The case made against used hard drives is similar to all other kinds of pre-owned hardware, but it rings truer because of the moving parts inside. You’re putting your data on something that has already spent years spinning in a chassis you’ve never seen, so some hesitation is definitely natural, but I think we have the risk backwards. A used enterprise drive tells you what it is and where it’s been, while a new consumer drive tells you nothing until it fails. Add what’s happened to storage prices across the board, and secondhand enterprise drives are the last real deal in storage and the ones I’d rather own.

If your older (or brand new) smart TV starts to feel slow, you might think it is time to buy a new one. However, you can do a few simple things in the settings menu to perk it up. It had been a few years since I'd really dug into my main TV's settings menu, and I got it feeling new again. Plus, I didn't have to exhaustively search for the right code to access the factory service menu to make tweaks.

I have been relying on cloud-based AI tools for almost everything lately. While tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are capable, I started wondering how much of my workflow I could move to local LLMs.

A large TV is the best way to enjoy your favorite shows and movies. This Hisense 65-inch M7 series Google TV combines an impressive image with excellent, versatile software. It's also quite affordable, costing just $374 at Walmart thanks to a small discount.

Getting a new Android phone usually means spending the first hour removing apps I don't want and setting up the ones I actually use. Over time, I stopped treating this as something I had to figure out every time. I now have a small list of replacements that I install almost automatically whenever I switch phones. They cover some of the apps I use most often, and I don't have to pay for any of them. More importantly, I didn't pick these replacements just to be different. Each one solves a specific problem I had with the default experience and fits better into the way I use Android.

An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the PPD said the AI model sent the tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th, but the investigators never reviewed it because it was marked as spam.Anthropic learned its AI model sent the false tip on September 28th and notified the PPD on October 7th. The company said that during testing, its AI model was interacting with "randomly selected websites" and submitted false information through the PPD's tipline, according to the PPD's stateme …Read the full story at The Verge.

"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity." Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tried to make sense of the flood of mathematical results OpenAI abruptly dropped on the field this week. Amid the awe, excitement, and uncertainty over the sheer scale of the deluge was a deep-seated anxiety over what it all means - and what comes next. For all their different reactions, researchers agreed that simply understanding what OpenAI had released could take years, let alone figuring out where the mathematicians themselves fit in the fi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Integrated graphics are usually an afterthought, especially on a mini PC that's decked out for home lab use. The Minisforum box I have and its Intel Core Ultra 9 389H aren't particularly adept at gaming, but when trying a handful of titles on it, new and old, it surprised me. It has a cut-down version of the integrated graphics in the full-fat chip, featuring only a third of the Xe3 cores. It also only has one stick of DDR5 SODIMM memory, which is about as bad of configuration as you can give an integrated GPU. Despite that, it ran most of what I threw at it.

We tend to shelve old laptops, phones, and gadgets in a rarely visited desk drawer. The devices stay there collecting dust, never to be used again. New hardware replaces them, and it's sometimes sad to see the plight of what used to be absolutely great a while ago. But old devices have a redemption arc going on these days. Almost every computing device, small or big, can be repurposed into something useful.

A jury found an Ohio political blogger guilty of telecommunications harassment after he sent an explicit image of Shrek to a Republican state senator. On Friday, a judge ordered DJ Byrnes, owner of political commentary blog The Rooster, to pay a $200 fine, according to a report from the Columbus Dispatch.Byrnes texted Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino in May after he dropped out of the state's Senate presidential race. As reported by the Columbus Dispatch, Byrnes sent a nude image of Shrek alongside the message: "Good to see you finally made your humiliation public, Young Mussolini! THE PATRIOTS CAUCUS sends its regards!!!!!!!!!!"Cirino filed a pol …Read the full story at The Verge.

For every AI feature of questionable utility that Microsoft advertises relentlessly, there's a useful one hiding in the OS in plain sight. Many of these tools aid productivity or everyday troubleshooting, and some let you forgo paying for utilities that do the same job outright.

CPU makers have noticed that the seemingly unending RAM price hikes are making it tough for a lot of us to upgrade our PCs. Their solution? A return to last-gen DDR4 RAM. Intel and AMD are making new CPUs that'll support the older, more affordable type of memory. On Friday, Gigabyte announced that two of its motherboard lines will support "upcoming" processors built on Intel's LGA 1700 socket. That socket debuted in 2021 with the 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs and supported both DDR4 RAM and the then-new DDR5 RAM. Intel dropped it for a DDR5-only approach in 2024. But according to Gigabyte, the dual format support is now being revived, with new …Read the full story at The Verge.