For as long as I can remember, my junk drawer has been a chaotic mess. Loose batteries, mystery keys, pens that may or may not work, and cables I probably don’t need anymore—it was all crammed together with no sense of order. I had tried store-bought organizers, but they never fit quite right, and most had slots for things I didn’t use.

It's always a bit of a conundrum when I discover a new, cool way to randomly generate the results of a die without actually using a die. On one hand, they're often very cool and use inventive ways to ensure the result is random, but on the other hand, I didn't buy way too many dice for my D&D campaigns for nothing. Something about rolling the dice just feels right, you know?

We've seen some impressive deals from Asus, knocking its Vivobook 14 line down to just $220. But if you are looking for something with a little more power and storage, we think this one with an Intel Core i5 and 12GB RAM is going to be right up your alley. Plus, you get a sleek design, and it's now not all that expensive thanks to a steep $280 discount that drops it down to just $320 for a very limited time.

The Sega Saturn was an impressive console, but it just couldn’t match the popularity of the PlayStation and its massive game library. Despite this, the Saturn had plenty of standout titles that never got the attention they deserved.

Reddit users in the United Kingdom will now be blocked from accessing “certain mature content” unless they complete the platform’s new age verification process. Reddit announced on Monday that UK users will need to upload a selfie or a photo of their government ID in order to view content that’s restricted for under-18s by the UK Online Safety Act (OSA), including abusive, violent, and sexually explicit materials.The age verification process is performed by Persona, a third-party provider that won’t have access to users’ Reddit data or retain photos for longer than seven days. Reddit says it also won’t have access to uploaded photos, and that it will only store birthdates and verification statuses so that users don’t need to re-verify their account. I managed to complete the process myself this morning using a selfie in under a minute, though the photo tool had some difficulty detecting when my face was correctly framed.“Reddit was built on the principle that you shouldn’t need to share personal information to participate in meaningful discussions,” Reddit said in its announcement. “While we still don’t want to know who you are on Reddit, there are certainly situations where it would be helpful if we knew a little more about you.”Reddit noted that there is a “growing number of jurisdictions” that have passed or are considering laws that require online platforms to verify the ages of their users. As such, the platform says it’s also introducing a global option for users to provide their birthdate “to help ensure that content and ads are age-appropriate,” and may roll out age verification requirements in other regions.More information about the verification process can be found here. A list of content categories that are restricted to minors — some of which could be considered subjective, such as content that “romanticizes” depression, hopelessness, and despair — can also be found here.Like a similar age check introduced on Bluesky last week, Reddit’s age verification mandate is being introduced to comply with rules under the OSA that require online platforms to implement measures that protect children from seeing harmful and age-inappropriate content by July 25th. According to a report published by British communications regulator Ofcom last year, Reddit was the fastest-growing large social media platform in the UK in 2024, experiencing a 47 percent year-on-year increase in reach for adult users.“The UK’s online safety rules are coming into force and change is happening. Society has long protected youngsters from products that aren’t suitable for them, from alcohol to smoking or gambling,” Ofcom said in a statement to The Verge. “Now, children will be better protected from online material that’s not appropriate for them, while adults’ rights to access legal content are preserved. We expect other companies to follow suit, or face enforcement if they fail to act.”The announcement also mentioned Reddit “would like to be able” to confirm whether users are human or not in the new age of AI. Reddit said that it has “more to come about that later,” suggesting the platform is planning to crack down on AI bot accounts.

If you’re not willing to switch to macOS to get the sleek styling of a MacBook, this laptop from Samsung is a great alternative. Not only does it look and feel good, but it also packs lots of power under the hood, making it great for everyday use. The only problem is that it's usually quite expensive, coming in at $1,650. Luckily, we're now seeing a solid discount from Best Buy that knocks $450 off, bringing it down to its best price at $1,200.

If you're interested in checking out what's coming next for Windows 11, you owe it to yourself to check out the operating system's Beta and Dev branches. These updates with new features that Microsoft would like people to try out before a full release, but unlike the Canary channel, it's a little more stable, and the features have undergone at least an initial testing phase before being served. Microsoft has just uploaded a new update to both the Beta and Dev channels, and both of them make the File Explorer a lot better to use.

In an era of social media-based restaurant reviewers, local neighborhood influencers, and an urgent need for trustworthy on-the-ground reports during moments of crisis, a crowdsourced hyperlocal platform like Nextdoor seems like a no-brainer. Yet something wasn’t clicking. Some people were installing Nextdoor and finding a flood of irrelevant updates and notifications. Others were realizing that, as with other neighborhood-based platforms, their community feeds had devolved into paranoid watch groups, where fear, anger, and negativity were a primary driver of engagement.As CEO and cofounder Nirav Tolia describes it, there were three key issues with the platform. The first was a lack of content — something Nextdoor had tried to fix by pulling in posts from a larger geographic area, to some users’ chagrin. The second was that useful notifications for things like a construction delay, power outage, or tornado tended to be too slow because users were posting about them once they’d already happened. And finally, the content was simply not high-value enough. “I’m sure that if you use the product, you’re not using it every day the way that you’re using Instagram and the way you’re using TikTok,” Tolia says. To try and turn things around, the company is overhauling its offerings and flooding the zone with new — and hopefully more useful — content and features. First, the platform is adding a new interactive neighborhood map called Alerts, which displays nearby emergency situations: fires, severe weather, power outages, and more. Rather than being self-reported by neighbors, the Alerts page pulls information from authoritative sources like power companies, police and fire departments, emergency services, and Weather.com, according to Nextdoor.Getting reliable, trustworthy information to the public in emergency situations is difficult: social media prioritizes engagement over safety, and government alert systems are sometimes spotty. During the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, a small, nonprofit-powered app called Watch Duty became a life-saving resource for residents. Tolia says that user engagement was “through the roof” during the LA fires, and the hope is that Nextdoor can use its precise data to send better emergency alerts. If a power company reports that a few hundred households are affected by an outage, Nextdoor (which has precise home address data from when users signed up) could send an alert to just those people, Tolia says.Nextdoor has never licensed (and still isn’t licensing) its content to AI companiesTo help bring more high-quality content to the platform, Nextdoor is also partnering with more than 3,500 local news outlets in the US, UK, and Canada to prominently feature their work in the app. A rotating carousel of news stories will appear at the top of the landing page, and news coverage will get sprinkled into the main feed of individual posts and the alerts map. The partnership, which has been rolling out over the past few months, is currently unpaid — news outlets just get traffic and engagement from Nextdoor users. It’s likely too early to assess whether the platform can be a major driver of engagement and traffic, but it could help smaller newsrooms get in front of local audiences who care about what’s happening around them. Tolia says Nextdoor will eventually bring in neighborhood influencers, schools, and other community groups — in other words, something akin to a Facebook feed with geographic constraints.Finally, Nextdoor is taking more than a decade of user data and rolling it into a new feature called Faves, which is an AI-powered recommendations chatbot. Tolia says Nextdoor has never licensed (and still isn’t licensing) its content to AI companies, and its hyperlocal conversations and recommendations aren’t indexed by Google like, say, Reddit threads. But the in-app Faves chatbot uses Nextdoor user data and allows people to ask for things like local yoga studios or places for families to go cycling, for example; the bot pulls and summarizes suggestions from previous conversations. Nextdoor users will see other AI-generated content creep in, too: news articles shared to the platform will have an AI comment posted to prompt conversation related to the story. Nextdoor is reevaluating one of its fundamental ideological questions here: who counts as a neighbor? What used to be a platform just for individuals now is courting news outlets, community groups, and influencers, as well as adding bespoke AI chatbots to neighborhood groups. “We’re going to recommit to hyperlocal. We are going to focus on utility,” Tolia says. “We don’t want to be the place where people are just bitching about what they don’t like about the neighborhood.”

I've been using Google's AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, since before most people knew it existed. I'm talking about the time when it was still tucked away in Google Labs. If you aren't familiar with what I'm talking about, Google Labs is essentially Google's experimental playground, where the tech giant tests out ideas before releasing them more broadly.

Obsidian is widely known as a powerful tool for knowledge management and note-taking, but its true potential goes far beyond just capturing ideas. After growing tired of the same old habit tracker apps, I wanted something more personal, more rewarding, and honestly … more fun. That's why I developed a system that transforms daily routines into an engaging, rewarding game-likefeel right within my favorite app, Obsidian. I’ve fully gamified my habit tracker and created a personalized RPG for my life. This entire system is powered by Obsidian's incredible Dataview and Templater plugins.

It's been a quarter of a century since the first IPv6 standard was finalized as RFC 2460, and to say adoption has been slow is an understatement. The pool of available IPv4 addresses has been exhausted for quite a while now, and in fact, was running out for public use years ago. Yet it's still not gone, with most systems that have adopted IPv6 running a dual-stack configuration that also includes IPv4.

Excel can be really intimidating to use. There, I said it. I’m not talking about creating a basic spreadsheet or formatting cells. I mean using Excel as a proper data analysis tool. The kind where you're expected to use complex formulas, manually figure out trends, and build something that actually makes sense. It's a lot, and it's a task I've never been a fan of doing.