Whether you are navigating the Google TV interface or trying to launch a heavy streaming app, there's nothing more frustrating than a smart TV that feels anything but smart. While most people assume they need a new streaming stick or a total factory reset, the solution is often buried deep within menus you were never meant to see.

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test will allow you to reposition the taskbar and change the size of the Start menu. The update, which is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Experimental channel, lets you place the taskbar on the bottom, top, left, or right side of the screen.Microsoft first teased its movable taskbar in March as part of efforts to rebuild trust among users. You can adjust the alignment of the icons inside the taskbar, as well as open the Start menu drawer from wherever you placed it. Windows 11 Insiders can access a shorter taskbar, too, which could come in handy for devices with smaller displays. There's also an opti …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you’re not staying on top of Analogue 3D updates, now’s the time to start. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Analogue has released a new firmware update for its Analogue 3D console that adds the Memories save state feature. Memories, which was first introduced with its handheld Analogue Pocket, allows you to save at any moment and resume from that exact spot later on, rather than having to reach a specific point in a game to save your progress. The feature should also help reduce some headaches with saving game progress on the Analogue 3D as its Virtual Controller Pak option still isn't available when using original or wired N64 controllers.Although the feature was announced when the company first shared all the details about its 4K Nintendo 64 i …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've really been getting into interactive fiction lately. I think with all the D&D tabletop and video games I've been playing, plus excellent Steam titles like Sorcery! and Slay the Princess, I've been in the mood for a book you can play. And what better way to revisit this classic genre than to make a text-based adventure game?

The problems surrounding insufficient VRAM rear their head whenever a new and demanding game fails to run properly on older or lower-end graphics cards. We blame everything from game optimization issues to Nvidia's habit of skimping on VRAM before going back to the status quo. The reason companies like Nvidia can keep selling GPUs with 8GB of VRAM is that gamers are forced to buy whatever they can in a terrible market. Another reason is that upscaling continues to improve, reducing the VRAM dependency on budget and mid-range cards. The latest reason 8GB VRAM GPUs aren't going anywhere is Neural Texture Compression, Nvidia's latest trick to drastically reduce VRAM usage in games. It promises astounding results, but only on Nvidia's most powerful GPUs. Older graphics cards don't have the hardware chops to adequately support this new technology, making it meaningless for the vast majority of RTX owners.

Ask the hardcore tinkering community about the best Network Attached Storage practices, and you’re bound to have some veterans claiming a NAS should be treated as a storage machine, not an experimentation node. Truth be told, I agree with them wholeheartedly, but I’d tweak that statement to replace storage “machine” with storage “server.”

OpenAI announced yet another reorganization Friday, consolidating certain areas and making company president Greg Brockman the official lead of all things product.In a memo viewed by The Verge, Brockman wrote that since OpenAI's product strategy for this year is to go all-in on AI agents, the company is combining its products to "invest in a single agentic platform and to merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified agentic experience for all."To do this, the company is making a suite of org chart changes, although it's still operating under some of the same ones from last month. That's when AGI boss Fidji Simo went on medical leave and Open …Read the full story at The Verge.

The use cases for large language models are growing exponentially by the day, and new image and video generation capabilities from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have accelerated that considerably. The frontier models on offer do far more than just writing, and are now instead active participants in a wide variety of creative and technical workflows that required significant user effort and prerequisite expertise previously.

I gave up my Perplexity subscription after a month yet my Claude subscription is going on its third month now. That probably says something about where I actually get value. Claude is genuinely the most AI tool I've had in my rotation - it handles my design coursework, Cowork helps me manage files and tasks on my PC, and recently I've been using Claude Design that lets me prototype and visualize ideas.

I have been using Windows as my primary operating system for around two decades, and for the most part, I rarely relied on Terminal-based commands. Frankly, it felt confusing. When Windows already had troubleshooters and dedicated settings for everything, using commands seemed unnecessary. But once I moved to terminal commands, there was no going back.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was billed by the company in late March as one of its “fastest gaming desktop processor ever.” That hype was evidently accurate, as benchmarks done by Gamers Nexus show the processor giving AMD’s pricier X3D cache-equipped Ryzen 9000-series CPUs a run for their money. The Ultra 7 270K Plus also outperforms the Core i9 14900K in many tasks, which has long been a preferred choice for gamers.Thankfully, it won’t cost you a ton to buy the 270K Plus if you’re considering a PC upgrade or building one from scratch. You can get this CPU at an all-time low price of $279.99 (about $45 off the normal price) right now at Amazon. Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processorWhere to Buy: $325.99 $279.99 at AmazonThe 270K Plus requires a motherboard with an LGA 1851 socket, of which there are many options available that support DDR5 RAM, plenty M.2 SSDs, and with support for Wi-Fi 7. It’s great to see prices come down on some PC components, though the savings are tougher to appreciate when costs on RAM are still much higher than they used to be. If you’re looking for a range of parts, Micro Center has component bundles that loop in discounted RAM for the best prices on the web.One nice perk of getting the CPU is that, through July 31st, you can register your purchase with Intel to get a full download of the Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight game.

ArXiv, a popular platform for preprint academic research, is taking a new step to attempt to reduce the volume of papers that include AI slop.If a paper has "incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation," such as hallucinated references or "meta-comments" left by an LLM, authors will be banned from ArXiv for a year, according to Thomas Dietterich, ArXiv's section chair of its computer science section. Future ArXiv submissions will also have to be accepted at "a reputable peer-reviewed venue."Here's what he said on X:Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name …Read the full story at The Verge.