It's a big year for America. It's the semiquincentennial, otherwise known as America250, and the United States is cohosting the World Cup. But spectators at these events - and the millions of people who live in the cities hosting them - may not realize that they, too, are being watched.From Kansas City to New York, the US cities hosting the World Cup have been ramping up their surveillance capabilities in the months leading up to the tournament. Security measures are at an all-time high in Washington, DC, which isn't hosting the World Cup, but is home to a series of spectacles this summer. The Fourth of July festivities in the nation's cap …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Fire HD 8 that launched in 2024 was the last new addition to Amazon's budget-minded tablet lineup, but the company has quietly updated the Fire HD 10 that debuted the year before. In 2023 it was offered with multiple storage configurations that each came with 3GB of RAM, but the 32GB version now ships with 4GB of RAM, and a small price bump from $139.99 to $154.99.The Fire HD 10 with 64GB of storage still only comes with 3GB of RAM and the other specs for both tablets remain the same, including a 10.1-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 display, a 2GHz eight-core processor, a 13-hour battery, and expandable storage through a microSD card. The refreshe …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years, budget 3D printers were mostly judged by the obvious things. We looked at speed, auto bed leveling, input shaping, app support, enclosure options, and whether the machine could print a respectable first model without rattling the whole desk. Those things still matter, and I’m not going to pretend they don’t. But lately, the build plate has started to feel like the part of the spec sheet that quietly changes the whole experience.

I have used a Fire TV Stick for over three years and have rarely had any issues. It was undoubtedly one of the best budget upgrades for my not-so-smart TV. But that doesn't mean that it was a completely seamless experience either. There were a few frustrations I had to deal with for the longest time, and the Fire TV remote was the biggest.

I've been self-hosting all kinds of services in my homelab for years. There's something satisfying about having complete control over your data, choosing your own software, and not relying on third-party providers. But over time, I realized that installing a service is the easy part — maintaining it is where the real commitment begins.

Smart home devices are already pretty handy thanks to their remote management tools, and voice assistants push their convenience to the next level. Google Home and Alexa+ are among the most common voice assistants in smart home setups, but despite their inherent benefits, I avoid them like the plague these days.

Despite the fact that smartphones have become impressively capable shooters, standalone point-and-shoot cameras are enjoying a renaissance. The tiny Kodak Charmera is still wildly popular, while influencers are scrambling to find aging Canon cameras on eBay. Godox, a company best known for its photography lighting products, is the latest to join the simple camera craze, but its new C100 stands out from the crowd by skipping a color preview screen for a transparent LCD that doubles as an optical viewfinder.Although the C100 product page on Godox's website is thin on technical details, including its sensor resolution and video capabilities, …Read the full story at The Verge.

VS Code is still the safe choice, but it no longer feels like the most exciting one. But 2026 feels like the first time its alternatives are not just trying to copy it, they are trying to replace the way I think about writing code.

I've burned through a frankly embarrassing number of AI coding tools this year, along with an even bigger heap of tokens. Along the way, I fell hard on the side of terminal-agents, wired up to a local LLM or two to help me limit my token burn. I've built agentic workflows that code and test without me, but I have to admit that sometimes I like the feel of a more traditional IDE.

E Ink technology (or general ePaper) is one of my favorite things right now. I love it when technology tries to do something that's very niche, but very useful for the particular crowd it's aimed at, and these displays serve a specific purpose very well.

The actual proposition of the Steam Machine is incredibly appealing. A SteamOS box that delivers 4K gaming at 60 FPS to the couch is a solid premise, but that premise has to be backed up in both the performance and the price. The Steam Machine does neither of those things.

When I first started using PowerToys a couple of years ago, I was immediately drawn to PowerToys Run because it addressed a couple of glaring issues I had with Windows Search. I didn't have to deal with the cluttered Start menu or accidentally clicking web results. And since I was already used to Spotlight on my MacBook, PowerToys Run felt oddly familiar even though it was mostly just a launcher. I know some Windows users have wanted an Alfred alternative for years, and PowerToys Run has always been too basic for that comparison.