After her game was banned from sale on Steam in a baffling decision with no appeal option, solo developer Cara Cadaver has made VILE: Exhumed available as shareware under a Creative Commons license. The project can be downloaded for free, but players can opt to donate in support of the solo developer’s work. Both Cara…

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today’s Connections: Sports Edition wasn’t too tough. I was rather entertained by the green and blue categories. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections:…

Robot vacuums that can both mop and sweep your floors have improved significantly in recent years. While they are still not as effective as good ol’ manual labor, if you run them regularly, they will help keep your floors cleaner with much less effort on your part. The difference is that newer “combo” robot vacuum…

Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the…

Interest in Sonos’s smallest portable speaker is heating up—literally—following word that at least one of the units came close to catching fire. A Sonos user on Reddit posted images of the “singed” and “bulging” USB port on the back of his Roam, a portable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker that doubles as a smart speaker. Sonos…
Intel is reportedly still struggling with a chipmaking process crucial to its future. Reuters reports that the company’s 18A process is still producing low yields and high defect rates. Intel has invested billions of dollars in the manufacturing process, on which it’s pinned its hopes of gaining ground on TSMC. This isn’t the first concerning…

At a time when subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming services keep getting more expensive and their ads more extensive, Roku’s new streaming service, Howdy, is worth a closer look. Howdy launched today in the US for $3 per month. It is currently only accessible via a web browser or the Howdy app on Roku OS. Roku…

The Assassin’s Creed franchise is one of the biggest series in gaming today. Ubisoft, the series’ publisher, said in 2023 that it has sold over 155 million copies of Assassin’s Creed games, making it one of the bestselling franchises in history. Xbox Game Pass subscribers can play one of the most recent entries in the…

Google rolled out a new tool within its Gemini AI chatbot that lets you create an illustrated story by simply describing it. The feature, called “Storybook,” generates 10-page stories, each with a short paragraph of text that Gemini can read aloud, along with an accompanying illustration. You can customize your story by asking Gemini to…

Huawei has greenlit a plan to open-source its CANN software toolkit for its Ascend AI GPUs. According to the South China Morning Post, Huawei is making this move in order to better compete against Nvidia and its closed-source CUDA software ecosystem. Open-sourcing CANN, or Compute Architecture for Neural Networks, could further speed up developer innovation…