While you could set up a traditional VPN, or even dynamic DNS to connect to your home network from a consistent IP address, these aren't the best way anymore.

The Bing Video Creator is rolling out now to Bing mobile app users.Microsoft has added a new AI video generator to its Bing mobile app that’s built on OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model. The Bing Video Creator announced on Monday provides a free way to generate short clips with Sora, which is normally locked behind ChatGPT subscriptions starting at $20 per month for Plus users.“Bing Video Creator represents our efforts to democratize the power of AI video generation,” Microsoft said in its announcement. “We believe creativity should be effortless and accessible to help you satisfy your answer-seeking process. We’re excited to empower anyone to turn their words into wonder through an AI-generated video.”The Video Creator is now rolling out globally (excluding China and Russia) to the Bing Search apps for Android and iPhone, and Microsoft says desktop and Copilot Search support are also “coming soon.” The video generator can be accessed via the menu at the bottom right corner of the Bing app, or by adding a description of the clip you want to make directly to the Bing search bar.Microsoft says that users can queue up to three video generations at a time and will receive a notification when they’re ready. You can choose between a “Standard” generation speed, which is free for all users, or a “Fast” option that works “in seconds,” according to Microsoft. 10 Fast generations are provided for free, after which users will need to use the Standard speed or redeem 100 Microsoft Rewards points for each Fast generation.Videos are five seconds long, in a 9:16 vertical format, and support for 16:9 format video creation will be added at a later date. Videos will be stored on the Bing app for up to 90 days and can be downloaded or shared with other platforms.The example videos that Microsoft has released are a far cry from the quality showcased by other AI models like Google’s Veo 3. The movements in the otter chef and sweeping hamster demos show unnatural clipping, for example, and the characters themselves look a little cartoony at times. Still, judging by our time experimenting with Sora after it launched in December 2024, these are a better representation of what the video model is capable of than the polished (and presumably cherry-picked) clips that OpenAI released when Sora was being teased.

TikTok is back online after a brief outage last night. Many people started reporting problems with the platform just after 11PM ET, noting that while TikTok wasn’t completely offline, it was definitely dealing with some kind of technical issues that impacted users trying to access the service and view video comments.Based on reports from Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, and looking at our own devices, some videos were able to load in TikTok’s mobile apps, but accessing other features like comments or switching between accounts wasn’t working reliably, leading some users to wonder if their accounts were banned. Trying to pull up the TikTok website, or even its support pages, displayed a message saying “An error occurred while processing your request” along with a reference code.TikTok didn’t make any public acknowledgement about the outage or what was causing it. At the time, status pages for some of its service providers, like Akamai and Oracle, didn’t indicate any wider problems. Downdetector listed 44,000 reports at our last check before regular service was restored at around 12AM ET, so while it’s unclear what was behind the technical issues, at least everything was restored swiftly.Update, June 3rd: The TikTok outage has now been resolved.

Gaming as a hobby is appearing to get more expensive. With the rise in prices for hardware and other aspects of video games, everyone is going to have to shell out more to engage with their favorite pastime. However, while the price of home game consoles and PC gaming has increased over time, one aspect of video games that's attracting a lot of debate is the price of individual releases. Not that long ago, it felt like $60 would be enough to buy most new releases that would come out at retail. But now it seems some developers are aiming to reach an $80 price point for their newest releases. And most players are not happy about it.

We saw this same SSD get a rare price drop to $280 about a month ago, and now we're getting an even bigger discount as Amazon knocks it down to its lowest price yet at just $240. This is the best price we've seen so far on this Gen5 M.2 SSD, which is perfect for that desktop or laptop that you've been looking to upgrade.

There are budget PCs, and then there are budget PCs. If you're on a mission to grab the cheapest gaming PC possible, you might want to look at old Xeon workstations. Intel's Xeon CPUs might not be relevant in the enterprise space anymore, but they're quite popular with hobbyists and home lab users. For gaming, they might seem an odd choice due to the outdated single-core performance, but they're surprisingly capable when compared to, say, 5-year-old consumer chips, such as the Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i5-12600K.

Moving four times in six years has taught me a lot. Mainly, changing addresses is utterly exhausting, but also that it's a lot more complicated than just putting your stuff in boxes and transporting them from point A to point B. This is especially true when it comes to moving your money and payments along with you while also trying to stay on a budget. Technically, all you need to keep track of your money during a move (and make sure all your payments come along with you) is a good ol' spreadsheet. But the process can be tedious, so if paying for a fancy app, making a cool Notion dashboard, or even buying a new notebook and some pretty washi tape will make it better for you, go for it. On my last move, I wrote all the things I had to do on color-coded sticky notes and put them on one of the walls of my apartment. Visualizing everything at a glance was a bit stressful at first, but it helped me know what was left to do as moving day came closer. It was also extremely cathartic to yank notes from the wall, crumple them, and throw them away once I completed a task. Coming up with a plan to deal with the financial aspects of your move ahead of time sounds like boring dad advice, b …Read the full story at The Verge.