Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a "routine improvement" instead:This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. Family Plan has existed for a long while. It has been around for, I think it is now close to 12, 13 years in Spotify history, and it makes up a pretty signi …Read the full story at The Verge.

I already use a local LLM with Home Assistant to handle requests that its built-in voice commands don’t understand. Most of what I say still goes through regular intent matching, but having a model interpret more complex requests makes the setup much more convenient. I can phrase things naturally and have it select an existing routine without remembering the exact command. Once that works, giving a local model more control over your automations is a tempting next step.

I have always been willing to pay for third-party apps that improve productivity, simplify everyday tasks, and unlock additional customization options on my phone. Over time, however, I realized I was paying for features my Samsung Galaxy already offered for free.

The newest trend in AI is getting software running on hardware where it really shouldn't be. People have been having a blast porting games to other consoles and PCs, but one person is on a mission: to get macOS 27 running on a Snapdragon X2. And the best part is, it seems surprisingly doable.

When you buy a car, you pay for its features, but they're all locked behind a thick manual that hardly anyone reads. I got my first car last year, and I thought I had tried everything it offered, but I was wrong. When I actually got around to the manual, I had Gemini Notebook read it. Then I asked it simple questions, like, “What can my car do that I might not know about?”

The Warhound website calls this “a new breed of dominance.” | Image: Warhound A new Texas-based defense startup has a plan to improve military and police dogs in the US: it's going to genetically modify them and equip them with Anduril's military technology. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences (the company that says it's trying to resurrect extinct animals), and it's already secured $200 million in funding from investors.Warhound plans to use Colossal's work in genetics, cloning, and animal biology to "produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions," with Anduril then equipping them with its "advanced cybernetic Augments." T …Read the full story at The Verge.

Retro video games are everywhere lately - especially in places where they aren't supposed to be. Halo in a web browser, Wind Waker on the iPhone, Super Smash Bros. in mixed reality. Over the past month or so, these kinds of unexpected projects have gone viral with incredible frequency thanks to new AI tools, as hobbyists take apart games and then rebuild them for new platforms. But while AI has supercharged the pace of these ports, it's also tearing apart tight-knit communities dedicated to preserving games.Decomps and recomps - shorthand for decomposition and recomposition - are a form of reverse engineering that involves breaking a game …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you ever wonder what someone would do with a receipt printer outside of business use, look no further than the tinkering community. They've found many different ways to put them to good use, such as letting people send them messages from the internet. Now, someone has found a way to turn a receipt printer into a daily family digest, complete with weather forecasts, puzzles, and a chore rota for the kids.

Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use AI in misleading ways," spurring the new policies and restrictions.Under the new policies, every listing must include "at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background," and all photos must "accurately represent the item a buyer will receive." The photos that aren't the first one can be edited with softw …Read the full story at The Verge.

Don’t be fooled; only one of these is a truly small phone (it’s the iPhone 13 Mini on the left). When we published our review of the iPhone Duo, I got a lot of hopeful questions from my fellow Mini fans who took note of the cover screen's Mini-ish 5.4-inch size. "Is this… a small phone that turns into a tablet?" they asked. And I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no. The Duo is not the small phone we've been looking for.I wish it was. I like a small phone. I own an iPhone 13 Mini that I refuse to surrender, even though it barely lasts a full day.But the Duo is thick and heavy. You will feel its weight every time you read an email, scroll Instagram, or put it in your pocket. It is a dense phone, and after a week with the Duo, …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I first got into home storage, I assumed that I would need to pick up a NAS. You know, one of those sleek little towers from a manufacturer like QNAP or Synology. They come with bays where hard drives slide in easily, plus a full-fledged app store tailored to storage devices.

For the better part of a month, my home server acted like it was possessed by a ghost. After a power outage, it didn't come back on its own like it usually does, and it happened while I was away from home, resulting in a lot of painful hours working without tools I usually rely on. When I pressed the power button myself, it stalled before Proxmox ever loaded. It sat on a firmware screen waiting for a keypress that a headless machine in the corner was never going to get. When I finally got it running, settings I’d configured a long time ago in the BIOS were completely reset, and when it happened again upon AC power loss, I knew exactly what the issue was.