Google Workspace is a phenomenally powerful tool with a rich interface, a slew of AI options via Gemini, and tons of third-party integrations — but it isn't the most private option. For all of Google's measures to protect your data, it's still stored on Google servers and subject to its privacy policies. If you want something a bit more secure, Collabora is a great self-hosted alternative that gives you total control of the data stored on the server. Yes, it requires more upfront work, and more effort goes into maintaining functioning servers, but when privacy is paramount, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better option.

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.

If you regularly move files between folders, manage multiple drives, or manage complex directory structures, the default Windows File Explorer just isn't enough. It's because it doesn't support multiple-panes to ease out your work. Yeah, there's always an option to open multiple windows of the Explorer, but that just doesn't work smoothly, as not all windows can remain active simultaneously, limiting the actions you can perform. So, that's where dual-pane or multi-pane third-party file managers will help you.

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.

I had a good time gaming on my Switch, but I really needed an SD card to store all my games on. After a while, that puny 32GB of storage space really didn't cut it. It was good to hear that the Switch 2 would boost that storage space up by eight times to a more generous 256GB, but if the Switch 2 games would be bigger than its older brother's titles, there was a chance they'd devour eight times the storage, setting us back to square one. Well, turns out that they're not as big a data-hog as I thought, and 256GB should actually last you a while.

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.

Breaking down the confusing world of color spaces.The best method that we have for defining color is by using math. Specifically, mind-boggling mathematical models called color spaces that use geometry to assign colors as a fixed point that we can reference, ensuring the blue that I see is the same blue you see. As a creative-leaning person who can barely split a bill without a calculator app, all that math is extremely daunting.The good news is that computing software will do all these complicated calculations for us, allowing us to rely on our eyeballs to pick whatever colors look best. The bad news is that there’s an equally daunting number of color spaces to choose from, and they’re all optimized for different tasks across web design, photography, video editing, physical printing, and more. And if you select the wrong one at any point between creating, editing, and viewing something, it can really mess with what colors are supposed to look like.It’s a lot to absorb. Thankfully, most of us will only ever need to understand the basics, and that knowledge can be useful to everyone — not just creative professionals. Learning about it can help you buy your next phone, TV, laptop, or computer monitor, and get the most o …Read the full story at The Verge.

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.’”

City-building games offer players the chance to create, manage, and shape entire civilizations. Steam has become a hub for some of the best city-builder games in the industry, offering a massive library of titles that cater to different types of players. These games allow you to step into the shoes of an urban planner and make decisions that will shape these virtual worlds. In this article, we’ll explore ten of the best city-building games you should try on Steam, each offering its own unique take on the genre and a new challenge to take on.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 78, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry everything’s about to get so expensive, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about baseball bats and work-life balance and BYD and Scarlett Johansson, watching Paradise, rekindling my love of pear-flavored jelly beans, sharing Robin Sloan’s AI take with anyone who will listen, grooving to the greatest unexpected Doechii remix of all time, and finally finding the monitor mount that makes my webcam upgrade work.I also have for you a couple of great new apps for streaming and gaming, a look back into Microsoft’s history, the latest on the Switch 2, a screed against screen time, and much more.Oh, and a programming note: Installer is off next week. Taking a little break before we ramp up for Developer Conference season. But we have lots to do today! Let’s get into it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / listening to / watching / downloading / sipping on this week? Tell me everyth …Read the full story at The Verge.

Developers have been prodding at concepts for using generative AI in gaming. One of these concepts involves having the AI generate the entire game, which is just as weird as it sounds. We've seen people do their own take on this concept by feeding an AI tons of visual data based on a game and then allowing players to play in a generated world. Microsoft has released its own take using Quake 2, and while it's surprisingly playable, it still feels like something I'd dream up while running a nasty fever.

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.