Smart homes felt fun at first, but after a while it became a daily irritation of yelling across the room just to execute a basic household task. Walking into a dark kitchen with your hands cupped and shouting, "Hey Google, turn on the kitchen lights" for the fourth time, because the speaker misheard you or lost its cloud connection really makes you feel like your smart home isn't smart at all. This is why I ditched my Google Nest smart speaker.

PowerToys has more than 30 useful tools in its arsenal, including a revamped version of the Run launcher, now called the Command Palette. I've been using Command Palette as a start menu replacement for quite some time, and it works better than you might think. I can launch apps, run commands, search files, and manage PowerToys tools from the Command Palette.

Running AI locally used to be something you either needed real hardware for or a lot of patience with slow tokens and suboptimal outputs. That's shifted a lot in the last year or so. The smaller models coming out of Google, Alibaba, and a few others are actually built for the hardware most people already own, so you don't need a home server rack or a 24GB GPU to have something useful running on your machine.

The ornament requires three 1.5-volt coin batteries, which are included in the box. | Photo: Cameron Faulkner/The Verge You probably know the signature PlayStation boot sound. Did you know that it's technically a multi-part chime? There's the synthy section where "Sony Computer Entertainment" shows onscreen with a white background. You only get to the next screen with the echo-y chimes and the color-filled PlayStation logo if your console recognizes the disc. How badly I wanted my sorta-broken console to get to that second screen.My console's disc spindle came apart pretty early into me owning it. As an eight-year-old kid, fixing the spindle was the riskiest undertaking of my life yet. The internet wasn't really a haven for how-tos yet, so I superglued that …Read the full story at The Verge.

Pairing everyday productivity applications with AI models is one of the best ways to bolster their capabilities. Note takers, for example, can utilize large language models to manage all your ideas, and even generate new ones from your existing knowledge base. In most cases, you’ll find AI-based note-taking workflows relying on cloud-based LLMs.

China's leading AI companies are ramping up the pressure on Silicon Valley, as Moonshot and Alibaba unveiled models they claim can go toe-to-toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost. The rapid-fire releases suggest America's lead at the AI frontier is increasingly tight, just as the technology is becoming central to national security, economic power, and geopolitical influence. The opening salvo came from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, one of China's leading AI model developers, which unveiled Kimi K3 on Friday. Moonshot claims its own testing ranks it consistently above nearly every US system, trailing only OpenAI …Read the full story at The Verge.

Self-hosting Immich is a common theme I see across homelab channels. It's extremely popular in that crowd, and a few people even proclaim that Immich has killed Google Photos. I've made a habit of leaving Google's ecosystem behind, one piece at a time, over the last few years, so I wanted to see if that held up for my personal photo library.

LG’s UltraGear Glossy OLED gaming monitor deliver deep, true-to-life blacks. | Image: LG If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your gaming monitor, LG’s 27-inch 27GX704A-B pairs a glossy WOLED panel with a fast refresh rate, and it’s currently on sale for $379.99 (about $70 off) at Amazon and directly from LG, marking a new low price. It originally launched at $799.99, but has been available for under $500 since May.LG UltraGear Glossy OLED gaming monitor (27-inches)Where to Buy: $449 $379.99 at Amazon $449 $379.99 at LGThe monitor offers a 1440p resolution and a glossy coating, which isn’t a combination of specs we often see at this price. Most OLED monitors under $400 use QD-OLED panels, which can give blacks a slight bluish tint. LG’s WOLED monitor delivers truer-looking blacks while the glossy coating helps colors appear richer and more vibrant.It doesn’t sacrifice speed, either. The monitor boasts a fast 240Hz refresh rate with variable refresh rate support (Nvidia G-Sync compatible and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro), along with a fast 0.03ms response time to keep games looking sharp in motion. It comes with a solid array of ports for the price, with two HDMI 2.1 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, and USB-A ports, making it easy to connect a PC, consoles, and accessories. Rounding things out, the stand is fully adjustable, too, allowing you to raise, lower, tilt, swivel, or rotate the display into portrait mode for a more comfortable setup. Or, because it has a VESA mount, you can yank it off and toss it onto a monitor arm of your choice.

This LG 34GX900A-B is one of the monitors found auto-installing LG’s app on users’ PCs. | Image: LG A video from Gamers Nexus explains how, after connecting a new LG UltraGear monitor to a PC running Windows 11 for the first time, Windows Update is silently installing LG driver updates and the LG Monitor App Installer, without so much as a permission pop-up or notification. The app doesn't appear to include special controls of its own, instead simply pointing users to LG's other apps, as well as McAfee antivirus.There are reports about LG's app auto-installing as far back as 2024, but Gamers Nexus's test follows recent user complaints on Reddit about large pop-up ads for McAfee and LG's own apps suddenly appearing in the bottom right cor …Read the full story at The Verge.

A judge partially granted the request from a dozen state attorneys general to temporarily place the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on hold, as reported by Variety and Reuters. US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said that based on the new company's market share, "the Court is persuaded that it can presume the proposed merger is likely to violate antitrust laws," and that the states showed "irreparable harm" could occur without a temporary restraining order.A week ago, California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington sued …Read the full story at The Verge.

The fine is more than double the penalty that Temu was slapped with for similar DSA violations. | Illustration: The Verge AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million (about $629 million) fine for violating Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA) rules by failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products from being sold on the e-commerce platform. The European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn't take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the company "allocated insufficient staff" to verify products, and failed to remove unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for "multiple weeks" after they were detected."The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not …Read the full story at The Verge.

The end of the Ford F-150 Lightning was also the start of a new era for the automaker. After failing to capture the market with the electric version of its popular F-Series truck, Ford is going back to the drawing board with its Universal Electric Vehicle Platform. The first offering will be a $30,000 electric truck, engineered for efficiency and also — perhaps most importantly — profitability. The truck will be revealed in 2027, but Ford plans on building a whole family of low-cost electric vehicles at its Kentucky assembly plant. The heavily camouflaged truck has already been spotted out in the wild, with observers noting that it seems even smaller than the Maverick. Success isn’t guaranteed. Ford has struggled to make profitable EVs, forcing the company to take a staggering $19.5 billion hit on its EV investments in 2025. But Ford still sees EVs as the future — just not oversize ones with “no path to profitability,” as executives say. Emojis as camouflage. Ford’s $30K electric truck could be smaller than a Maverick. Inside the lab where Ford is trying to crack the code on cheap EVs Ford’s EV and software chief Doug Field is leaving the company Ford is fighting against physics to build affordable EVs Ford’s big bet on EVs didn’t pan out — now it’s pivoting to hybrids and energy storage Ford CEO Jim Farley on China, tariffs, and the quest for a $30,000 EV Ford reveals breakthrough process for lower priced EVs