Home Assistant is a wonderful way to link up all of your services into one neat software package, enabling smart home automation while also making it possible to do more than what was intended with the original devices. You can track your email, build your own sensors, and manage your servers all from one centralized place if you want, and that's the beauty of it. However, there are some integrations (known as "legacy" integrations) that can only be set up from the configuration file, rather than from the UI. Because Home Assistant has been around for a long time, "legacy" integrations are those that were designed for significantly earlier versions of the software.

Every once in a while, we come across personalization tools that tick all the right boxes, becoming one of the mainstays of our user experience. Besides fan favorites like Wallpaper Engine, Rainmeter is one of those few that I haven't uninstalled in years. It is a powerful, open-source tool for Windows that lets you customize your desktop to an incredible degree. If you're tired of the stock Windows look and feel, Rainmeter skins are your gateway to a world of personalization.

Something I've always found confusing was the overwhelmingly harsh and constant criticism of Final Fantasy X. Despite so many good things to come from it, some role-playing game purists often downplay the importance and success of the game. One would even say there's a borderline hatred for Final Fantasy X in some cases, given how vicious some of the criticism can be.The game is the tenth mainline entry in the series that brought Final Fantasy into a new era, adopting fully voiced cutscenes and a new level of beautiful visuals. But even with all of that, Final Fantasy X still manages to be the center of disdain from some fans, often in comparison to many of the more popular games of the franchise. Whether some accept it or not, Final Fantasy X is actually a great sequel, and it doesn't deserve the unjustified hate it gets so often.

It seems that Apple's announcement of the Vista-like Liquid Glass UI has stirred up a spectre of some sort. A month ago, we saw a really weird issue where Windows 11's test builds started playing Vista's startup sound. While it's easy to assume it was a joke from Microsoft related to Apple's new announcement, it quickly became apparent that this was a legitimate bug. Windows 11 somehow managed to fetch a startup sound from decades past.

Fighting games can be incredibly fun to play with other people. They are not only exciting and easy to get into with others, but can also become very competitive among players. But for those who want to stay competitive with some of the most hardcore fans of the genre, it can take a lot of time and practice to maintain the skill to do so. This is why I find myself playing many different fighting games to keep my skills sharp, especially classic fighting games that focus on the fundamentals of the fighting game genre. Even with so many great new titles being developed and released across multiple platforms, you can't go wrong by revisiting some of the iconic classics that helped lay the groundwork for the genre and the competitive scene as a whole.

A 3D printer isn’t just a tool for fun projects and quick prototyping. It’s also a powerful, practical machine that can save you money month after month. Whether you're organizing your space, upgrading your hobby gear, or replacing household items, your printer starts proving its worth quickly. With a few rolls of filament and some creativity, the return on investment often speaks for itself by the end of the year.

When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090's $2,000 price tag was announced, gamers everywhere winced at the idea of buying one. Then there were storage issues, and the GPU ended up selling for far more than that in the hands of scalpers. And now, Asus has revealed its own 5090, which I'm pretty sure is the most expensive GPU ever to exist. It's a gold-plated 5090 that's covered in 5KG of the precious metal, and if you go off of gold prices alone, the GPU is worth at least $500,000 in base parts.

Hi! Welcome to Installer No. 89, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. My name is Jay Peters, and I will be taking care of Installer while David is on parental leave. All of us here at The Verge are very excited for him and his family, and he'll be back later this year.It's a huge honor to be writing this. I look forward to Installer every week to see what awesome things David is obsessed with and what you all are into. (Thanks to everyone who sent over their favorite non-famous apps to get me started. Keep reading for some of those!) I'm really excited to keep the party going. (If you're new here, welcome, and also you …Read the full story at The Verge.

I love ePaper and E-Ink in all its forms, whether I'm reading eBooks, taking notes, or browsing the Internet for sparks of inspiration. I love seeing all the projects that people have used ePaper displays on, adding dashboards of various sizes that don't drain your electricity bill. I wish more options to use it for computing use existed, but that would require larger display sizes which get spendy really quickly.

With dozens of bank accounts and credit card statements, loan documents, investment reports, and budgeting spreadsheets, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with your finances. For years, I navigated personal finance feeling disorganized and frankly, a bit lost. Financial advisors felt out of reach, and spreadsheets often led to more confusion than clarity.

GM was the first major US automaker to make the promise to go all-electric by 2035, just four years ago. Those promises have since turned into rough estimates under the second Donald Trump presidency, with the company softening language about its electrification goals. But GM is riding high on EV sales, and as CEO Mary Barra puts it, EVs are still the future - just on a delayed (and very flexible) timeline. "We still believe in an all-electric future," Barra told The Verge in an exclusive interview at the Le Mans race in France. "The regulations were getting in front of where the consumer demand was, largely because of charging infrastruct …Read the full story at The Verge.

Several days after temporarily shutting down the Grok AI bot that was producing antisemitic posts and praising Hitler in response to user prompts, Elon Musk’s AI company tried to explain why that happened. In a series of posts on X, it said that “…we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”On the same day, Tesla announced a new 2025.26 update rolling out “shortly” to its electric cars, which adds the Grok assistant to vehicles equipped with AMD-powered infotainment systems, which have been available since mid-2021. According to Tesla, “Grok is currently in Beta & does not issue commands to your car – existing voice commands remain unchanged.” As Electrek notes, this should mean that whenever the update does reach customer-owned Teslas, it won’t be much different than using the bot as an app on a connected phone.This isn’t the first time the Grok bot has had these kinds of problems or similarly explained them. In February, it blamed a change made by an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for the bot disregarding sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. Then, in May, it began inserting allegations of white genocide in South Africa into posts about almost any topic. The company again blamed an “unauthorized modification,” and said it would start publishing Grok’s system prompts publicly.xAI claims that a change on Monday, July 7th, “triggered an unintended action” that added an older series of instructions to its system prompts telling it to be “maximally based,”  and “not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.” The prompts are separate from the ones we noted were added to the bot a day earlier, and both sets are different from the ones the company says are currently in operation for the new Grok 4 assistant. These are the prompts specifically cited as connected to the problems:“You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”* Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.”* “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”The xAI explanation says those lines caused the Grok AI bot to break from other instructions that are supposed to prevent these types of responses, and instead produce “unethical or controversial opinions to engage the user,” as well as “reinforce any previously user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech in the same X thread,” and prioritize sticking to earlier posts from the thread.