The beloved attraction fell victim to a recent surge in destructive storms that have ravaged southern Italy.
Monthly Archives: February 2026
Zero grip, maximum fun: A practical guide to getting into amateur ice racing
In Formula One, grip is everything. The world’s best engineers devote their careers to designing cars that maximize downforce and grip to squeeze every bit of performance out of a set of four humble tires. These cars punish their drivers by slinging them at six Gs through corners and offer similar levels of abuse in braking.
It’s all wildly impressive, but I’ve long maintained that those drivers are not the ones having the most fun. When it comes to sheer enjoyment, grip is highly overrated, and if you want proof of that, you need to try ice racing.
Should you be lucky enough to live somewhere that gets cold enough consistently enough, all you need is a good set of tires and a car that’s willing and able. That, of course, and a desire to spend more time driving sideways than straight. I’ve been ice racing for well over 20 years now, and I’m here to tell you that there’s no greater thrill on four wheels than sliding through a corner a few inches astern of a hard-charging competitor.
Apple iPhone Deals Slash Prices On Grade‑A Refurbs With Full 1‑Year Warranty
Once again, Amazon-owned Woot is hosting a huge sale on Grade-A refurbished Apple iPhone models spanning the iPhone 16 Pro Max all the way down to the iPhone XR, with prices starting at a very low $119.99. In addition, it’s also hawking Grade-A refurbished Apple Watch models, including the Apple Watch Ultra 2nd Gen. If you’ve been wanting
HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country — and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law.
Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings “confidently incompetent” — superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year.
Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: “Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ubisoft Says Don’t Worry About Splinter Cell Remake As It Lays Off More Developers
40 devs have been laid off at Watch Dogs, Far Cry studio Ubisoft Toronto
Hubble Captures Rare Image Of A Galaxy Made Almost Entirely Of Invisible Dark Matter
Scientists using a trio of some of the world’s most powerful observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, ESA’s Euclid, and the Subaru Telescope, have pulled back the curtain on a ghost galaxy that is nearly 99% dark matter, detected thanks solely to its four associate globular clusters.
The discovery centers on the object named Candidate
New Mario ‘Game’ From Nintendo Lets Kids Torture The Poor Plumber For 12 Minutes At A Time
Hello, Mario is free to download and out now on phones and the Nintendo Switch
Could The Binocular Meta Ray-Ban Display Successor Launch This Year?
Meta is accelerating its plans for a Meta Ray-Ban Display successor, hoping to launch later this year, The Information reports.
The current Meta Ray-Ban Display, exclusively available in the US for just under five months now, is a monocular device. It has a small display in the right lens, while your left eye sees nothing. In our review, we described how this “just feels wrong”, inducing a constant minor feeling of eyestrain when the display is active for more than a few seconds.
The reason that Meta Ray-Ban Display is monocular is that, as Meta’s CTO pointed out in the weeks before the device’s launch, the components for a binocular device would cost more than twice as much, since it also requires implementing disparity correction. It would also drive up the bulk and weight, harming social acceptability even further than it already is.
But the cost of in-lens waveguides and miniature light engines should decrease with scale, and Meta executives have described the demand for Meta Ray-Ban Display as significantly higher than expected, leading to the delay of the plan to launch the product internationally.
Meta Ray-Ban Display Review: First Generation Heads-Up Mobile Computing
Meta Ray-Ban Display is an early glimpse of a future where mobile computing doesn’t mean looking down and taking something out of your pocket.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
During development, Meta Ray-Ban Display was internally codenamed Hypernova. Last year, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Meta plans to release a successor, codenamed Hypernova 2, in 2027. Hypernova 2 would include a display in both eyes, he wrote at the time.
This timeline was corroborated by supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who also said Meta would replace the first-generation product with a successor in 2027.
Now, though, The Information’s Jyoti Mann reports that Hypernova 2 will launch this year, not in 2027. While the report doesn’t go into much detail, Mann describes Meta executives as being “concerned that launching too many devices in quick succession could confuse customers”.
Given that Meta plans to launch its ultralight Horizon OS headset in early 2027, and that multiple sources point towards the company aiming to launch its first true AR glasses in the second half of 2027, shipping binocular HUD glasses this year may make for a less confusing release sequence.
Mann’s report says Meta has also revived plans to launch a smartwatch, hoping to release that later this year too.
With the binocular HUD glasses, Meta could be hoping to get ahead of Apple’s upcoming smart glasses, widely believed to be launching in early 2027. With Apple’s first glasses lacking a display at all, Mark Zuckerberg could be hoping to present Meta as the technology leader in the smart glasses space.
Apple Glasses Could Have 2 Cameras & Launch In 2027
Apple’s smart glasses will have two cameras, one for capture and the other for computer vision, and launch in early 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Keep in mind that Meta’s hardware roadmap is constantly shifting, and the company frequently spins up and cancels headsets before they ship. When a specific product gets close to shipping, we’ll bring you any reliable rumors of its imminent arrival. Until then, be ready for anything planned to get canceled or delayed.
Nintendo announces surprise Switch 2 version of sci-fi RPG Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition
Last year’s Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition was significant for a few reasons. It was the final major first-party Switch game ahead of the Switch 2’s arrival in June, and the last doomed Wii U game to be granted a second life on Nintendo’s infinitely more successful console. Nearly a year on, a Switch 2 update for one of the most technically impressive games Nintendo has ever published has finally arrived.
Somewhat hilariously titled Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (you get the feeling Nintendo has started a naming convention it may come to regret here), the updated version of Monolith Soft’s sprawling sci-fi RPG now supports up to 60fps performance and 4K resolution when docked to a TV.
The sprawling alien world of planet Mira, now enhanced on #NintendoSwitch2 with improved frame rates and up to 4K resolution in TV mode!
Join the fight for survival in #XenobladeChroniclesX: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, available now! pic.twitter.com/raA1XhIimC
— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) February 19, 2026
As impressive as the Switch remake of the 2015 Wii U game was, given the frankly absurd size of its open-world setting, you could almost feel the hardware creaking under its weight every time you booted the game up, so this patch was much-needed. Unfortunately the graphical and performance enhancements aren’t free for anyone who already owns the Switch version of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition. A $5 upgrade pack is available on the eShop, and the Switch 2 game costs $65 on its own. A physical version is also arriving on April 16.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (again, won’t someone please think of us writers) was the last of a number of Xenoblade Chronicles games to make its way to Switch. It’s a bit different to the other entries in the series, with its hard sci-fi story, emphasis on side quests and completely seamless open world to explore. Also, stick with the game long enough and you can eventually fly around the entire planet of Mira in a giant mech, which is as fun as it sounds.
Like the other games in the series, Xenoblade Chronicles X is a standalone experience, so don’t worry about jumping in if you’ve never played one before. The series’ signature MMO-like hybrid real-time combat system takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s part of what makes these games stand out from other RPG series.
The other Xenoblade games in the Switch library, which are Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, are yet to receive Switch 2 updates, but hopefully they’ll arrive eventually too.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-announces-surprise-switch-2-version-of-sci-fi-rpg-xenoblade-chronicles-x-definitive-edition-153121689.html?src=rss
Every Pair Of Headphones In New Study Found To Contain Toxic Chemicals
A wide-scale investigation has revealed that the headphones millions of people wear daily for work, exercise, and leisure are leaching a cocktail of hazardous forever chemicals and endocrine disruptors (think BPA) directly into their bodies. Conducted by the ToxFree LIFE for All project and spearheaded by the environmental group Arnika, the
The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits
Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 — and that some may not survive at all if they cannot secure enough memory.
The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer who raised the possibility of shutdowns and product discontinuations, and Khein-Seng largely agreed rather than volunteering the prediction himself. The shortage stems from AI data centers consuming the vast majority of the world’s memory supply, a buildout that has sent RAM prices up by three to six times over the past several months. Only three companies control 93% of the global DRAM market, and all three have chosen to prioritize profits over rapid capacity expansion. Even Nvidia may skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, and Apple could struggle to secure enough chips. Khein-Seng also expects consumers will increasingly repair broken products rather than replace them.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gigabyte MZ33-AR1: A Uniquely Positioned AMD EPYC 9005 Motherboard For Open-Source Firmware
The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a single socket AMD EPYC 9004/9005 E-ATX server motherboard for those wanting up to 24 RDIMMs, dual 10 Gigabit LAN, and plenty of storage potential via six MCIO connectors and four PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. Beyond offering nice capabilities for this modern AMD EPYC server motherboard at a ~$700 USD price point, it’s uniquely positioned for an open-source firmware future thanks to ongoing work around AMD openSIL and hopefully followed by OpenBMC.
AMD Announces hipThreads For Easier Porting Of C++ Code To GPUs
The newest addition to AMD’s ROCm/HIP portfolio is HIP Threads “hipThreads” as a C++ style concurrency library for AMD GPUs…
Corsair Drops Limited‑Run PC Cases With Striking Color‑Shift Panels
Corsair is slapping a fresh coat of paint on its popular Frame 4000D chassis for a limited edition run, and what makes the new color schemes so unique in a sea of PC cases is that the color shifts depending on the viewing angle and ambient lighting. There are two options to choose from, both of which are part of a new Frame 4000D Vault Series:
Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World’s Biggest Company by Sales
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos’ Seattle-area garage.
Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion.
Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon’s revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart’s, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dangerholm’s latest creation blurs the gravel and XC MTB boundary even further
Swedish bike customiser Dangerholm has worked his magic to create this new Scott Scale RC Aero. It’s his latest work on Scott’s XC MTB range to adapt it to gravel riding, and this time he’s added a dose of aerodynamics into the mix.
Dangerholm says the aero concept isn’t aimed at being faster than a standard gravel race bike on smooth gravel, but to maintain performance on rougher surfaces, where a gravel bike with 40mm tyres would start to struggle.
Previous Dangerholm customisations have included December 2025’s Scott Spark HMX Gravel Project, a full-suspension gravel bike with 110mm travel, a custom one-piece cockpit and 52mm-wide, 70mm-deep aero rims.
Then there’s the Scott Scale RC SL, a drop-bar bike with a host of custom carbon from Darimo, a RockShox suspension fork and a 7.19kg claimed weight.
At the heart of the Dangerholm Scott Scale RC Aero’s design is Scott’s Scale Gravel RC, a rigid-fork, flat-bar variant of its Scale XC mountain bike. Dangerholm usually rides a size L, but sized down to an M to accommodate the drop bar and make the reach shorter.
Dangerholm has raided Scott’s road bike parts bin, swapping to a seatpost from a crashed Scott Foil RC aero road bike and the seat cluster to fit it.
This involved cutting up a box-fresh Scale frame and hoping the section of the Foil RC frame would fit, which it did, wrapped with plenty of carbon fibre to hold it in place.
More cut-and-wrap was done on the Scale’s driveside chainstay, enabling Dangerholm to fit a larger 46-tooth chainring to the concept bike, followed by a lot of sanding down to smooth out the frame surface.
The fork leg mounting points were also removed to up the aero.
Bling bits
Once the frame and fork were painted, it was time to bolt on lots of fancy aero parts, starting with that aero seatpost from the Foil RC with its built-in light, topped with a 99g Berk Lupina Monocoque saddle.
As with Dangerholm’s Scott Scale RC SL, there’s a cockpit from Spanish super-light component maker Darimo. It’s a custom Nexum Drag Gravel with a shorter 80mm length and 380mm width to suit the Scale frame’s longer reach. The slacker head tube angle of the Scale frame required a unique -12-degree stem angle.
There’s also a set of custom headset hardware to fit the bar to the frame.
Further fancy hardware comes in the form of a SRAM Red XPLR AXS rear derailleur with CeramicSpeed OSPW X Alpha jockey wheels, along with a Red XPLR 13-speed 10-46t cassette and Red chain.
That’s paired with a Wert StW-M titanium crankset with hollow crank arms and a 314g weight. The one-off axle sits in CeramicSpeed Alpha bearings and is a little wider than usual, adding 3.5mm to the offset and enabling Dangerholm to fit a 44t Red Aero chainring with a power meter.
Finally, there are Xpedo M-Force 8 Ti pedals.
Dangerholm has used the Red brake levers. But rather than the standard Red calipers, which are flat mount, he’s switched to two-piston 612-Parts post-mount aero calipers, along with lightweight Italian Carbon-Ti X-Rotor Aero brake rotors.
The wheels haven’t been ignored, with prototype 45mm internal-width, 70mm-deep wave-profile rims developed with a pair of Canadian firms, and designed for aerodynamics and tyre stability with 2.25in MTB tyres.
They’re built onto Extralite HyperSmart 3 hubs with Alpina Hyperlite spokes. The hubs have a Boost adaptor kit and can be specced with a SRAM XDR freehub to fit the SRAM road-spaced cassette.
Dangerholm reckons that, despite the wide tyre stance potentially positioning the shoulder knobs poorly for cornering, it’s rare to lean into a corner enough for this to have an impact when riding on gravel, because you’d wash out first.
He admits the 2.25in Maxxis Aspen ST MaxxSpeed Team Spec MTB tyres probably aren’t going to add much to the bike’s aerodynamics. He’s running TPU inner tubes and has blacked out the logos for cleaner aesthetics.
Dangerholm isn’t the only rider to adapt an MTB for gravel use. Chris Mehlman rode a Pivot LES SL with a drop bar at Unbound XL in 2025. It’s not only customisers who are blurring the boundary between gravel and mountain bikes either. Last year, we highlighted four brands with gravel bikes with clearance for MTB tyres.
We’ve recently seen Ridley launch the Ignite GTX with 2.3in/58mm tyre clearance, while Pinarello’s Grevil MX, as with Dangerholm’s concept, adds an aero road bar to a frame with 50mm tyre clearance and a 100mm-travel suspension fork.
Elder Scrolls And Fallout Boss Says AI’s ‘Not A Fad’ But Doesn’t Want It To Replace ‘Handcrafted Human Intention’
Todd Howard is cautious about what the new tech can and can’t help with
Pico to Showcase VisionOS and Android XR Competitor at GDC Next Month
Pico announced that it’s showcasing the core OS and platform capabilities of its upcoming XR headset ‘Project Swan’ at next month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC).
The News
Project Swan is going to be Pico’s next flagship XR headset, the company says in its GDC session description, which is also slated to run PICO OS 6, the next version of the company’s Android-based operating system.
While the company hasn’t expressly said it will also reveal Project Swan’s hardware at GDC in March, Pico says it will provide “an overview of Project Swan’s graphics performance, multimodal interaction system, and developer toolchain, as well as practical guidance on bringing existing apps or games into spatial computing workflows,” which is set to include “concrete examples and live demos.”
“This session introduces the core OS and platform capabilities that enable developers—from XR specialists to non-XR app, web, and game creators—to build or adapt content for this emerging medium,” Pico says. “It presents a new paradigm for spatial experiences in which games and apps coexist, allowing a primary experience to run alongside companion applications in a shared environment.”
The Information initially reported last summer that Project Swan is set to be a slim and light headset weighing in at around 100 grams, which allegedly features a hybrid design that offloads processing to a tethered compute puck. Other reported features include hand and eye-tracking for input.
Then, in November 2025, Zhenyuan Yang, Vice President of Technology at Pico parent company ByteDance, revealed the headset will house a self-developed chip with a custom microOLED display, the latter of which is said to approach 4,000 PPI—slightly higher than that of Apple Vision Pro’s 3,386 PPI.
Furthermore, Yang said Pico’s microOLED displays reach an average 40 PPD (over 45 at center), and addresses brightness limitations by incorporating microlens (MLA) technology and optical compensation for uniform color and luminance.
We expect to learn more at GDC next month, which takes place March 9th – 13th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.
My Take
Project Swan is slated to mark a significant next step for the company. Pico’s parent company ByteDance ostensibly isn’t throwing money at its XR division like it was before though, so it’s a new game.
Battle lines have shifted since Pico first launched its Pico 4 series headsets in 2022 though. Back then, Pico was nipping at Meta at its peripheral territories in East Asia and Europe, relying on its unique access to the Chinese market, and leaning heavily into enterprise. It also released Pico 4 Ultra in 2024, a direct competitor to Quest 3.
That same year, Apple released Vision Pro, priced at $3,500. A year later, it followed up with an M5-based hardware refresh at the same price point, while Google formally launched Android XR alongside Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, priced at $1,800—moves that effectively reframed the competitive landscape.
Rather than racing to the bottom, companies are increasingly targeting the high end, as early expectations around mass-market consumer adoption seemed to have faltered, with Meta’s recent pullback from funding first-party Quest content possibly signaling a broader shift in how the industry approaches the consumer XR segment.
That said, I’d expect Project Swan to straddle the prosumer-enterprise segment, as the company’s next flagship probably won’t be cheap enough to make any grand overtures to consumers while simultaneously offering the very same consumer-oriented platform Pico built up over the years, which hosts a wide array of XR games and apps.
To me, this increasingly puts Pico more in competition with visionOS and Android XR, rather than as a direct competitor to Horizon OS. That said, Meta’s upcoming headset could possibly arrive next year, which is reportedly also a slim and light headset tethered to a compute puck, which may put all four—Apple, Google, Meta and Pico—in the same boat.
The post Pico to Showcase VisionOS and Android XR Competitor at GDC Next Month appeared first on Road to VR.
Five Ways to ‘Fix’ Your iPhone’s Keyboard
You don’t need to do much digging online to find complaints about the iPhone keyboard: From typos and spelling mistakes to lag and missed keystrokes, there are multiple issues being reported by users, across multiple versions of iOS. While the root causes of these problems tend to vary, there are some broad fixes you can try that should go some way to giving you an iPhone keyboard experience you can rely on—besides waiting for the next bug-squashing iOS update from Apple.
Reset the keyboard dictionary on your iPhone
Resetting the keyboard on iOS.
Credit: Lifehacker
Credit: Lifehacker
Over time, the iOS keyboard tries to build up smarter autocorrect suggestions for you, but these aren’t always helpful: The further away these suggestions get from the defaults, the worse they can get, which risks turning your sentences into gibberish. To clean the slate and go back to the beginning, open up Settings, then tap General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary. Type in your handset’s unlock code, then choose Reset Dictionary.
Add custom words and shortcuts to your iPhone’s dictionary
This may seem to contradict the previous tip, but by explicitly teaching your iPhone the words it often gets wrong, you can reduce the likelihood of those frustrating moments where iOS suddenly replaces the word you were typing with something else (e.g. “he’ll yeah” or “what the duck”). From Settings, tap General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Tap on the + (plus) button in the top right corner, then enter your word or phrase—you can add a shortcut for it too to help you type it more quickly, but it’s optional. Tap Save to confirm.
Adjust other iPhone keyboard settings
If a keyboard setting isn’t helping, turn it off.
Credit: Lifehacker
Credit: Lifehacker
There are more keyboard settings that are worth taking a look at under General > Keyboard in iOS Settings. You can turn Auto-Correction off completely, for example, and disable Slide to Type if your fingers have a tendency to slip across the keyboard. There are additional tweaks you can make through the Accessibility menu in Settings: Under Touch > Touch Accommodations, you can change the sensitivity of double-taps and press-and-holds, among other settings, which may help improve typing accuracy.
Change your iPhone’s keyboard layout
There’s not a lot you can do with the iPhone keyboard layout to improve your typing experience and eliminate bugs, but there is a one-handed mode you can try in order to minimize glitches and ensure your keypresses match up with what’s on screen. To switch to the one-handed layout, tap and hold on the globe icon in the lower left corner of the keyboard, then tap one of the icons at the bottom of the pop-up menu: You can move the keyboard to the left, or the right, or put it back to normal.
Switch to a different keyboard on the iPhone
You’ve got several options for iOS keyboards.
Credit: Lifehacker
Credit: Lifehacker
If you’re still struggling with the vagaries of the keyboard on iOS, you can always opt to install a third-party alternative: We’ve covered a bunch here, including Gboard and SwiftKey, and they typically offer more customization options than the Apple default. Once you’ve installed an alternative keyboard or two, you can manage them from iOS Settings by choosing General > Keyboard > Keyboards. To actually switch between keyboards when typing, press and hold on the globe icon (lower left).
Or avoid a keyboard altogether
There are also some more extreme measures you can take that maybe haven’t crossed your mind. The first is to use a Bluetooth keyboard (via Bluetooth in Settings), which will give you a more convenient (if less portable) way of typing text into your iPhone. The second is to ensure dictation is enabled in General > Keyboard in Settings, then tap the mic icon in the lower right corner of the keyboard, and speak out your text. You can handle emojis, line breaks, text editing, and more, using your voice.
Dell Expands Its 2026 Gaming Monitor Lineup With Two Low-Cost 240Hz Displays
Dell has quietly launched a pair of affordable 27-inch gaming monitors starting at a low $129.99, and despite the budget-friendly price tags, they both feature a reasonably fast 240Hz refresh rate. They’re also both AMD FreeSync Premium models. Dell’s launch is a refreshing change of pace when the cost of gaming on the PC platform continues