When someone asks me what the best tools are to start with when setting up a homelab. I always tell them that Cloudflare is by far the best service for homelabbers and the wider internet. Not because it was free, but because Cloudflare had quietly become the load-bearing layer of my homelab. From ingress to internal access and DNS resolution, I used Cloudflare for everything. Beyond these, Cloudflare services were sprinkled across my overall day-to-day workflow.

The other day, I got hit with what felt like a random $100 charge on my credit card from Google. At first, I couldn't figure out what it was for, but then I remembered that several years ago, I started paying for Google One because my Google Photos surpassed its 15GB storage limit. At this point, it feels like I have countless subscriptions, and it would be great to find a way to cut down on a few of them, or at the very least, drop to a lower tier, though I know that's likely not realistic given how often I use Google's cloud services for work.

A large speaker bump on the back of the Tab Plus Gen 2 contributes to the tablet’s upgraded sound. | Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge Lenovo announced a new version of its chonky speaker-filled Tab Plus tablet that once again puts a strong focus on audio. While the original Tab Plus launched two years ago with eight built-in speakers requiring a 13.58mm rear bulge to squeeze them all in, the new Tab Plus Gen 2 bumps that to nine speakers with a circular bump on the back that's now 22.7mm thick. To help justify the thicker addition, the Gen 2's speaker bump integrates a fold-out kickstand that rotates 360 degrees to support the tablet in portrait and landscape modes.Lenovo hasn't confirmed exactly where or when the Tab Plus Gen 2 is expected to launch, but it says it will …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most mechanical keyboards are great these days, with colorful looks and satisfying typing sounds - even in budget-friendly ranges. But every so often, one stops me dead in my tracks. In this case, two of them. I've been testing a pair of jaw-droppingly lovely keyboards that launched late last year. The Evoworks Evo75, a compact 75-percent layout with loud, low-pitched typing sounds. And the Dry Studio ATM98, an 1800-layout / 98-percent layout with silent switches and a design that's anything but quiet - complete with an enormous RGB-ified rotary dial. They are easily two of the nicest keyboards I've ever seen, heard, and used. And they're …Read the full story at The Verge.

New features are coming to cameras connected to Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video. | Image: The Verge, Getty Images Apple's HomeKit Secure Video service is getting in on the Apple Intelligence party to bring more descriptive alerts from your connected cameras and let you search footage using natural language. The Apple Home app is also getting better notifications powered by AI and is finally adding support for energy reporting.These improvements were announced at WWDC last week and will be publicly available this fall. I've been playing with some of the features in the developer betas for iOS 27 and tvOS 27 for a few days, and based on my first impressions, Apple's HomeKit Secure Video is much improved - enough to put it back in contention for me as a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Intel announced Firefly ahead of Computex and went into more detail on the new project during the technology event. At first glance, it may sound like Intel simply wanting to go a step further from existing architectures and launch something similar to Apple silicon with tighter integrations, phone-style components, higher efficiency control, and thinner systems. But it's much more than that, especially for portable devices. Intel brought about the Ultrabook to try to create a class of product, and the company is planning to do the same, but this time focusing on making Windows-powered laptops cheaper, thinner, and more standardized.

Claude Code is easy to frame as the exciting part of a home lab because it can write scripts, explain logs, and stitch together small tools with little ceremony. That makes it tempting to hand the flashy jobs to it first. I’ve done that too, because there’s always a dashboard to polish or a new service to wire into the stack. But the longer I use it, the more I think its best work happens in the least glamorous corner of the lab.

Despite being an objectively terrible digital camera, the Kodak Charmera has been incredibly popular thanks to a cheap price tag and several fun retro designs inspired by the iconic 1987 single-use Kodak Fling. Instead of entirely rethinking that formula, Reto, the company licensing the Kodak brand, is following up on the original Charmera with a Millennium Edition. The seven shiny new designs draw inspiration from the tech and aesthetics of the early 2000s, and at $34.99 each, these will probably once again fly off camera store shelves.The Charmera Millennium Edition isn't just about a Y2K facelift. Reto has updated its software with a to …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been using Hermes Agent for a while now, and the more time I spend with it, the less I think about it as another chat interface. The model matters, obviously, but a chat box is a mere conduit once the model can read files, run scripts, send messages, schedule work, and talk to the services I already use.

I'll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped… until I remembered Apple's magic dots. Introduced in 2024, Apple's Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device's accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the e …Read the full story at The Verge.

Days after its massive IPO, SpaceX says it is spending $60 billion to buy Cursor - a bet designed to help Elon Musk's sprawling rocket / AI / social media behemoth win over lucrative enterprise customers and close the gap with AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI.The takeover was not entirely unexpected: SpaceX announced a peculiar arrangement in April in which it agreed to either acquire the programming platform for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The company had been holding off completing the deal while going public. In an SEC filing, SpaceX said it expects the deal to close during the third quarter of 2026. Musk has pr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Threads has surpassed 500 million monthly active users, Meta announced on Tuesday, hitting the milestone just shy of the platform's third birthday. Threads got off to a hot start in 2023, reaching 100 million users even faster than ChatGPT, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks Threads could hit 1 billion users.Meta says that daily active users on Threads continue to "increase strongly across the globe," with "all" of it driven by communities, which allow users to see and make posts about different topics. The company is bringing them out of beta and adding features like a communities hub in the Threads menu and giving communitie …Read the full story at The Verge.