There are things Windows is good at, and other aspects where it fails miserably. Bloatware, I believe, falls under the latter. Over the years, Microsoft has been pushing more and more apps on Windows that offer no real utility to the vast majority of users. And after AI integration picked up, the list got even longer.

The Liberty 5 Pro Max feature a larger touchscreen with more controls and the ability to record meetings without a phone. | Image: Anker Anker has announced a new version of its Soundcore Liberty Pro earbuds: the new Liberty 5 Pro. These are the company's first earbuds featuring the Thus AI audio chip Anker announced last month, here being used to bolster noise reduction capabilities and help ensure the user's voice can be clearly heard during calls, even in noisy environments. They're the first new Soundcore Liberty Pro earbuds since the 2024 version that launched with a charging case screen. Joining the Liberty 5 Pro are a new Max version that add AI-powered note-taking capabilities through their charging case.The Liberty 5 Pro are available starting today for $169.99 in …Read the full story at The Verge.

A federal judge is officially being tasked with deciding whether to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster. More than 30 states are asking Judge Arun Subramanian to order a sale of the ticketing giant, a "sufficient number" of large amphitheaters, and limit its ability to tie access to its remaining amps to the use of its promotions services. In April, a jury found that the company is an illegal monopolist, after more than a month of trial. The initial remedies proposal doesn't include a further breakup of some other parts of Live Nation's business that California Attorney General Rob Bonta told The Verge and other outlets earlier this week the …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's something about a network humming along for years without fault. After many hours of painstakingly configuring every aspect of it, from virtual local area networks (VLANs) to DNS filtering, there's little I've found to provide the same amount of accomplishment as getting my LAN fully up and running. The center of my home network is OPNsense and a few switches, including an almost-decade-old EnGenius ECS2512FP. This eight-port multi-gig network switch helps make the magic happen, taking in a 10Gb uplink from the network and providing eight points for the home lab to connect to.

The Raspberry Pi has always been easy to recommend for home automation, but the Raspberry Pi 5 complicates that recommendation in a useful way. If all you need is a box to run Home Assistant, a few Zigbee devices, and some basic automations, it’s more machine than the job really needs. A Raspberry Pi 4 can still handle that workload comfortably, and older models can remain useful for modest setups. The Pi 5 starts to make more sense when the home automation hub becomes part of a wider home lab rather than a single-purpose appliance.

For a long time, my workflow was spread across too many disconnected places. Editorial tasks lived in one dashboard, side projects in another. My ideas were scattered across note apps, and my inbox was getting buried under marketing threads. At some point, switching dashboards and keeping context became more exhausting than the actual work.

When I bought my RX 9070 XT upon release, I expected FSR 4 to be one of the bigger parts of my upgrade. AMD's machine-learning upscaler had been positioned as the answer to DLSS, and the actual gameplay footage that was put out by reviewers backed up the image quality claims. A year later, with Adrenalin 25.12.1 installed and the FSR 4 override toggle sitting right there in the driver, I still spend most of my evenings on FSR 3.1 or whatever older version a given game shipped with. Not because FSR 4 looks worse, but because the games actually loaded on my drive don't qualify for the override more often than they do. The toggle is a great piece of engineering, but the widespread support it promises isn't as widespread in practice.

Even though I've been using an RTX 4090 since 2022, I barely ever enabled frame generation for anything besides benchmarking. Every time I toggled it on, I was just underwhelmed with how the game felt while moving around, and turned it back off within minutes. Sure, the FPS counter looked impressive and made for a great screenshot to show off to my friends, but the actual experience never felt nearly as transformative as the numbers suggested.

I've been using Plex for more than half a decade, and one reason I've stuck with it is the lifetime subscription I bought. I still think it's one of the best purchases I've made for home streaming because Plex has almost everything you need for remote access and media management.

The Liberty 5 Pro series are Soundcore’s most ambitious earbuds yet. Soundcore, Anker's audio brand, has mostly lived in the budget-to-midrange world, but with its new Liberty 5 Pro earbuds, it's aiming at the big guys. The two new earbuds - the Liberty 5 Pro and Liberty 5 Pro Max - use Anker's new Thus chip, which has more processing power than previous Soundcore earbuds to try and compete with the chips found in Apple, Sony, and Bose products. And that extra processing power gives the Liberty 5 Pro the best in-call noise canceling I've heard in any earbuds.Previously, the highest-priced Soundcore earbuds (not counting the sleep buds) were the Liberty 4 Pro at $150, but the Liberty 5 Pro are $170 and the L …Read the full story at The Verge.

The wild world of retro handhelds just got a little weirder.

Let's say you spent months picking out parts or researching a pre-built PC. You made sure to get 16GB of fast dual-channel RAM, so your games would run smoothly, and your desktop wouldn't choke under heavy multitasking. But somehow your system feels strangely sluggish. You notice erratic 1% low frame rate, which is stuttering, in CPU-bound games like Cyberpunk or Counter-Strike. Alongside this, opening heavy apps feels slightly delayed. For some reason, despite the fact that you opted for 16GB of RAM, it just feels like your PC is a machine with half of the memory capacity it has.