If you have just obtained your 3D printer and have an idea of something to print, you need some essential software tools for 3D printing to bring that idea to life. You might not always create your files from scratch, but you can download them from 3D printing websites like Thingiverse, Myminifactory, Printables, Makerworld, and many others. However, you need to be familiar with a 3D modeling program to create or adjust the files you downloaded.

PC enthusiasts are quick to recommend high refresh rate monitors, especially for gaming, because games feel buttery smooth and take immersion to a whole new level. My first time using a high refresh rate display was in 2017, when I bought the Alienware 17 R3, which had a 120Hz screen. I immediately noticed the improved smoothness since I had only used standard 60Hz monitors up until that point. Since then, I've purchased several high refresh rate monitors, and I currently use a 4K/160Hz, 1440p/175Hz, and 1440p/360Hz monitor with my gaming PC.

Disasters can strike at any time, whether caused by hardware failure, malware, or human error. On Windows 11, proactive preparation ensures your data remains safe, and your system can recover quickly. Here are the most efficient ways to prepare for disaster recovery, and always be one step ahead.

“Hands Off” protesters in Manhattan.People are gathering in cities all over the United States and globally to protest an “illegal, billionaire power grab” by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They’re being put on by over 150 different organizations, including civil rights groups, labor unions, and LGBTQ+ advocates, and span more than 1,200 locations.Last weekend, “Tesla Takedown” protests targeted Tesla showrooms around the country to show disapproval for Musk, its CEO, who has spearheaded an effort to carry out mass federal workforce layoffs and hollow out government agencies. As Tesla’s sales have plummeted this quarter, Musk has threatened to “go after” the company’s critics, while the FBI has created a task force to investigate individual acts of vandalism and other actions aimed at the company.Rain or shine (mostly rain)— Mia Sato (@miasato.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T18:21:40.575ZThe scope of these protests is much broader, targeting both Trump and Musk, who the Hands Off website accuses (accurately) of “shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid.” The Verge’s Mia Sato is in Manhattan’s Bryant Park in New York City, where she took the above video. She told me it wasn’t clear how many people are there, but that it’s “wall to wall everywhere” despite the fact that it’s “raining here and really nasty.”Hands off rally in Washington, DC today— Lauren Feiner (@laurenfeiner.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:58:28.578ZMy colleague Lauren Feiner, who attended the protest in Washington, DC, said the protest there “is very big, thousands here around the Washington monument.” She described it as “very peaceful and orderly,” with attendees listening quietly to the speakers, occasionally chanting in response. Jessica Toman, who went to the protest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, texted the above image to me. A person posting images of the same protest on Bluesky guessed that protesters numbered in the thousands. It looks like a similar story in Boston, where “thousands” are seen in this video from today:WOW: Thousands are currently protesting in Boston. This is just one of more than 1200 'Hands Off' protests underway today across the nation as people rise up against the Trump-Musk regime. (via Rob Way)— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) 2025-04-05T16:06:41.143ZFox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul posted aerial footage of a massive crowd gathered at the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota:Demonstrators gathered in massive numbers in Daley Plaza in Chicago, Illinois, too, where a CBS Chicago livestream showed what looked like many thousands of people streaming from one side of the street to another for many blocks while this story was being written. Protests are also taking place overseas, in cities like Berlin, Germany and London, England.It’s not just major cities. Hundreds appear to have shown up to protest in cities like St. Augustine, Florida, which the US Census Bureau estimates has less than 16,000 people, and Riverhead, New York, where only about 36,000 people live. Cars honked in apparent support of a protest in Manhattan, Kansas (under 54,000 residents), according to the Bluesky user who posted this video:4/5/25 Manhattan, KS-a college town & home of NBAF, in Sen Marshall’s district, 5 min after it was to begin & they’re still coming!😁✊🏻💜 Proud of my Blue Dot in a red state! #manhattankansas #handsoff— M (@snflwr6684.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T16:43:22.728ZA similar scene plays out in this video, apparently taken in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a town of fewer than 4,000 people, today:Here’s a gallery with some more images taken by Sato, Toman, and The Verge’s Chris Welch:

Cosplay has been transformed by 3D printing, giving fans the ability to create and share jaw-dropping costumes and props that look like they came straight from the screen. This tech allows for precise detailing, wearable durability, and customization, bringing characters to life like never before. From screen-accurate armor to working gadgets, these pieces aren’t just convincing — they’re often nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Here are a few 3D-printed cosplay pieces that seriously raise the bar.

Most PC products that hit the market are under some level of scrutiny, but most of the time, a lot of them come and go without a terrible amount of discussion. When a product does strike a chord with consumers though, it sticks like old thermal paste, especially if the response is negative. All publicity isn't necessarily good publicity with regard to PC products, and these five designs were so controversial, they'll forever live in the minds of enthusiasts.

I like to cook food, and I like to try out new recipes. I started with using Mealie to import recipes and help me prepare what I needed to make them, but I recently gave Nextcloud Cookbook a go as it would integrate with my already-existing Nextcloud instance. After all, it's built into Nextcloud's ecosystem and integrates seamlessly with your files — seems convenient enough, right? However, after spending some time with it, I switched back to Mealie and haven't looked back.

When I first started 3D printing, I had no idea how many hidden features were waiting to be discovered in my machine. These functionalities have transformed my workflow and saved me from countless misprints. Looking back, I realize how much time and frustration I could have spared if I had known about them earlier. Let me share seven valuable features I wish I had discovered sooner to make your own 3D printing experience smoother.

Meta has announced the release of Llama 4, its newest collection of AI models that now power Meta AI on the web and in WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Direct. The two models, also available to download from Meta or Hugging Face now, are Llama 4 Scout, a small model capable of “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU,” and Llama 4 Maverick, which is more akin to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. And the company says it’s in the process of training Llama 4 Behemoth, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says on Instagram is “already the highest performing base model in the world.”According to Meta, Scout has a 10-million-token context window — the working memory of an AI model — and beats Google’s Gemma 3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite models, as well as the open-source Mistral 3.1, “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks,” while still “fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU.” It makes similar claims about its larger Maverick model’s performance versus OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, and says its results are comparable to DeepSeek-V3 in coding and reasoning tasks using “less than half the active parameters,” or the variables that guide AI models’ behavior.Meanwhile, Llama 4 Behemoth has 288 billion active parameters with 2 trillion parameters in total. The company again says Behemoth can outperform its competitors, in this case GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7, “on several STEM benchmarks.” For Llama 4, Meta says it switched to a “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, an approach that conserves resources by using only the parts of a model that are needed for a given task. The company plans to discuss future plans for AI models and products at LlamaCon, which is taking place on April 29th.As with its past models, Meta calls the Llama 4 collection “open-source,” although it has been criticized for its licenses’ less-than-open requirements. For instance, the Llama 4 license requires commercial entities with more than 700 million monthly active users to request a license from Meta before using its models, which the Open Source Initiative wrote in 2023 takes it “out of the category of ‘Open Source.’”

There's no end to the number of note-taking software applications available to users today, but Joplin is among the best. It's an open-source alternative to tools like Evernote or Notion, with cross-platform support between Mac, Windows, and even Linux, secure encryption, and complete offline functionality. You can even access notes on the go through iOS and Android. Joplin has numerous community-made extensions that make it even better and enhance the overall user experience. These are some of the best Joplin plugins you can get your hands on right now. Many Joplin plugins can be installed from within the application just by going to the Settings menu, while others can be downloaded from GitHub.

There's a good chance you're using a router from your internet service provider (ISP), but did you know it's easy to build your own firewall? Attach a switch and access point, and you'll have a powerful DIY networking solution that provides you maximum control over every aspect. The only question is: which firewall should you use? I've passed through a few, and I kept bouncing between them until I discovered OPNsense — I've not looked back since.

When you're comparing two of the best CPUs, the first spec that comes to mind is clock speed. It quite literally represents how fast the CPU can churn through clock cycles, and naturally, you'd assume a higher clock speed means higher performance. Today, however, clock speed doesn't say much. It can still represent performance differences between two CPUs, but when choosing a processor for your rig, there are several other considerations you should keep in mind.