While the rest of my PC components have seen a lot of churn over the years, my storage drives have remained more or less constant. I have been using the same Gen3 NVMe and SATA SSD since 2017, and even the newer Gen4 SSD I got in 2022 has been showing warning signs for the last year or so. I was running out of storage, and I finally decided to do a complete storage overhaul, replacing all the drives, even bringing back an HDD into the fold.

Despite the attempts from app developers to bridge the gap between different operating systems, switching from one OS to another remains quite a hassle. Not only do you have to work with a radically different interface, but you may also end up losing access to your application if it hasn’t been ported over to your new daily driver OS. For example, switching from Windows to Linux means letting go of the Adobe Creative Cloud and switching to FOSS alternatives, which is still not feasible for professional creators.

The winners of the $TRUMP meme coin contest did get to see President Donald Trump speak at a private dinner closed to the press - but his speech was probably the least exciting part of their night. They did get a better, more valuable, and potentially more lucrative experience: the opportunity to network with the biggest crypto traders in the game, win watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and attend a not-so-exclusive afterparty at the Capitol Hill Marriott afterward - all without having to complete particularly thorough background checks. The vetting process for entering the dinner was a 'pretty light' KYC checkAfter being whisked behind the gates of the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, past a throng of journalists snapping photos and protesters screaming at them for being corrupt, the 220 attendees went through security and had their IDs checked. According to one attendee, many were wealthy but some were living on normal-ish paychecks. The other guests, he said, were largely foreigners from overseas, all with an extremely high risk tolerance for gambling with crypto. The attendee said the vetting process for entering the dinner was a "pretty light" …Read the full story at The Verge.

Capable of tracking every minute detail of your budget, finance management apps are some of the best quality-of-life-enhancing services on the block. But with budgeting applications popping up like mushrooms, you might have a hard time picking the right tool to manage your expenses. Over the years, I’ve tried to use Expensify, YNAB, PocketGuard, and several other bookkeeping services, but each tool lacked the je ne sais quoi to satisfy my budgeting needs.

I’ve been in the graphic design and digital creation game for a while. Over a decade, in fact. Even throughout my degree, when we were all poor students who barely had two pennies to rub together, Photoshop was the encouraged program of use. Even with a student discount, it’s pricey. But with browser-based tools like Photopea, there’s little requirement to fork out hundreds of dollars a year on Photoshop anymore. Photopea is one of the best alternatives to Photoshop, besides price alone. Here’s why I made the switch.

One great way to put a spare SBC to good use is to make it a server of some kind. After all, they're really good at staying online for long periods of time, and they use barely any electricity, so they made a negligible impact on your bill. So, why not keep those boards out of the spare parts drawer and make them earn their keep?

After three seasons, Amazon’s live-action take on Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time series is coming to an end.Though The Wheel of Time‘s third season was hailed by fans as the show’s strongest chapter yet, Deadline reports that Amazon has decided not to bring it back due to its relatively high production costs and flagging viewership numbers. Similar to Amazon’s Rings of Power series, The Wheel of Time was clearly a play to produce another Game of Thrones-style hit. When the series first debuted in 2021, it managed to capture an impressively large audience and become one of Amazon’s most-watched programs. But those numbers dwindled in subsequent seasons, leading Amazon to call it quits.Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter back in April right after The Wheel of Time‘s third season concluded, showrunner Rafe Judkins said that when when he and his team were first shopping the series around to studios, they ultimately chose Amazon as a production partner because it “felt like a place where they do want to invest in shows for the long term.”“There are not a lot of places doing that anymore,” Judkins said. “For Wheel of Time, it’s really important for us to be somewhere that does want to invest in shows for the long term and not just for the splash and leave.”

When the Asus ROG Ally debuted, it delivered the kind of performance handheld enthusiasts had been waiting for. With its AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU, 120Hz 1080p screen, and a Windows 11 environment, it felt like a pocket-sized gaming desktop. But it also came with the same flaw as most handhelds: very limited storage. With modern AAA games often exceeding 100GB, the internal SSD fills up quickly, even on the 1TB model. While microSD cards offer extra storage, they’re slower, less durable, and can bottleneck higher-performance games.

When the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+ launched back in 2012, it sparked a wave of excitement in the DIY and education communities. The 2014 revision brought a modest bump to the SoC and USB ports, but it's still a far cry from today’s Raspberry Pi 4 or Pi 5. So why did I pull one out of storage in 2025 and try to use it again? Mostly curiosity, partly nostalgia. I assumed it would be slow, frustrating, and borderline unusable, but I was surprised at how far a little patience and the right expectations could take it.

Frigate is a powerful tool for creating your own home surveillance system with a few IP cameras and an available network-attached storage (NAS) enclosure, single-board computer (SBC), or home lab server. I've been running the software for a few weeks now and have come to appreciate all the features it offers over the competition. Like anything you self-host, however, there are always things you learn along the way, and here are some points I wish I knew before getting into the world of Frigate.

If you've been looking to buy an OLED screen, this one from LG is going to be a fantastic buy as it drops to just $550. Not only do you have a TV that delivers vibrant colors, but it can also be used as a monitor as well. It's simple, performs well, and is now quite affordable. Grab it from Best Buy with this limited-time deal and save.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell pretends to get a hole drilled into his head for a brain-computer interface.Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, the company behind Half-Life and DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike and preeminent PC game distribution platform Steam, has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC. It began over a decade ago with in-house psychologists studying people’s biological responses to video games; Valve once considered earlobe monitors for its first VR headset. The company publicly explored the idea of brain-computer interfaces for gaming at GDC in 2019.But Newell decided to spin off the idea. That same year, he quietly incorporated a new brain-computer interface startup, Starfish Neuroscience — which has now revealed plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year.Starfish’s first blog post, spotted by Valve watcher Brad Lynch, makes it clear we’re not talking about a complete implant yet. This bit is the custom “electrophysiology” chip designed to record brain activity (like how Neuralink can “read your mind” so patients can interact with computers) and stimulate the brain (for disease therapy), but Starfish isn’t claiming it’s already built the systems to power it or the bits to stick it into a person’s head.“We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues,” writes Starfish neuroengineer Nate Cermak (bolding theirs), suggesting that Starfish might wind up partnering with other companies for wireless power or even the final brain implant. But the goal, writes Starfish, is a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition, one that can “enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions” instead of just one site, and one that doesn’t require a battery. Using just 1.1 milliwatts during “normal recording,” Starfish says it can work with wireless power transmission instead.Here’s the chip’s current spec sheet:Low power: 1.1 mW total power consumption during normal recording Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA) Capable of both recording (spikes and LFP) & stimulation (biphasic pulses) 32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75kHz 1 current source for stimulating on arbitrary pairs of electrodes Onboard impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurement Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces. Fabricated in TSMC 55nm processNeuralink’s N1, for comparison, has 1,024 electrodes across its 64 brain-implanted threads, a chip that consumed around 6 milliwatts as of 2019, a battery that periodically needs wireless charging, and the full implant (again, not just the chip) is around 23mm wide and 8mm thick. The Elon Musk-led company has reportedly already implanted it in three humans; while some of the threads did detach from the first patient’s brain, he still has functionality and has been giving interviews. Starfish says it could be important to connect to multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, instead of just one region, to address issues like Parkinson’s disease. “there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated,” Cermak writes.In addition to multiple simultaneous brain implants, the company’s updated website says it’s working on a “precision hyperthermia device” to destroy tumors with targeted heat, and a brain-reading, robotically guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system for addressing neurological conditions like bipolar disorder and depression.In case you’re wondering how any of this might make its way back to gaming, I’ll leave you with Valve’s talk from GDC 2019 about brain-computer interfaces.