Synology’s DiskStation Manager (DSM) is among the most beginner-friendly operating systems of any NAS brand. It guides you through the setup process to make it easy, even for first-time NAS users, and has a Windows or Linux-like interface so that you have minimal trouble figuring your way around the OS. While DSM is proprietary, many of its features have cross-platform alternatives that you can use on any NAS, be it pre-built ones like those from QNAP and Terramaster or your own DIY NAS running TrueNAS.

3D printing is a rewarding activity, and it becomes even more fun if you keep costs in check. Making minor adjustments to your routine can prevent wasted filament and help you stretch every spool further. You can produce high-quality prints while preserving your resources by taking simple yet thoughtful steps. Here are some practical methods I use to cut down on filament waste.

Spring has sprung — and so has Amazon’s latest sales event. Amazon’s Big Spring Sale kicks off on Tuesday, March 25th, and runs through Monday, March 31st, bringing with it a slew of discounts on gardening supplies, bedding, grilling essentials, and other springtime favorites. And while the discounts aren’t as steep as during tentpole events like Prime Day, you can still find steep savings on cheap security cameras, smartwatches, portable speakers, and loads of other tech.As is typical of Amazon, the retailer has already dropped a handful of deals in the run-up to the event, many of which we anticipate will stick around through the seven-day promo period. Most deals don’t require you to cough up $14.99 a month for a Prime subscription, either, making it a great time to snag a tried-and-tested Verge favorite.We’ll be digging into all the deals and discounts next week; however, in the meantime, you can peruse a selection of the best early deals below, all of which have been handpicked and tested by a Verge staffer at one point or another.Featured dealsOther deal recommendationsThe Beats Studio Pro are on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $179.95 ($170 off), which remains one of the best prices we’ve seen. Looks-wise, they’re not drastically different than prior Beats models, though they tack on a useful transparency mode, personalized spatial audio, and lossless playback over USB-C. Plus, unlike most noise-canceling headphones, they offer native support for both iOS and Android software features. Read our review.If you prefer a pair of noise-canceling earbuds that support native software features on both iOS and Android, the Beats Studio Buds Plus are available at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for around $130 ($40 off), nearly matching their best price to date. Yes, their lack of wireless charging and in-ear detection stings a bit at their typical list price, but their see-through design is slick enough that the shortcomings are (almost) forgivable. Read our review.The Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e — aka, the best-sounding wireless headphones you can buy — are available at Amazon starting at $296.71 (about $102 off), or from Bower & Wilkins or Best Buy for $319.99 ($80 off). The British audio brand isn’t as well-known as Sony or Bose, though with the S2E, you’re getting superb sound, superior build quality, and controls that rely on physical buttons as opposed to the tap/swipe gestures found on mainstream noise-canceling headphones like Sony’s XM5. Read our review.Amazon’s ad-supported Fire HD 10 tablet is on sale at Amazon and Best Buy right now with 32GB of storage starting at $94.99 ($45 off), or about $20 shy of its lowest price to date. The 2023 model sports USB-C charging, a 10.1-inch, 1080p display, and 3GB of RAM, which is plenty if all you’re doing is streaming or browsing. Just be aware that, like all of Amazon’s budget-minded tablets, it’s really focused on serving up Amazon content at every turn.JBL’s Charge 5 is on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart in multiple colors starting at $119.95 ($60 off), which is the best price we’ve seen on the portable speaker since July. We’re not huge fans of the oversized JBL logo, but the powerful Bluetooth speaker hits all the right marks when it comes to functionality and performance, offering an impressive 20 hours of battery life and a built-in USB-A port that lets you top off your phone while listening to music.Despite the fact the Sonos app has been a bit of a debacle as of late, I have few qualms about recommending the Sonos Era 100 for $199 ($50 off), its current price at Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos’ online storefront. It’s a great smart speaker with stereo sound, privacy-conscious microphone controls, and support for both Bluetooth and line-in connections. It can also connect to Spotify and every other music service you can think of and supports AirPlay 2, letting you stream content from Apple devices. Read our review.Ring’s latest Indoor Cam is on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and The Home Depot for $39.99 ($20 off), matching its second-best price to date. The 1080p security camera boasts all the same features as the prior model — including two-way talk, color night vision, and a built-in siren — only it’s equipped with a redesigned mount that makes it easier to adjust. That said, you’ll need a Ring Protect Plan ($4.99 a month / $49.99 a year) to share or view video recordings.For a limited time, Garmin’s InReach Mini 2 is available at Amazon starting at $293.89 (about $106 off), an all-time low. The rugged, palm-sized satellite communicator might seem a little unnecessary given many recent phones now support satellite messaging, but the subscription-based gadget is still great for texting, sharing your location in the backcountry, and triggering an SOS alert in the event of an emergency. It can also last up to 30 days on a single charge, which is significantly more than your smartphone.The Blue Yeti microphone is on sale at Amazon in a myriad of colors for $89.99 ($40 off). That’s not the lowest price we’ve seen — it’s fallen to around $70 in the past — but it’s still a good deal on what has become a certifiable classic USB mic in the era of never-ending Zoom meetings. The versatile mic is easy to set up and simple to use, with a three-capsule microphone that can capture clear, warm sound that should appeal to both amateur podcasters and anyone wanting a more professional setup.One of our go-to gift guide picks, the Instant Pot Duo Plus, is currently available for an all-time low of $89.95 ($40 off) at Amazon. Multiple Verge staffers swear by the six-quart multi-cooker, which is similar to the base-model instant pot but comes with a few additional smart programs, including a customizable sous vide setting and a cake option that lets you pressure cook at high temperature for 40 minutes. That’s in addition to the ability to cook rice, steam veggies, and sauté, among other actions.We’ve said it several times before, but if all you need is a basic monochrome laser printer, just buy whatever Brother model is on sale. Right now, that’s the Brother HL-L2400D printer, which is matching its all-time low of $99.99 ($20 off) at Amazon as part of the retailer’s spring sales event. It’s not really suited for photo use or anything fancy, but it connects to Wi-Fi, works reliably, and lasts ages on a single toner cartridge. It also supports automatic duplex printing, so, you know, it has that going for it.Amazon’s latest Echo Dot is down to $39.99 ($10 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Kohl’s. The tiny, orb-shaped smart speaker features onboard microphones and produces good sound for its size, making it a solid option for listening to music, issuing smart home commands, checking the weather, and making other various Alexa requests. It also includes a built-in temperature sensor, which can tell you the temperature in the room and trigger various Alexa Routines, if necessary. Read our review.Update, March 23rd: Updated to reflect current pricing/availability and several new deals, including those for the UE Miniroll, iRobot’s Romba Combo i5, and the Instant Pot Duo Plus.

Google has started rolling out new AI features to Gemini Live that let it “see” your screen or through your smartphone camera and answer questions about either in real-time, Google spokesperson Alex Joseph has confirmed in an email to The Verge. The features come nearly a year after Google first demonstrated the “Project Astra” work that powers them.A Reddit user said the feature showed up on their Xiaomi phone, as spotted by 9to5Google. Today, the same user posted the video below demonstrating Gemini’s new screen-reading ability. It’s one of the two features Google said in early March would “start rolling out to Gemini Advanced Subscribers as part of the Google One AI Premium plan” later in the month. The other Astra capability rolling out now is live video, which lets Gemini interpret the feed from your smartphone camera in real-time and answer questions about it. In the demonstration video below that Google published this month, a person uses the feature to ask Gemini for help deciding on a paint color to use for their freshly-glazed pottery. Google’s rollout of these features is a fresh example of the company’s big AI assistant lead as Amazon is preparing the limited early access debut of its Alexa Plus upgrade and Apple has delayed its upgraded Siri. Both are supposed to have capabilities similar to the ones Astra is starting to enable now. Meanwhile, Samsung still has Bixby, but Gemini is nevertheless the default assistant on its phones.

There are a lot of self-hosted Google Drive alternatives out there, one of the biggest being Nextcloud. Complete with Nextcloud Office which aims to replace Google's entire suite of document software, enthusiasts are spoiled for choice these days. However, one little-known alternative that I personally see as the best replacement for Google's overall suite of services (if you care about privacy more than anything else, that is) is CryptPad. It's a privacy-focused open-source end-to-end encrypted online collaboration application, and the myriad of options it has match and even surpass some of Google's own offerings.

Nvidia and Apple are very different companies, but now, more than ever, they're both working off of the same playbook. Taking up the second and first slots, respectively, for the world's wealthiest companies, Nvidia and Apple enjoy the position of being the rulers of a particular market. They have a dominant position in their respective fields, and they're leveraging that position to maintain a grip on the product categories they sell.

Nvidia is a massive and storied company. It may make some of the best graphics cards you can buy, but Team Green has its hands in a lot of different businesses, and it's leveraged some shady tactics in those businesses in the past.

Google Maps users have recently been complaining on places like Reddit that their Timeline data — the app’s historical record of where they’ve been — had disappeared. Now, Google has confirmed that it accidentally deleted the data and that anyone who wasn’t using Google’s cloud backups is out of luck.Google spokesperson Genevieve Park provided this statement in an email to The Verge:We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people. Nearly everyone with encrypted Timeline backups will be able to restore their data; unfortunately those who did not have backups enabled will not be able to recover lost data.In a Reddit post that Android Authority spotted, users reported getting a similar statement in an email from Google that included instructions for recovering the data for those who’d turned on the app’s cloud backup feature. To see if it’s on for you, tap your user icon in the iOS or Android Google Maps app, then “Your timeline,” and look for a cloud icon with either an arrow inside of it (on) or a line through it (off). You can tap the icon to change your backup settings.Google warned users last summer that it was switching to on-device storage for Google Maps location data. That meant you could keep track of your Maps location history without having it tracked on Google’s servers, which is great for privacy but comes with the risk of it abruptly vanishing, as Google’s “technical issue” shows. And unfortunately, while Google Maps lets you export location history data to a file, Google’s instructions for recovering Timeline data include no obvious way to reimport the data that doesn’t involve the cloud backup servers.Update March 23rd: Updated with confirmation from Google spokesperson Genevieve Park.

With a Raspberry Pi at the heart of your 3D printing setup, you can accomplish so much. This tiny computer delivers reliable performance, allowing you to automate tasks and experiment with creative features. It also helps you control different elements of your builds, offering convenience that makes printing more enjoyable. Below, you’ll find several projects that tap into the power of the Raspberry Pi so you can enhance your 3D printing endeavors and learn new skills.

The Apple Watch Series 10.Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On Newsletter.The cameras will be “inside the display” for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on the side, next to the digital crown and button, according to Gurman. With them, the Apple Watch would be able to “see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information,” which he says is also the plan for camera-equipped AirPods Apple is rumored to be working on. The Visual Intelligence features that these devices would use debuted on the iPhone 16, where it works with the phone’s camera to do things like add details from an event flyer to your calendar, or look up information about a restaurant. It’s underpinned by AI models from other companies, but Gurman writes that Apple hopes to power the feature with its own in-house models by 2027, when he says the company plans to release these new Apple Watches and AirPods. Visual Intelligence and other AI features coming to Apple’s wearables would depend a lot the leadership of Mike Rockwell, who Gurman reported last week is now in charge getting the delayed Siri LLM upgrade on track. Rockwell was previously in charge of the Vision Pro and reportedly will continue to work on visionOS. That software is expected to power another Apple wearable that’s likely to have a big AI component, but that’s likely still several years away: AR glasses in the vein of the Orion concept that Meta showed off last year.

We live in an era where video games take nearly a decade to develop and cost more to make than some Hollywood blockbusters. With so much money and so many jobs on the line, it’s no surprise that studios play it safe, sticking to tried-and-true formulas instead of taking risks. If it isn’t a surefire hit, it’s not worth making — at least, that’s the industry mindset.

Steam has been around since the early 2000s, launching alongside Half-Life 2much to the chagrin of the gaming community at the time. What was seen as yet another needless DRM solution has ballooned into one of the most important pieces of software in gaming today, snowballing Valve into a powerful position capable of forcing developers as large as Activision Blizzard to comply with rules only found on Steam.