Mini PCs can pretty much do anything you need them to do, so long as you get one that meets your needs. While you can use this one from GMKtec as a standard PC to get things done, we like to think that it has more potential as the base of your home lab, becoming a powerful hub that can handle all your data and expansion that you can throw at it.

Uber customers in Atlanta now have the option of hailing a driverless Waymo robotaxi, the company announced today. Atlanta is the second market, after Austin, to play host to Uber and Waymo’s burgeoning autonomous ridehail partnership.At launch, Waymo’s vehicles will be available exclusively on the Uber app in Atlanta. The two companies first announced a deal to put Waymo’s robotaxis on the Uber app back in 2023, indicating that Austin would be first, followed by Atlanta. Waymo’s own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in Atlanta; customers who open Waymo One will be redirected to Uber’s app.Waymo’s vehicles will only operate within a 65-square-mile service area that includes Atlanta’s Downtown, Buckhead, and Capitol View neighborhoods. The vehicles don’t drive on highways yet, nor will they make trips to the airport. Another thing to consider: simply calling an Uber in Waymo’s service area doesn’t guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Like in Austin, the companies will start with a small fleet of vehicles and grow from there.Customers can increase their chances of being matched with a Waymo vehicle by opting into autonomous rides in the Ride Preferences section of their Uber app. The rides will cost the same as a typical UberX, Uber Comfort, or Uber Comfort Electric ride. Once the Waymo vehicle arrives, customers can unlock the door, open the trunk, and start the ride from the Uber app. Rides can also be started by pressing the button on the rear touchscreen in the vehicle. Uber will manage fleet services, including vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, EV charging, and depot operations. The company is contracting with Avmo (formerly Moove Cars) to handle these tasks. Waymo is still responsible for vehicle testing, roadside assistance, and certain elements of rider support. The companies will obviously share in the costs and the revenue produced by the robotaxi service, though both companies have declined to share the split.Uber and Waymo, former rivals turned unlikely partners, have said they will work together to get more people to use driverless vehicles. But the partnership isn’t exclusive; Uber also is working with over a dozen other autonomous mobility companies, including sidewalk robot operators for its Uber Eats business. The company says it has quickly grown to an annual run rate of 1.5 million robotaxi and delivery robot trips on its network. While many Atlanta residents will be experiencing a driverless car for the first time, Waymo isn’t new to the city. The company first started gathering mapping data and manually testing its vehicles in Atlanta back in 2018. Fully driverless testing started in January 2025, followed by early passenger trips in May 2025. For those keeping score, there were approximately 283 days between identifying Atlanta as a future robotaxi city and launching the service on the Uber app. Waymo’s success depends partly on narrowing that window for future cities in order to prove its scalability, while keeping an eye on safety. Waymo currently conducts approximately 250,000 rides each week in its four main markets. The company has also said it will launch in Miami and Washington, DC with its own Waymo One app.

One thing's for sure — Microsoft has taken every opportunity it gets to remind Windows 10 fans that the operating system is reaching its End of Life status this October. The Redmond-based giant hasn't been subtle about it at all, and is doing everything within its power to get people to upgrade to Windows 11.

Google Earth can display a Street View timeline of certain locations, like New York’s Vessel sculpture. Google Earth will now let you look at historical imagery from Street View. The update, which comes as part of the tool’s 20th anniversary, allows you to see how a location has changed over time.Google Earth already offers the ability to switch to Street View while viewing satellite imagery, but now you can look through images captured across different years — just like you can in Google Maps. Last year, Google launched the ability to view historical satellite and aerial imagery, which was previously only available in the Earth Pro desktop app.Google is also planning to roll out a new feature that gives professional users “AI-driven insights” about the planet. That includes information about tree canopy coverage, allowing users to see where an area is more heavily shaded and which places might benefit from cooling approaches. It will also offer access to land surface temperatures, which professionals can use to see which areas of a city are hotter. These insights are rolling out in the “coming weeks.”

At a pristine, multimillion-dollar lab on the Manhattan waterfront, just down the street from a men's homeless shelter and the medical examiner's office, a slice of summer plum is being converted into fragrance code. This is the work of Osmo, a fragrance tech startup claiming to build artificial olfactory intelligence. Osmo has parlayed this innovation into offering turnkey fragrance compounding that promises a 48-hour sample turnaround from initial client prompt. In the time it takes your Amazon Prime order to arrive, you may now order a custom perfume. Traditionally, creating a fragrance isn't fast. After a client provides a brief - usually a mood, memory, or concept - a perfumer begins weeks or months of formulation trials, compounding and revising dozens of modifications, or "mods." Each must settle before it can be evaluated for balance, projection, and drydown. Raw materials often need years of cultivation. Bottling, regulatory reviews, packaging, and testing follow. From concept to shelf, a single perfume can take six to 18 months - even longer in luxury. And like fine wines, fragrance materials vary with climate concerns. One year's yield will not smell like the next one …Read the full story at The Verge.

The fighting game genre has an incredibly dedicated base of players who are willing to play games everywhere. No matter what type of platform it may be, if fighting games are available, players will go there and play them. Now that the Nintendo Switch 2 is finally on the market, a few big fighting games will be on it, with possibly more titles making their way over. Although games like Street Fighter 6 have been available on other platforms, that doesn't mean people will avoid picking up the game for the Switch 2, especially if they're looking for something that interests them to play on their newly purchased console. But there needs to be more than just this for the genre to really take off on the Nintendo Switch 2.

The Super Nintendo is one of the most important gaming consoles of all time. It wasn't just a haven for platformers and RPGs — for an entire generation of gamers, it was where they first learned the rules of sports they hadn't even played in real life yet. Whether it was football, wrestling, Formula One, or even tennis. In the 16-bit hardware of the SNES, these games made gamers live and breathe all the sports in the world.

For once, the unflappable Hideo Kojima was overwhelmed. Even close to four decades of game-making experience didn't prepare him for his biggest tribulation so far: developing Death Stranding 2: On the Beach during the covid-19 pandemic. "I thought I can't pull this off. [I can't] meet people or scan people, or shoot with people. I almost gave up. And also the staff were all remote, and I became sick as well. I thought it was just the end of the world," he says through an interpreter as part of a group interview in Sydney. "I've been creating games throughout my career, but Death Stranding 2 was the most difficult challenge."Even his initial scouting of Australia, where Death Stranding 2 is predominantly set, had to be carried out remotely via Zoom, with Kojima painstakingly directing a local contact to document the landscape on his behalf. "Looking at it from a camera and to be there is totally different, so that's disappointing."For Kojima, those experiences led to a different approach for the sequel. His own sense of isolation that arose from having to develop Death Stranding 2 with a remote team saw him reconsidering its tale - yet it's also this isolation that led to Koj …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia has increasingly given more control to users with its recent software updates. Settings have slowly migrated out of the Nvidia Control Panel into the Nvidia app, GeForce Experience is dead, and you now have access to features like DLSS overrides directly within Nvidia's software. Even with more control, there's one free, open-source tool I always leave installed on my PC: the Nvidia Profile Inspector.

Riot Games is closing the studio behind Hytale, its Minecraft-like game that has been in development for nearly a decade. Hypixel Studios, which Riot acquired in 2020 for an undisclosed sum, is shutting down “over the next few months,” according to Hypixel CEO Aaron “Noxy” Donaghey.“After years of pushing forward, adapting, and exploring every possible path, it became clear we couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise,“ says Donaghey in a post on X. ”This is a painful decision. We still believe in Hytale. We believe in the team, and are forever grateful to every member, past or present, who poured their love into the game.“Hytale has been in development since 2015, when Hypixel was founded as a small indie studio by members of a popular Minecraft server network. A trailer was released in late 2018, and Hypixel was supposed to deliver a beta of Hytale in 2021 following the Riot acquisition a year prior. That beta never arrived, and in 2021 there was a major change to the game engine powering Hytale that set development back.“Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be,“ says Donaghey. ”It became clear we’d need a lot more time to get it to a place where it could support the ambitious vision for the game.“The Hypixel closure won’t affect the Hypixel server on Minecraft, which is run separately from Hypixel Studios. Despite the studio closure, Donaghey says he’s “deeply grateful to Riot” and that the team is being “supported with generous severance and resources to help them find what’s next.”

Verizon is trying to streamline its customer service experience by overhauling it with more chatbots and AI tools. The My Verizon app is being relaunched today with a new “AI-powered Verizon Assistant” that aims to help consumers “manage upgrades, add new lines, ask billing questions, take advantage of savings, and more,” according to the telecom giant’s announcement.The idea is that this chatbot service will be able to quickly complete tasks that typically need to be handled by human service reps, providing a more efficient and flexible experience for customers. Dory Butler, senior vice president of customer experience at Verizon, told The Verge that the Verizon AI assistant will transfer customers to a human agent either upon request or if it’s unable to handle the enquiry it’s been given.Butler says the company had “worked very closely with Google” to prevent the Verizon AI agent from hallucinating by creating small language models that are personalized to Verizon services and customers. “To date, we are seeing north of 90 percent accuracy with very minor mistakes being made.”Verizon says it’s now providing a so-called “Customer Champion” that will leverage Google’s Gemini and Cloud AI models to help customers resolve “complex issues.” The press release is vague, but in 2025 we’re going to assume that those champions are still humans utilizing Google’s AI tools. The goal is for customers to contact Verizon once, and for the champion to then provide updates via the My Verizon app, text messages, or call backs.Verizon is also expanding the operating hours of its live customer service agents and introducing 24/7 live chat support that can cater to “diverse customer schedules and preferences.”

I've been using OPNsense tonnes lately, mainly as the gateway to my home lab shenanigans. Most of this has been accomplished with various virtual setups, but that has its problems that I find myself fighting more than doing any substantial work. The biggest issue I have is that the virtual network adapters frequently change assignments when I return to the VM after a while, and it has become a dealbreaker.