Have you ever looked at the internal USB headers on your motherboard and wondered what you can connect to them? These headers come in a few flavors. We have the older USB 2.0 headers, slightly newer USB 3.0 headers, and a USB-C port on modern motherboards. It's not uncommon to now find all three present on the PCB, so what can you use them for? Aside from front panel I/O, here are some things you can plug into your motherboard.

The go-anywhere BougeRV CRD2 40. Keeping humans alive at home in post-agrarian societies requires refrigeration. Meat bags on the move must either load up a cooler with ice for a soggy weekend barbecue or do the evolved thing and use a 12V fridge instead.The $509.99 battery-powered BougeRV CRD2 40 refrigerator and freezer combo I've been testing for the last few weeks runs for almost 12 hours on its itty-bitty battery. It charges from a wall outlet or a 12V socket found in cars and portable power stations. It even accepts 100W of direct solar input to stay charged in sunny climates. And if this 40-liter (43-quart) model is too small, it's also available in larger 49-liter …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been a tough decade for the Need for Speed series. Between the 2015 soft reboot that became the poster child for wasted potential and the messy Payback, the EA franchise was at risk of losing its popularity. Then came 2019's NFS Heat and 2022's Unbound, which were absolutely solid. With over 100 hours in each, I can confidently state that the series needs to do more of what it did with its last two entries.

A few years ago, I started self-hosting services on my local hardware to escape from the clutches of unending subscription fees and privacy-intrusive apps. But what initially started as a means to protect my finances and personal information quickly turned into a hobby, and now I have tons of gaming, media-serving, note-taking, and automation apps in my repertoire. So many, in fact, that I have a suite of containers designed to help me manage the rest of the services running on server nodes.

The collaborations between LEGO and various popular brands are always a fun thing to see. Lately, LEGO has been releasing sets that are based on video game consoles, with the most recent one being on the Nintendo Game Boy. Prior to that, the company collaborated with Nintendo on a set that featured the Nintendo Entertainment System, which was out around the same time as their Super Mario series sets. There was even a LEGO set that let people build a PAC-MAN arcade cabinet, which included a miniature version bundled with it. As collectibles, these are fun things for gaming fans to pick up, especially if they love all things related to video games.

Third-party Windows launchers add what the native Windows Search lacks: custom web searches, instant access to commands, and much faster file searches. Despite their usefulness, Windows launchers had been a novelty to me until Windows PowerToys’ Command Palette sent me down a rabbit hole, through which I discovered Flow Launcher. As I fiddled with Flow's seemingly endless number of customizations and plugins, I kept searching for what else was out there. That’s when I came across Listary.

Delta Air Lines is explaining more about its AI-assisted dynamic pricing model after coming under scrutiny for recent comments about the pricing.In November, Delta president Glen Hauenstein said at an investor day that “we will have a price that’s available on that flight, on that time, to you, the individual.” However, responding to questions sent by lawmakers, EVP and chief external affairs officer Peter Carter says in a letter that “there is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data.” He also says that the company has “zero tolerance” for discriminatory or predatory pricing. As part of its latest earnings report, Hauenstein said that the company planned to deploy the technology, developed by a company called Fetcherr, to about 20 percent of its domestic network by the end of the year. “Our AI-powered pricing functionality is designed to enhance our existing fare pricing processes using aggregated data,” according to Carter. “This technology is a decision-support tool that simply provides informed insights for our analysts, who oversee and fine-tune the recommendations to ensure they are consistent with our business strategy.”In his comments to investors and analysts last year, Hauenstein said the AI was taking on the role of a “super analyst,” responding to changes in real time. The company’s statement today frames that more explicitly as responding to competitors pricing and overall buying trends, in an attempt to find the highest price for a market as opposed to an individual customer.Carter says that Delta is “evaluating” the “AI pricing recommendation functionality” and that it does not share personal information with Fetcherr. Carter’s letter was replying to one from Senators Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who wrote to Delta CEO Ed Bastian expressing concerns about the technology in July. Reps. Greg Casar (D-TX) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) have also introduced the Stop AI Price Gouging and Wage Fixing Act, which would ban companies from using AI to “set prices or wages based on Americans’ personal data.”

It has been another busy week. GPT-5 appears to be just around the corner…This week, I decode the meaning behind Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" manifesto, and what it means for the broader AI race. Keep reading for my chat with a Figma exec on the company's IPO day, a bunch of good links, and some feedback from last week's issue.What "personal superintelligence" really means to MetaMeta has given up on trying to beat ChatGPT at its own game.If you read between the lines, that's the message behind Mark Zuckerberg's "personal superintelligence" manifesto. For the past year, he pushed the Meta AI assistant on nearly ev …Read the full story at The Verge.

HDMI 2.1 was supposed to herald a new age of widespread high-bandwidth, low-latency, and lossless media consumption. As far as monitors are concerned, however, that promise hasn't really panned out. Having an HDMI port on your monitor with the HDMI 2.1 spec doesn't automatically guarantee access to the entire feature set of the standard. It all depends on which particular features the manufacturer chooses to implement on your model. Add to that the confusion among consumers regarding which HDMI cable to buy, and it's all a mess that has lasted for far too long.

I’ve never paid for Adobe Acrobat for longer than a few months at a time, and every time I’d wonder why I locked myself into a payment just to edit some text on my PDFs. If you’re still forking over a monthly fee for Acrobat to access the same, simple features, you’re getting robbed.

Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted about the potential of AI and the company’s approach to developing it in a rare all-hands today that was reported on by Bloomberg. Apple has been slow to roll out some of its AI features and has stumbled with a planned AI-powered upgrade to Siri, which it delayed earlier this year.According to Bloomberg:The executive gathered staff at Apple’s on-campus auditorium Friday in Cupertino, California, telling them that the AI revolution is “as big or bigger” as the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps. “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” Cook told employees, according to people aware of the meeting. “We will make the investment to do it.”Cook also apparently pointed to how the company has “rarely been first” in categories like personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and MP3 players but that Apple eventually made the “modern” versions of those. “This is how I feel about AI,” Cook said, Bloomberg reports.Software chief Craig Federighi also spoke, discussing the Siri delay and how the company originally wanted to build it with a “hybrid architecture.” Under that plan, one system would take care of things Siri can now, and the other would be powered by LLMs, but “we realized that approach wasn’t going to get us to Apple quality,” he said. The new plan is to move everything to a new architecture.The all-hands follows Cook’s comments ahead of an earnings call yesterday where he said that the company is “open to” acquisitions to accelerate its roadmap. Apple has also lost some of its AI talent as part of Meta’s “superintelligence” hiring spree.

Fixing my eroded attention span has been a journey. Brick has sort of helped. "We need to talk." Nobody likes to hear those words from their spouse. Especially when it's delivered in a grave tone as you rot on a couch in a grubby blankie, staring like a zombie while doomscrolling. "Wut?" I said, very intelligently.What came next was a compassionate but firm speech about how I was in dire need of an intervention. My attention span, my spouse said, was utterly shot to hell. They'd just asked my opinion about something happening on the TV show we were watching. I hadn't heard them. At all. Apparently, they'd repeated the question three times. Instead, I'd been engrossed in… actually, I couldn't tell you. "You have …Read the full story at The Verge.