Matter 1.6 introduces a new way to share smart home devices with different ecosystems. | Image: CSA Matter, the smart home interoperability standard, might finally get a feature that should have been there from day one: a single shared Matter network managed by multiple ecosystems. With this feature, called Joint Fabric, smart devices added to the network will be controllable by any authorized platform - Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and the rest. No need to "share" your smart light between apps; set it up once, and control it everywhere. It's like your smart home is a joint bank account and your platforms of choice all have signing authority. Joint Fabric is part of the new Matter 1.6 spec announced this week at Unify, the Con …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're looking to transform your monitor into a smart TV, this streaming media stick from Amazon is going to be the way to go. Not only are you going to get easy access to popular streaming apps and game streaming services, but this comes in at a price that's easy to afford. For a limited time, you can now pick up the Fire TV Stick HD for just $16, which is the lowest price we've seen for this model. Don't wait until Prime Day because this is as good as it gets.

I'll admit it. I was wrong. Wildly colorful lighting is delightful for your smart home - well, outdoors, at least. Smart lighting is one of my favorite features of the smart home - it combines convenience with ambiance, letting you change the entire look of your room with just a press of a button. But, other than the occasional pop of color, mostly in my kids' rooms and outdoors around the holidays, I've never found much use for color-changing lights. I prefer the subtler effects of tunable white light combined with dimming to set the scene indoors, and that preference also extended to outdoor lighting. Until this summer.With an influx o …Read the full story at The Verge.

The cool thing about e-paper displays isn't just that they look amazing, although that's definitely a huge plus. No, one of its more practical features is its low power profile. This makes them perfect for displays around the home that you want to leave on 24/7, but you don't want them making a dent in your energy bill.

My phone is filled with productivity apps that promise to make me more organized, more focused, or more efficient. Most of them lasted a few days before I stopped using them. Some were too complicated, others tried to do too much, and many simply didn't fit into my daily workflow.

Ever since Nvidia unveiled the latest version of DLSS at CES 2026, it has been clear that DLSS 4.5 boasts the sharpest image quality and temporal stability in their proprietary upscaler to date. In fact, DLSS 4.5 even makes low internal resolutions like DLSS Performance and even Ultra-Performance genuinely viable on 4K displays. Sure, it comes with a slight performance cost with fewer frames and increased VRAM usage, but DLSS 4.5 has earned every bit of that extra resource tax.

The next humanoid robot might not have a head. It might not have legs. It might even sit on a wheeled base and fold down like a deck chair. But, as Genesis AI puts it, "humanoid robots don't need to look human." That explains the look of Eno, the new robot from the French startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Genesis says Eno is designed "around human capability" rather than human appearance and is intended as a fully "general-purpose" robot rather than a machine built around a single task, like folding laundry. One part is still very human though: its hands, which the company says are designed to "exactly match the form and fu …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most local LLMs feel predictable now. You download a model, point a runtime at it, ask a question, and then watch text move across the screen one token at a time. The model might be better or worse than the one you used yesterday, but the basic experience is usually the same.

It hasn't been a good few months for people who want to run their four-decade-old hardware on Linux. A few days ago, we had to bid farewell to i486 support after Linux 7.1 was finally released, and it doesn't seem like Linux 7.2 will be any more merciful. A new commit confirms that everyone who runs a modern-day Linux distro on a 44-year-old GPU will be left out come the next kernel update, but I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody will miss it.

Let's be real: There's no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That's true even if you've exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it's fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply shrinking it down into something more manageable. Now we have Square Enix and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, a curiously named RPG that mixes the classic Zelda structure with something that resembles Final Fantasy. And it's a combination I can't seem to get enough of.The Adventures of Elliot is the latest in Square Enix …Read the full story at The Verge.

As a hardcore data hoarder, I prefer storing my media files locally instead of relying on online platforms. Thankfully, the home lab ecosystem has dozens of applications that make managing, archiving, and browsing my painstakingly-collected digital library a lot easier. There’s Jellyfin (and Plex too, I guess) for my TV shows and movies, while RomM organizes my collection of retro game files and Immich takes care of all the images I’ve captured over the years.

For the past few months, a couple of ARM-based mini PCs have been sitting in my online shopping cart. What really caught my attention was the passively cooled chassis and the low idle power draw, which are suitable for my home lab experiments. Also, the price tag seems good enough not to hurt the wallet.