Spotify has submitted an iOS app update that would allow US customers to use payment options beyond Apple’s system, the company said Thursday. The move follows Wednesday’s Epic Games v. Apple ruling, which prohibits Apple from taking a cut of non-Apple payment systems and from controlling how developers inform users about alternative payment methods.

If approved, the update would enable US users to view subscription pricing details and promotions directly in-app, purchase subscriptions via external links, seamlessly switch between Premium plans, and access payment options beyond Apple’s system. Spotify suggested the update could eventually facilitate additional purchasing opportunities, including audiobooks. “While other governments around the world have taken steps against Apple’s harmful practices, this is, by far, the most consequential action to date,” Spotify said, calling it “absurd” that these “basic services” weren’t permitted despite being ordered by a judge four years ago. Patreon has similarly announced plans to submit an iOS app update allowing creators to accept non-Apple payments.

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Microsoft has taken its most significant step yet toward eliminating passwords by making new Microsoft accounts “passwordless by default.” The change means new users will never need to create a password, instead using more secure authentication methods like biometrics, PINs, or security keys.

The move builds on Microsoft’s decade-long push toward passwordless authentication that began with Windows Hello in 2015. According to company data, passkey sign-ins are eight times faster than password and multi-factor authentication combinations, with users achieving a 98% success rate compared to just 32% for password users. Microsoft also said it now registers nearly one million passkeys daily across its consumer services.

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Donald Trump’s crypto company created a digital dollar called USD1, which is now being used by a big investor in Abu Dhabi to help fund a $2 billion deal with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Reuters reports: Stablecoins are an increasingly lucrative cog in global crypto trading. Their issuers typically profit by earning interest from the Treasuries and other assets that underpin them. The value of USD1 in circulation reached about $2.1 billion on Wednesday, according to CoinMarketCap data, making it one of the fastest-growing stablecoins. The identity of its major holders, however, remains unclear. An anonymous cryptocurrency wallet that holds $2 billion worth of USD1 received the funds between April 16 and 29, according to data from crypto research firm Arkham. Reuters could not ascertain the owner of this wallet.

Binance founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was incarcerated in the United States last year after pleading guilty to violating U.S. laws against money laundering, met Zach Witkoff and two other World Liberty co-founders in Abu Dhabi, according to a photo posted on social media site X on Sunday. “It was great to see our friends,” in Abu Dhabi, posted Zhao in response to the photo, tagging Witkoff. Zhao, who in 2023 stepped down from his role at Binance as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. over the illicit finance charges, remains a major shareholder of Binance.

Separately, Zach Witkoff announced that USD1 would be integrated into Tron, the blockchain of Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun. Sun is the biggest known investor in World Liberty and an adviser to the venture, according to his social media posts, having poured at least $75 million into the project. Sun was fighting a U.S. securities fraud lawsuit at the time of his first investment in World Liberty. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February paused its case against him, citing public interest.

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Following a major court ruling limiting Apple’s control over App Store payments, Patreon plans to update its iOS app to allow payments outside Apple’s system, letting creators keep more of their earnings. Spotify and Proton are also preparing similar updates. The Verge reports: “This is a huge moment for creators and their businesses,” [spokesperson Adiya Taylor] says. “The iOS app is the number one platform for fan engagement on Patreon, and we believe this ruling allows creators to get paid without giving Apple 30 percent. As a first step, we will submit an app update for review by Apple to enable payments outside of IAP so creators keep more from iOS based fan payments.”

Last year, Patreon said it was forced to switch to Apple’s in-app purchase system, which applied a 30 percent fee to all new memberships purchased in the app, or else risk “being removed from the App Store.” “When we first announced rolling out Apple’s IAP requirements last year, we shared that we used three principles to guide our decision in how we wanted to move forward: transparency, control, and stability,” Taylor says. “Keeping with those principles, we’re exploring further action we can take, and we’ll continue to keep creators and fans posted on any changes to our experience.” Taylor wasn’t able to share a timeline for when the update might be rolled out. Further reading: Epic Games Is Launching Webshops To Circumvent App Store Fees

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Late last year, Reddit introduced its AI-powered search tool, Reddit Answers. Now, the company plans to make the feature even more prominent by adding it into Reddit’s main sitewide search, CEO Steve Huffman said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

“We are now working to integrate it into Reddit core search experience to further streamline the path from question to answer on Reddit,” Huffman said. “Integrating into Reddit search means we want one search box. That’ll be the primary search box, and you’ll type your query in there, you’ll get, potentially, your [Reddit] Answers, answer, or, you know, more of a traditional Reddit response, depending on what you’re searching for.”

Up to now, Reddit Answers, which is still labeled as being in “beta,” has lived in its own section of the service. The feature summarizes conversations from across Reddit in response to queries that users may otherwise seek out by adding “Reddit” to their searches on Google. Huffman said that Reddit Answers, which recently became available to all US Redditors, as well as a handful of international markets, already has 1 million weekly users. That’s only a small fraction of Reddit’s 401 million weekly users, but adding it into Reddit’s primary search box should give it a boost.

Huffman said the change is part of a broader strategy to improve search across Reddit. Reddit Answers, he said, could help make the service more accessible to new users and guide people who come to the site via search engines. The change could also be somewhat controversial — Reddit users aren’t exactly known for loving big changes to the service — though Huffman acknowledged users may not always want an AI-generated summary in response to every search.

“Sometimes people will want the summarized, annotated, sterile answers from AI, and we’re even building this ourselves in Reddit Answers,” Huffman said. “But other times they want the subjective, authentic, messy, multiple viewpoints that Reddit provides.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-will-integrate-ai-answers-into-its-main-search-bar-223907171.html?src=rss

A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. The findings, detailed in a working paper by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen, provide an early, large-scale empirical look at AI’s transformative potential.

In “Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects,” economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard focused specifically on the impact of AI chatbots across 11 occupations often considered vulnerable to automation, including accountants, software developers, and customer support specialists. Their analysis covered data from 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark.

Despite finding widespread and often employer-encouraged adoption of these tools, the study concluded that “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation” during the period studied. The confidence intervals in their statistical analysis ruled out average effects larger than 1 percent.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Epic Games is taking a victory lap. After notching a big win against Apple in a years-long legal dispute, Epic announced that its Epic Games Store will allow developers to open webshops, which can offer players out-of-app purchases to circumvent fees from Apple and Google. […] With the Epic Games Store’s new webshops feature, other developers will be more easily able to follow suit.

Usually, Epic takes a 12% share of a developer’s earnings from the Epic Games Store, which is still a better deal than what developers get from Apple. But starting in June, Epic Games will not take a cut from the first $1 million each game earns annually. Only after a game eclipses $1 million in revenue will Epic begin taking a cut. “With new legal rulings in place, developers will be able to send players from games to make digital purchases from webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the European Union and United States,” Epic said.

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Meta’s Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta’s Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company’s Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It’s the key business unit that anchors CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to build a new computing platform involving digital worlds accessible via VR and augmented reality devices. […]

Wall Street has questioned Meta’s big spending on the metaverse, which Zuckerberg has said could take many years to turn into a real business. The company must now also contend with sweeping new tariffs from President Donald Trump and the likely increase in costs that will follow, potentially leading to higher-priced devices. Last week, Meta said that an unspecified number of Reality Labs employees were laid off. Those workers were part of the Oculus Studios unit, which creates VR and AR games and content for Quest VR headsets.

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An entire cottage industry has formed around phishing attacks that bypass some of the most common forms of multifactor authentication (MFA) and allow even non-technical users to quickly create sites that defeat the protections against account takeovers.

MFA works by requiring an additional factor of authentication besides a password, for instance, a fingerprint, face scan, or the possession of a digital key. In theory, this prevents attackers from accessing an account even after they phish a victim’s username and password. Most often, the second form of authentication comes in the form of a one-time passcode that is sent to the user by text message or email or is generated by an authentication app that the user has already set up.

Adversary in the middle

As detailed on Thursday by Cisco Talos, an entire ecosystem has cropped up to help criminals defeat these forms of MFA. They employ an attack technique known as an adversary in the middle. The tools provide phishing-as-a-service toolkits that are marketed in online crime forums using names including Tycoon 2FA, Rockstar 2FA, Evilproxy, Greatness, and Mamba 2FA.

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The rapid proliferation of AI chatbots has made it difficult to know which models are actually improving and which are falling behind. Traditional academic benchmarks only tell you so much, which has led many to lean on vibes-based analysis from LM Arena. However, a new study claims this popular AI ranking platform is rife with unfair practices, favoring large companies that just so happen to rank near the top of the index. The site’s operators, however, say the study draws the wrong conclusions.

LM Arena was created in 2023 as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley. The pitch is simple—users feed a prompt into two unidentified AI models in the “Chatbot Arena” and evaluate the outputs to vote on the one they like more. This data is aggregated in the LM Arena leaderboard that shows which models people like the most, which can help track improvements in AI models.

Companies are paying more attention to this ranking as the AI market heats up. Google noted when it released Gemini 2.5 Pro that the model debuted at the top of the LM Arena leaderboard, where it remains to this day. Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s strong performance in the Chatbot Arena earlier this year helped to catapult it to the upper echelons of the LLM race.

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Google is bringing AI image editing to Gemini, which means that you can use text-based prompts in the Gemini app or website to tweak existing images. This feature has been available in Google AI Studio for some time, and Google is now rolling it out to all Gemini users, with support for 45 languages. Google says you will be able to use conversational prompts to edit both AI-generated images and photos uploaded from your phone or computer.

What you can do with Gemini’s AI image editing

The most appealing part of this feature is that it lowers the entry barrier for editing photos. You can have a conversation with the Gemini AI chatbot to have it generate an image, or upload any of your photos into the chat window, and then ask the AI to edit the photo. It’s similar to the Google Pixel’s Reimagine feature, which lets you add fake objects to real photos. 

You can use Gemini’s photo editing tools to replace certain objects in a photo, alter the background, and even add entirely new elements from scratch. In its blog post announcing the new feature, Google gives an example, saying you can upload your own photo and ask Gemini to change your hair color to see how you’d look after a dye job. The AI also remembers your previous requests, so you can ask it to make multiple changes to your image across different messages. Google also claims that you can use this feature to generate a story and images to go with it.

There are ethical concerns with features like these, with the most obvious being that they could be used to create fake images that could cause real harm to people or businesses. To help prevent this, Google says all AI-generated images will have an invisible watermark. It’s also experimenting with using a visible watermark on these photos, too, which could help identify AI-edited images more easily. 

Since this feature is only starting its rollout today, it may be a while before you’re able to use it. This feature won’t be available for Google Workspace and education users.

Sam Altman’s eye-scanning identity project, now called World, officially launched in the U.S. with six in-person registration sites. CNBC reports: Here’s how it works: You go up to an Orb, a spherical biometric device, and it spends about 30 seconds scanning your face and iris, then creates and stores a unique “IrisCode” for you verifying that you’re a human and that you’ve never signed up before. Then you get some of the project’s cryptocurrency, WLD, for free, and you can use your World ID as a sign-in with integrated platforms, which currently include an open API integration with Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify and Discord.

Starting Thursday, the company is opening six flagship U.S. retail locations where people can sign up to have their eyeball scanned: Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami and San Francisco. At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the venture announced two high-profile partnerships: Visa will introduce the “World Visa card” this summer, available only to people who have had their irises scanned by World, and the online dating giant Match Group will begin a pilot program testing out World ID and some age verification tools with Tinder in Japan.

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Whatever happened to chunky mashed potatoes? There’s a lot of hype for the silky, nearly pudding-like variety of mash—which seem to be the only kind served at restaurants these days—but for me, nothing beats a heaping pile of fluffy smashed potatoes studded with knobbly bits of soft, uncrushed tuber.

And if you too are a supporter of chunky mashed potatoes, you can use your stand mixer to get the best consistency.

Stand mixer versus hand-mashed potatoes

There is nothing wrong with hand-mashing potatoes, but I’d like to bring stand mixer mashing to your attention simply because after I tried it, I couldn’t help but appreciate the difference in consistency. I hadn’t even expected to feel the difference on my palate—I was only testing out the method to see if it served a practical purpose. 

Surprisingly, just by scooping a dollop into a bowl, I could feel that the texture was lighter than when I hand-mash potatoes in a pot. (And I didn’t even use a whisk attachment.) I then ate said bowl of spuds, and experienced an airiness that didn’t fade even after it cooled down. Whenever I mash by hand, the potatoes are soft but still dense, and they sit heavily. Not these—this batch was almost whipped, with more consistently sized bits of unmashed potato. (Maybe this is a me-thing, but if I hand mash potatoes for their chunkiness, I usually wind up with a few embarrassingly large pieces that somehow make it through my masher.)

As far as those practical purposes are concerned, mashing with a stand mixer is great if you need to multitask with multiple dishes, quickly free up the stove after boiling, or if you have limited strength or mobility.

Regardless of your reasons, here’s how I do it.

How to make mashed potatoes with a stand mixer

1. Boil or steam your spuds

When making mashed, I prefer to steam my potato pieces because it’s faster, but you can stick to boiling if you like. (Steaming only takes about 15 minutes because you only need to boil a half-inch of water rather than a gallon.) The type of potato is also up to you, but I use russets for their high starch content, which can yield a more fluffy mash.

2. Toss in the hot taters and flavoring ingredients

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Once your potatoes are fork-tender, carefully (don’t burn yourself) toss them into the bowl of the stand mixer. Don’t wait for them to cool down; they should still be piping hot. As America’s Test Kitchen explains in their baked potato post, breaking open the potato (in our case, the potato hunks) while hot allows more steam to escape, leading to a fluffier, lighter texture. Add in your favorite ingredients, a few knobs of butter, some salt, pepper, and chives if you’re into that. Don’t add your liquid ingredient yet.

3. Mash

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Attach a paddle attachment to the stand mixer and turn the machine on the lowest speed. Allow the mixer to do the work for about three to five minutes. You’re looking for a uniform texture, and for the butter to be fully incorporated. Stop the machine if you have to so you can get a better look at how the potatoes are breaking down.

4. Add the liquid

During those three minutes, pour your measurement of liquid (whether it’s milk, cream, or a combination of the two) into a microwave-safe measuring cup. Heat it until steaming. Keeping the mixer on the lowest speed, slowly pour the liquid into the mashed potatoes. Once the liquid has been incorporated, bump the speed up one or two notches and let it mash for another 20 seconds or until you like the texture. Taste, and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Top your taters with a swirl of gravy and enjoy the fluffiest chunky mashed potatoes you’ve ever experienced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The House of Representatives on Thursday voted to block California from implementing plans to block new sales of gas-powered vehicles in a decade. In a 246-164 vote, members approved House Joint Resolution 88, which seeks to withdraw a waiver granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to California during the Biden administration to implement the ban. Thirty-five Democrats joined 211 Republicans in backing the measure. […] The House also approved two other measures which withdraw waivers on the state’s plans to increase sales of zero-emissions trucks in a 231-191 vote, along with the state’s latest nitrogen oxide emission standards for engines in a 225-196 vote.

Following Thursday’s vote, Newsom’s office issued a statement saying the House illegally used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal the state’s Clean Air Act waivers. The governor’s office also said the move contradicts the Government Accountability Office and Senate Parliamentarian who have ruled the CRA does not apply to the state’s waivers. “Trump Republicans are hellbent on making California smoggy again. Clean air didn’t used to be political. In fact, we can thank Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon for our decades-old authority to clean our air,” Newsom said. “The only thing that’s changed is that big polluters and the right-wing propaganda machine have succeeded in buying off the Republican Party — and now the House is using a tactic that the Senate’s own parliamentarian has said is lawless. Our vehicles program helps clean the air for all Californians, and we’ll continue defending it.” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) said in a statement: “House Republicans’ misguided and cynical attempts to gut the Clean Air Act and undercut California’s climate leadership ignores the reality of California’s strength as the fourth largest economy in the world…

… If Senate Republicans take up these measures under the Congressional Review Act, they will be going nuclear by overruling the Parliamentarian, all to baselessly attack California.”

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Being a model citizen and a person of taste, you probably don’t need this reminder, but some others do: Federal judges do not like it when lawyers electronically watermark every page of their legal PDFs with a gigantic image—purchased for $20 online—of a purple dragon wearing a suit and tie. Not even if your firm’s name is “Dragon Lawyers.”

Federal Magistrate Judge Ray Kent of the Western District of Michigan was unamused by a recent complaint (PDF) that prominently featured the aubergine wyrm.

“Each page of plaintiff’s complaint appears on an e-filing which is dominated by a large multi-colored cartoon dragon dressed in a suit,” he wrote on April 28 (PDF). “Use of this dragon cartoon logo is not only distracting, it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon.”

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Military-grade infrared vision goggles use detectors made of mercury cadmium telluride, a semiconducting material that’s particularly sensitive to infrared radiation. Unfortunately, you need to keep detectors that use this material extremely cool—roughly at liquid nitrogen temperatures—for them to work. “Their cooling systems are very bulky and very heavy,” says Xinyuan Zhang, an MIT researcher and the lead author of a new study that looked for alternative IR-sensitive materials.

Added weight was a sacrifice the manufacturers of high-end night-vision systems were mostly willing to make because cooling-free alternatives offered much worse performance. To fix this, the MIT researchers developed a new ultra-thin material that can sense infrared radiation without any cooling and outperforms cooled detectors at the same time. And they want to use it to turn thermal vision goggles into thermal vision spectacles.

Staying cool

Cooling-free infrared detectors have been around since before World War II and mostly relied on pyroelectric materials like tourmaline that change their temperature upon absorbing infrared radiation. This temperature change, in turn, generates an electric current that can be measured to get a readout from the detector. Although these materials worked, they had their issues. Operating at room temperature caused a lot of random atomic motion in the pyroelectric material, which introduced electrical noise that made it difficult to detect faint infrared signals.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) kicked off a Wednesday hearing criticizing ​​the Trump administration for cutting science funding, firing federal scientists, and triggering policy uncertainties that she said threaten to undermine the foundation for America’s global leadership.

Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the administration’s abrupt cancellation of grants and laying off scientists has little or no justification. “These actions put our leadership in biomedical innovation at real risk and must be reversed,” she said.

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I’m not sure I can remember another car that took as long to get comfortable with as the 2025 Aston Martin Vantage. It’s an achingly beautiful machine, from the outside at least. And by the week’s end, I had my first glimpses into how it can deliver driver engagement with the best of them. By then I’d also gotten over my disappointment with the interior and, sadly yet again, had the “British cars with crap electronics” stereotype confirmed once more.

Painted the same striking shade of Podium Green as one of Formula 1’s safety cars, the Vantage is one of the most eye-catching cars we’ve tested in a while. In person, that giant front grille dominates things, but all around the car you see the influence of the aerodynamicists and engineers who want to bend the airflow to their needs; cutting drag here, adding downforce there, feeding a cooling duct or venting waste heat. The way the wheel arches stretch out from the doors reminds me of the One-77 supercar from a few years ago, but it’s all a thoroughly modern shape here.

That sculpted and vented hood contains the Vantage’s 4.0 L twin-turbo V8. With 656 hp (490 kW) and 590 lb-ft (800 Nm), it’s the most powerful Vantage to date, eclipsing the time the company bolted some Eaton superchargers to a 2-ton Chesterfield sofa on wheels. ZF’s excellent 8HP automatic transmission sends that power and torque to the rear wheels, which arrived wearing Vantage-specific versions of Michelin’s latest Pilot Sport 5 tires.

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The Steam Deck makes your PC games feel like they were built for handheld gaming, but it’s kind of like a fancy illusion. Under the hood, the Steam Deck is essentially a Linux PC that employs a user interface made for a controller. What that means is that you, the user, can easily dive under that hood with Steam’s Desktop interface and start modding and tweaking your games, just like you would on a regular gaming PC.

When you’re in Desktop mode, you’ll find a full Linux desktop environment (specifically, KDE Plasma) complete with Firefox for browsing the web, a file manager, and the full desktop Steam interface. While it works a little differently than something like Windows, if you’re used to tweaking settings or modifying your game files in Steam, this mode will seem familiar.

This is also the mode you’ll need to access if you want to install third-party launchers, mod your games, or run emulators. There’s so much power waiting for you behind a simple change in interface. Here’s how to get started.

How to access Desktop mode

Valve has made it remarkably easy to swap to Desktop mode, and it shouldn’t be intimidating to anyone. Here are the steps:

1. Press the Steam button (underneath the left touchpad).

2. Select Power.

3. Select Switch to Desktop.

That’s it. Easy, right? Keep in mind, this is technically restarting your console, so if you’re in the middle of a game, save any progress you have. After a brief black screen, you’ll see a desktop UI with a few desktop shortcuts and a toolbar along the bottom.

How to navigate the desktop on a Steam Deck

While you can technically connect a mouse and keyboard to use this as a desktop, you don’t have to. There are a few basic controls you’ll need to learn, but once you do, you’ll be able to navigate just like it was any other PC.

• The touchscreen. First and foremost, since this is a touchscreen, you can tap directly on anything on the screen. It’s not the most precise method, but it should be mentioned up front.

• The right trackpad is your mouse. Just like the touchpad on your computer, you can use the right trackpad to control the desktop cursor.

• The left trackpad is your scroll wheel. It can be a little wonky, but swipe up and down on the left trackpad and you can scroll through websites or menus that have focus. 

• Click and right-click with the right and left triggers, respectively. To click on something, press the right trigger. To right-click on something, press the left trigger. Yes, it sounds counterintuitive when you describe it, but once you’re doing it, it feels a lot more natural.

• Press Steam + X to pull up the on-screen keyboard. This is the least intuitive part of the interface, but if you need to enter text, press Steam + X. This shortcut will invoke the virtual keyboard. You can then dismiss it when you’re done by pressing the keyboard icon on the bottom right.

These basic controls will let you navigate the vast majority of the desktop interface. It might feel a little cumbersome at first, but you get the hang of it quickly. With that in mind, you can start messing around in your Steam Deck’s files.

Install non-Steam game launchers

Steam might be the default official game store for the Steam Deck, but you can technically install others. In the past, this was a bit of a hassle, but long-suffering volunteers have made tools to make it easier than ever. You can install launchers like GOG Galaxy and even Epic Games Store with a little effort.

Keep in mind that none of these are officially supported, and you should research install methods specifically for the Steam Deck to get them working. The Steam Deck runs on a Linux build, and it’s only able to run Windows applications through the frankly magic Proton compatibility layer. You’re venturing into buggier territory with this path, but you can find access to a ton of games you couldn’t have otherwise played with the default Steam Deck setup.

Start modding your games

Modding is one of the best ways to breathe new life into your favorite games, and Steam is usually super friendly to it. While there’s not an easy way to do it from the default Steam Deck, its desktop mode opens that world right up. You can use Firefox to browse popular mod sites like NexusMods and the Dolphin file browser to dig through your game files.

Since you can also access the desktop version of Steam, it’s easier to go through your game files. Right-click (that is, left trigger) on any game in your Library, select Properties > Installed Files, then click on Browse to pull up the folder where that game’s files are located.

In some (rare) cases, it can be even easier. NexusMods is currently developing a Steam Deck version of its mod manager app that currently officially supports Stardew Valley, with more games planned for future support.

Connect peripherals for the full PC experience

With the Steam Deck’s USB-C port, you can connect a wide range of peripherals that let you effectively turn your Deck into a whole PC. Valve even has an official docking station (though you can also find cheaper ones from companies like Anker). It also supports Bluetooth connections for wireless keyboards and mice. With this you can connect:

• External monitors. The Steam Deck has a 1280×800 panel (either IPS or OLED, depending on your model), which is great for its size, but it’s hardly high res. If you’d rather play your games on something bigger and more detailed, you can connect an external monitor to play on.

• Keyboards and mice. Obviously, Steam and its games were designed with a PC interface in mind. While the Steam Deck has done a great job of making games feel at home on a handheld, you can always connect a mouse and keyboard as a fallback. This also makes navigating desktop mode easier.

• External hard drives. One of the biggest downsides of the Steam Deck is its limited storage capacity. Rather than constantly redownloading your games, you can plug in an external drive and swap out your games from there, via desktop mode. You’ll save a ton of time (and bandwidth) over deleting and redownloading.

• Ethernet adapters. The Steam Deck is at its best when you’re playing single-player games, in my opinion. However, if you’d like to occasionally use it for online play, you might get better latency over an Ethernet connection. Docking stations can add this functionality while docked without having to invest in a whole laptop.

If you only ever use a Steam Deck in handheld mode, you’ll probably have a great time. The experience is so refined at this point that you’d be forgiven for thinking every game on Steam was designed with the handheld in mind first. However, if you’re willing to brave less conventional waters, the Steam Deck’s desktop mode is a gateway to the kind of tinkering power normally reserved for the full-fledged PC crowd.

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Garmin is well-known among fitness smartwatch enthusiasts, and if you’re a runner, the Forerunner 265 is the best option in the Garmin lineup. The Forerunner 265 is without question the best fitness watch for runners, according to Senior Health Editor Beth Skwarecki’s review. While it’s typically a costly smartwatch at $449.99, it’s currently on sale for $349.99, which is the lowest price it has ever been, according to price tracking tools. (Both the 46 mm model and the smaller 42 mm model are on sale for the same price.)

Operating System: Android, Memory Storage: 8 GB, Battery Capacity: 4 Amp Hours

Garmin Forerunner 265

$349.99
at Amazon

$449.99
Save $100.00

$349.99
at Amazon

$449.99
Save $100.00

Operating System: Android, Memory Storage: 8 GB, Battery Capacity: 4 Amp Hours

Garmin Forerunner 265S

$349.99
at Amazon

$449.99
Save $100.00

$349.99
at Amazon

$449.99
Save $100.00

The Forerunner 265 comes with a bright and colorful AMOLED screen that makes it easily visible out in the sun. There are also physical buttons, which are much easier to hit without needing to look down mid-run. The GPS is surprisingly accurate, as is the heart rate tracking feature.

The watch also calculates your VO2max and uses that data to predict your race times for a 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and full marathon. These predictions are pretty accurate, but usually a bit on the optimistic side, according to Beth’s review. As you can with most Garmin watches, they are very customizable, from screen watches to workouts. The data you see or don’t see can be easily edited in the companion Connect app.

Beth got about 14 days of battery life from the smaller 265S watch. They are mostly the same watch with very subtle differences. The main thing you should worry about is getting the right size for your wrists so it fits well and generates accurate readings.