If you take a long, hard look at your motherboard, you'll notice that it comes with some legacy ports on them, such as Serial (COM), Parallel (LPT), and PS/2 headers. It can be really tempting to assume they're there because the motherboard companies are lazy, but in fact, there's a good reason they're there. And the answer lies about three decades ago.

Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means.Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy Angel is a quirky electronic exploration with huge saw-wave synths, jittery percussion, and sky-high vocal stacks. While 2020's Demisexual Lovelace …Read the full story at The Verge.

Claude Pro proves its worth most of the time. Anthropic's models are accessible pretty much anywhere through API, but the Claude workspace has become almost necessary in my workflow, especially Projects and Artifacts - and more recently, Claude Docs too. But when I scroll back through weeks of chats, I realize the sessions themselves are pretty basic, they mostly revolve around helping me understand things. So ultimately, I'm paying for the desktop app features, but these can be replaced by local tools like AnythingLLM or even PewDiePie's Odysseus.

CrystalDiskInfo has been synonymous with SSD and HDD monitoring for years. It reads your drive's Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) attributes and presents them on a single screen for easy reference. Checking your SSD's health percentage, temperature, or other metrics is pretty simple with this free tool.

The ACEMAGICIAN W1 mini PC is currently listed at $620 on Amazon and is being discounted down to $504 for a limited time. I recommend grabbing it before this price changes. It packs an AMD Ryzen 7 H 255 processor and Radeon 780M graphics into a compact chassis that handles multitasking, creative work, and light gaming without breaking the bank.

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded flyers about their wing specials.Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require disclosures on AI content. And it requires those labels regardless of where an ad …Read the full story at The Verge.

The TV is one of the most important devices in any home, as it's the central piece of an entertainment hub. Having a high-quality panel and sound system is crucial to a satisfying home theater experience, but using your TV's default settings can easily ruin your experience. It still boggles my mind how the average consumer is expected to know which settings to disable on a new TV before they can enjoy it to the fullest.

Cable and streaming TV services like Hulu Live and YouTube TV are monthly expenses I don't need. I don't watch much on cable channels anyway. I would rather put that $90 to $100 toward the rising cost of storage. I added a cheap network tuner to Jellyfin to get live TV throughout my home and canceled my streaming TV subscription.

Adding another home server should mean more room for your applications. Somehow, it also becomes an invitation to learn Kubernetes and spend your weekend figuring out how everything talks to everything else. I already have working Compose files, and I’m not particularly interested in turning a few machines into another job.

I have become so dependent on AI that even for small tasks like summarizing or replying to emails, I always turn to cloud AIs like ChatGPT or Claude. Since I can’t stop going to AI, I have been trying to cut down on cloud AI and use self-hosted local LLMs whenever I can.

BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all.Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would have caused them to cut a shot. Or "we might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: 'Oh, actually … the water conditions are not really good enough …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google TV has plenty of benefits, but the home screen's clutter is a common complaint. Series recommendations often don't feel relevant and take up most of the screen. Worse, some users get ads when they're just trying to browse their apps in peace.