Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta has issued
a “modest proposal
” for a technology-innovation-lifecycle process
that would provide more formal structure for adopting technologies in
Fedora. The idea is to spur innovation in the project without having an adverse
impact on stability or the release process. Spaleta’s proposal is
somewhat light on details, particularly as far as specific examples of
which projects would benefit; however, the reception so far is mostly
positive and some think that it could make Fedora more “competitive” by being the
place where open-source projects come to grow.
I’m posting this on March 17,St. Patrick’s Day, the day we celebrate the patron saint of Ireland, and Irishness in general, by dancing to accordion-and-fiddle-based music, dyeing a river green, and enjoying a wee drink or three. But there’s a lot people get wrong about the holiday, so allow me to clear up some myths.
The association between boozing it up and March 17 is relatively recent. St. Patrick’s Day was observed in Ireland as early as the ninth century but it was largely a somber remembrance, not a celebration—it marks the anniversary of St. Patrick’s death, after all. It was a day when the dietary restrictions of Lent were lifted, which must have been a relief, but it wasn’t about drinking and having fun. It was about going to Mass. Pubs were closed by law on March 17 in Ireland up until the 20th century, and drinking was unofficially discouraged on that day until as late as the 1970s.
St. Patrick’s Day, as we know it now, was arguably born in New York in 1762, when a group of Irish soldiers in the British army marched through Manhattan to a local tavern. In 1848, New York’s Irish Aid societies held the first official St. Patrick’s Day parade (which was also the world’s first civilian parade of any kind) and from there, the “drinking, dancing, and having fun” aspect of the holiday grew.
Ireland, by the way, was the last nation to get the memo. In a 2001 New York Times article, Irish novelist Maeve Binchy recalls a childhood spent watching every other country cut loose on March 17, while “Dublin was the dullest place on earth to spend St. Patrick’s Day.” By the 1990s, though, Ireland realized that people would rather have fun than remember dead saints, and now there are festivals and parades all over the country, including a huge one in Dublin.
The Irish are well-known for their story-telling and dance styles, but they are not known for their cuisine. The one exception is corned beef and cabbage, a meal many think of as Irish, except it really isn’t. Ireland has a complicated history with cows, but in general, pigs have been the real Irish protein, particularly after the 1800s. Things were different in the U.S., though. Irish immigrants in New York City were lacking Irish bacon, so they supposedly substituted corned beef, which they bought from their Jewish neighbors.
If you want legit Irish food, try boxty or Irish soda bread. Boxty is a potato-based pancake. Irish soda bread was invented during the potato famine and is made with sour milk and leavened with baking soda by people too poor to afford yeast. Soda bread was born of a nation’s misery, but if you add raisins and slap some salted butter on it, it’s delicious with coffee.
Unlike that other famous holiday-saint, St. Nicholas, St. Patrick wrote an autobiography, so we know something about his life. He was born in the late fourth century in Roman-occupied Britain, probably in Scotland or Wales, so he was Roman by citizenship, and could have been British, Italian, or Celtic. When he was around 15, Patrick was kidnapped by raiders and taken to Ireland, where he was forced to shepherd. After six years of captivity, Paddy escaped back to Scotland or Wales, spent 15 to 20 years in religious study, became ordained as a bishop, then returned to Ireland to convert the pagans to Catholicism. He was obviously successful in his mission, although I doubt pagans thought so. Here’s how the druids supposedly described St. Patrick:
Across the sea will come Adze-head, crazed in the head,
his cloak with hole for the head, his stick bent in the head.
He will chant impieties from a table in the front of his house;
all his people will answer: “so be it, so be it.”
“Adze-head” refers to the tonsure, the haircut monks used to have, so it’s a quality insult.
Like all good saints, Patrick’s actual deeds were overshadowed by imaginary ones written down in the centuries after his death. In his own writings, Patrick only cops to one, very minor, miracle: When returning to Ireland, his party ran out of food, and Patrick said, “God will give us some” Then they found some wild boar. The miracles attributed to Patrick in hagiographies written about him are way more exciting. Here is only some of what St. Patrick was said to have done:
Battled druids and pagans in wizard duels, where the magical powers of the pagans were defeated by Patrick’s faith
Confronted the devil stone idol of Cromm Crúaich by striking it with his crosier and banishing the demon within it to hell
Banished demonic birds by ringing his bell
Raised 33 people from the dead
Was guided by Jesus himself to “St. Patrick’s Purgatory,” a cave in Lough Derg where sinners could be purged of their sins if they spent a day and a night there in penance
Left a walking stick behind that sprouted into a tree
Accidentally drove his staff through the foot of King Aengus, then later prayed and healed the wound
Drove the snakes out of Ireland
It’s that last one that people remember. Supposedly, St. Patrick was in the middle of a 40-day fast atop Croagh Patrick when he was attacked by serpents. He waved his magical staff, and ordered all the snakes to depart the Emerald Isle. And it’s true there are no snakes in Ireland, but it’s not because of St. Patrick—it’s because there never were snakes in Ireland.
SparkyLinux 2026.03 has been released as the March 2026 ISO snapshot of the SparkyLinux Rolling edition based on the Debian Testing repositories.
A Bay Area startup that manufactures drones to tackle wildfires has just signed its first customer, the Aspen Fire Protection District.
The company, Seneca, recently announced that its fleet of five drones (dubbed a “strike team”) would be coming to the famed Colorado ski town this summer, making Aspen the first wildfire agency in America to add these types of aircraft to its arsenal.
Each drone is designed to carry enough water “to create over 50 gallons of finished foam suppressant,” which can reduce the speed at which a wildfire consumes fuel. The drones are designed to be able to reach and extinguish a small fire before humans can.
Oppo is back with another high-spec foldable phone you may never see outside a tech journalist’s hands. The Find N6 is its new, sub-9mm device that is headed to Asian markets and, for now, not many other places. That means no US or European availability. So why write about it? With its build quality, hardware specs and camera array, not only is it a very good phone, but it’s also proof that another device maker can go toe-to-toe with Samsung’s dominance in flagship foldable phones.
Oppo is obsessed with the foldable crease. More than me, more than most of you, more than it should, probably. A focus of its presentation last month in London detailed all the effort put into its “zero-feel crease.” The idea is that you can’t really feel where the device folds, with 3D liquid printing and laser scanning used to fill the hinge’s surface precisely. The company says this reduces hinge height variance from 0.2mm to only 0.05mm.
Oppo has improved the glass used on the foldable display, and according to TÜV Rheinland testing (again), the Find N6 reduces long-term crease formation by up to 82 percent compared to last year’s Oppo model. It apparently takes a lot of engineering to make a foldable that looks pristine for longer. It’s definitely still early days, but after a few weeks of use, the crease does seem perceptibly shallower than that of other devices, especially the older Find N5. However, there is still a crease. You might not feel it as much, but you can see it.
Despite that particular obsession, it’s another incredibly thin foldable, measuring 8.93mm (0.35 inches) thick. That means, folded, it seems roughly equivalent to most typical smartphone form factors. For reference, the iPhone 17 Pro is 8.75mm (0.34 inches) thick. Even with its slim profile, it also offers improved protection with IP59 certification against dust and water. The new foldable also picks up a new custom hardware button, like the Find X9, which can be assigned to launch the camera, switch sound profiles and other quick action settings.
The screens are the same size and resolution as its predecessor: a 6.62-inch front display and an 8.12-inch inner screen. There have been notable improvements here, too. Peak brightness has been punched up to 3,500 nits on the front screen and 2,500 nits on the foldable screen, making them brighter than on Oppo’s last foldable, but behind Motorola’s latest, most luminous foldable.
The Find N6 also has another custom 7-core Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor — the flagship processor of the moment. The more impressive spec may be the battery: a huge 6,000mAh Silicon-Carbon power pack. That’s 400mAh more than the Find N5 and 1,600mAh more than the ZFold 7. And it goes and goes: Doing a battery rundown test on the front display playing non-stop video lasted just shy of 30 hours, while using the bigger internal screen still hit 24 hours.
Another area where it bests Samsung is in charge speeds, supporting up to 80W SUPERVOOC wired charging through Oppo’s proprietary adapter and up to 55W with other high-wattage chargers. There’s also 50W AIRVOOC wireless charging — again, only if you have Oppo’s particular flavor of wireless charger, which I do not. Sadly, there are no Qi2/PixelSnap/MagSafe docking magnets.
Oppo has made major improvements to the cameras with several features showcased on the Find X9, now making their way to its foldables. There’s a new 200-megapixel main camera with an f/1.8 lens and a new 50MP ultrawide camera that lets in 50 percent more light. The telephoto camera captures 50MP images, with 3X periscope optical zoom and telemacro focus up to 10cm away. All three cameras also support 4K 60 fps Dolby Vision video capture, with the main sensor also capable of 120 fps recording.
Oppo’s new foldable has cameras that rival those of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series. The addition of the high-resolution 200MP main sensor adds more detail to images and more versatility, too. The company continues to collaborate with Hasselblad on camera hardware and software. A new Hi-Res mode that captures stills using the full pixel count of each sensor, while other shooting modes from previous devices are still here. That includes the Hasselblad Master Mode, with full control over the camera settings and the iconic XPAN mode for 65:24 panoramic stills and video.
While I was already impressed by Oppo’s recent Find X9, the Find N6 still surprised me. It’s versatile, consistent, and it’s almost the best foldable camera phone — if only its telephoto matched the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s 5x zoom.
When it comes to multitasking, the Find N6 really wants to deliver, even if the end result is a little messy. You can run a full-screen app, while three Free-Flow Windows each run a different app or web page, all concurrently. Every window is interactive and it almost immediately gave me a stress headache. Oppo has baked in a system of swipes and pinches to aid navigation, but I’d argue that even an 8.1-inch screen isn’t enough for all those windows. Still, for the true power user, there is a lot to tap into. If you’re the kind of person who bounces between work chats in Slack, your calendar and umpteen Chrome tabs — this phone is aimed at you.
Oppo wasn’t done with the productivity bonafides. It’s added a new stylus to its foldable series, which comes with its own holster/case that attaches to the back of the Find N6. In most instances, this would make a chunky foldable too bulky, but the base phone is so slim that it’s passable. The case also serves as a charging cradle that can recharge the stylus via reverse wireless charging. I’m not a huge stylus user, but for those who miss the S Pen, this is an option if you live in a country where it’s being sold.
The stylus, officially called the Oppo AI Pen (hate that name), has a button to summon an onscreen palette of tools and features. Double-pressing the button switches between writing and erasing, which is pretty handy. Screen-off note-taking will apparently arrive in a later software update.
Oppo is also continuing to bridge ecosystems with iPhone Connect, which adds AirDrop-style file sharing to Apple phones. Remote PC control is still a cute feature, making the Find N6 into a tiny pocketable PC, if you’re willing to work on your laptop through a tiny screen.
It’s another impressive foldable from Oppo, one that sadly most folks will never be able to buy. What’s stopping Oppo from testing the waters outside of Asia? The Find N6 is an incredibly powerful, technically impressive device. What is Oppo afraid of?
The foldable will arrive in both silver and orange, although the latter is a little more muted than I’d hoped. For now, Oppo is launching the Find N6 on March 20 in China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and other Asian territories. The company just announced that prices will start at ¥9999 in China (approximately $1,450), with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/oppos-find-n6-might-be-the-foldable-of-your-dreams-131036055.html?src=rss
Way back in 2019 when Kia introduced the first-generation Telluride, both the media and the car-buying public went nuts for it. Dealers struggled to keep the Telluride on their lots, and that’s before the insanity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic a year later. Now, fast-forward six years, and there’s a new Telluride for the 2027 model year, and once again, Kia seems to have knocked it out of the park.
The 2027 Kia Telluride follows the same formula as the old one, but it has grown in every direction except engine cylinder count, and it looks a whole lot like the folks at Kia’s US design studio had “Greatest Hits of Range Rover” on repeat, which is a very good thing. Oh, and there’s finally a hybrid version.
The second-generation Telluride has fully ditched its old 3.8 L six-cylinder engine. In its place, it is now offering either a turbocharged 2.5 L four-cylinder gasoline engine that produces 274 hp (204 kW) and 311 lb-ft (422 Nm) of torque, or that same engine with a dual-motor hybrid system. The hybrid version produces a combined 329 hp (245 kW) and 339 lb-ft (460 Nm) while returning a claimed 35 mpg (6.7 L/100 km) combined.
Last year, Dell came this close to abdicating its throne as the maker of the best premium Windows laptops when it announced it was killing off the XPS brand. Thankfully, the company regained its wits, admitted its mistake and doubled down on its flagship notebook line by revealing a full redesign for 2026 with super sleek builds, improved performance and helpful tweaks to nearly everything else we loved about its predecessors. The one blemish to Dell’s crown jewel is some keyboard issues on early units. But make no mistake, the king of laptops is back.
For this revamp, Dell didn’t stray away from the XPS line’s typical mix of glass and aluminum. However, this time around, the company streamlined pretty much everything. The XPS 16 now weighs just 3.65 pounds (or 3.85 if you opt for the heavier LCD display), which is almost a full pound lighter than its predecessor (4.56 pounds). That’s a massive drop and it makes this system closer in heft to a 15-inch MacBook Air (3.3 pounds) than a 16-inch MacBook Pro (4.7 pounds), despite the latter being XPS’s usual rival. It’s also noticeably thinner at 0.58 to 0.6 inches (depending on the exact configuration), which is once again a sizable decrease from the previous model (0.75 inches). Honestly, this laptop needs to be held to be truly appreciated. Even after using it for a while, it still feels impossibly sleek every time I pick it up.
Elsewhere, Dell kept important features like the XPS line’s up-firing stereo speakers (which sound great), along with a decent mix of ports, including three USB-C jacks that support Thunderbolt 4, DisplayPort 2.1 and power delivery. The one thing I wish Dell had included though, is some sort of SD card reader. With the XPS 16 being the largest member of the family, it’s often a prime option for people who like to edit photos and videos on the go, so having an easy way to transfer media from a camera to the laptop would be really nice.
As for its display, Dell’s optional 3.2K tandem OLED panel like the one on our review unit reinforces the laptop’s role as a mobile editing platform. It produces vibrant hues and features a variable refresh rate that can go between 20 and 120Hz depending on what’s on the screen. Despite having a nominal peak brightness of 400 nits, it looks much brighter in person, so you’re getting an excellent viewing experience.
Perhaps the biggest change to the XPS line is its reworked keyboard and touchpad, which brings some ups and downs. Dell kept the glass deck and seamless touchpad used on previous models, except now there’s a faint line going around its perimeter, so you never have to guess where it is. The company also replaced the row of capacitive touch function and media controls from its predecessor with regular keys. As a fan of physical buttons, this is just great.
The issue is that for discerning typists, the keyboard seems to be missing anti-ghosting or N-key rollover tech. This means that if you press two keys very quickly one after another, the second press actually gets registered first, which can result in erroneous inputs. We ran into the same problem when testing the XPS 14. Dell claims this issue only impacts the first batch of systems off the line and that units on sale today have had this issue patched already. Furthermore, the company says it will release an update to address the issue on the remaining units, which should be out sometime in March. Though at the time of publication, I haven’t received anything yet.
There is another nitpick about the keyboard. While I don’t mind that Dell retained its zero-gap layout instead of going with a more traditional chiclet-style design, the more I type on it the more I wish Dell would offer something with a bit more key travel and heavier actuation. For reasons out of my control, my company-assigned work machine is a Dell Precision 5680 from 2023. I don’t like it very much aside from its keyboard, which is significantly bouncier and just generally nicer to use than the one on the XPS 16.
A big reason why Dell was able to make the XPS 16 so thin and light is that the company didn’t leave room for discrete graphics. That means you can only choose between a handful of Intel’s latest Series 3 Core Ultra chips, ranging from the Ultra 5 325 to the Ultra X7 358H, with the latter being the one I tested here. That’s not a bad thing though, as the laptop easily handled all the various productivity tasks I threw at it. And even without a proper GPU, the XPS 16 still pumped out 62 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1920 x 1080, using Ultra settings and Intel’s XeSS set to Quality. Those kinds of numbers aren’t going to make anyone toss out their dedicated gaming rig, but once again, that’s not too shabby for a notebook this easy to carry around.
Thanks to a larger 99.5Whr battery, the XPS 16 fared better on our rundown test than its smaller sibling. This could be a deciding factor for anyone trying to choose between the two. In PCMark 10’s Modern Office battery benchmark, the XPS 16 lasted just shy of 12 hours (11:53), which is more than an hour and a half longer than what we got from the XPS 14 (10:21). As long as you’re not going to be gone for more than a day or you’re really pushing it, you should be able to leave its power brick at home.
When Dell decided to bring back the XPS name, COO Jeff Clake said the company was going to get back to its roots. That’s the kind of messaging that’s easy to stay on a stage, but after testing out the reborn XPS 16, I can confirm it isn’t just flimsy rhetoric.
This laptop is a shining example of a premium ultraportable Windows laptop done well. It features a super sleek aluminum chassis, strong performance, solid battery life and an excellent display, particularly if you upgrade to the 3.2K OLED option. The connection to the iconic award-winning systems isn’t just skin deep. This thing is just as much an XPS as the ones we loved a decade ago and Dell is driving that point home by letting the XPS logo sit front and center on its lid instead of the company’s usual branding.
My one complaint is that I wish Dell would bring back the chiclet-style keyboards we got on models from the early 2020s. Though as long as the company can release updated software to fix the ghosting issues I’ve encountered, what’s on there now is more than good enough. Granted, at $2,349 for our review unit, the XPS 16 is a bit pricey, but that’s the going rate for a high-end notebook these days. If you snag a discount similar to the one Dell is currently running , suddenly, you’re looking at an even more enticing package at $1,900.
The biggest reason someone might want to hold off for now is if you do need more powerful graphics, as I’m expecting Dell to release an alternate version of the XPS 16 with room for a discrete GPU (and hopefully an SD card reader) sometime before the end of the year. Despite Dell nearly tossing decades of pedigree in the trash just months ago, the XPS 16 has returned to reclaim its spot at the top.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/dell-xps-16-2026-review-return-of-the-king-130000906.html?src=rss
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A refurbished Nintendo Switch OLED (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) bundle is currently selling for $269.99 on Woot, a noticeable drop from the $447 price for a new unit on Amazon and below the $299 typical price for a “like-new” refurb. This unit is listed as “Grade A” refurbished, meaning it has passed diagnostic testing and should only show minimal cosmetic wear that you likely won’t notice during normal use. Along with the console and standard accessories, you also get a download code for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online membership. That means you can start playing immediately without having to buy a game or subscription separately. Shipping is free for Prime members, while others pay $6, and the deal is expected to run for two weeks or until it sells out. Shipping is limited to the contiguous U.S.
The seven-inch OLED display is the main reason to pick this version. Colors appear more vibrant, and darker scenes look deeper and more defined when you’re playing in handheld mode. That difference is easy to notice in bright games like Mario Kart or platformers with colorful environments. Nintendo also replaced the small plastic kickstand from the older Switch with a wide, adjustable stand, which reportedly makes tabletop play more stable when you’re using detached Joy-Cons. Storage is 64GB out of the box (though you’ll still want a microSD card if you download a lot of games), and the dock includes a wired Ethernet port for more reliable online play, notes this PCMag review. None of this changes raw performance—games run the same as they do on the base Switch, so you are not getting higher frame rates or better graphics beyond the screen itself.
The bigger consideration now is how this compares to the latest Switch 2. Nintendo’s newer console introduces more powerful hardware and improved graphics, so players looking for the most future-proof option may lean in that direction. The counterargument is the price and the library. The original Switch already has years of games available, and most of Nintendo’s biggest titles were designed specifically around this hardware. And at $270 with a major game and a year of online access included, this bundle lowers the cost of entry considerably compared with buying new or moving to the newer console.
For the last three years, the technology industry has been held captive by a single narrative: the unstoppable rise of the AI data center. NVIDIA, through a combination of visionary leadership and a near-monopoly on high-end GPUs, has turned the “data center into the computer.” They have successfully convinced the world that AI is something that happens “out there”—in massive, power-hungry clusters that serve intelligence to us over a straw.
Last Friday, March 13, 2026, AMD formally challenged that consensus. With the announcement of their “Agent Computer” initiative, AMD isn’t just launching new chips; they are attempting a classic strategic flanking maneuver. While NVIDIA is focused on the training of foundational models, AMD is betting that the real value—and the real volume—lies in the local inference of autonomous agents.
It is a bold bet that the PC is not just a terminal for the cloud, but a sovereign server for a personal digital workforce.
AMD’s vision isn’t entirely new; the industry has been chasing the “digital agent” for decades. However, the path is littered with the corpses of high-profile failures. Before we can understand why AMD might succeed, we must look at why others failed.
We often point to Microsoft’s Cortana as the primary example of an agent that over-promised and under-delivered, but she was hardly alone. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa suffered from the same fundamental flaw: they were “command-and-control” interfaces, not autonomous agents. They were built on rigid intent-matching systems that couldn’t handle multi-step reasoning.
More recently, specialized AI hardware like the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit r1 attempted to create dedicated agentic devices. They failed primarily because they were “thin clients” tethered to the cloud. They suffered from high latency, privacy concerns, and a lack of local compute power. When your “agent” has to ask a server three states away for permission to summarize an email, the illusion of agency shatters.
AMD is arguing that these efforts underperformed because they lacked the local “muscle”—the combination of high-bandwidth memory and dedicated NPU silicon—to run complex models without a cloud umbilical cord.
NVIDIA’s dominance is rooted in the H100 and B200 ecosystems. They own the training market. AMD, realizing that catching up in the data center is a multi-year slog, is instead shifting the battlefield to the client.
By launching the Ryzen AI Max+ series with support for 128GB of unified memory, AMD is providing the specific hardware necessary to run massive, 100B+ parameter models locally. This is a direct shot at NVIDIA’s “Inference in the Cloud” model.
If a professional can run a Qwen 3.5 (122B) model locally on an AMD workstation with near-zero latency and total data privacy, the economic and security argument for NVIDIA’s cloud-based inference begins to crumble. AMD is banking on the idea that corporations will prefer “Sovereign AI”—agents that live within the corporate firewall—over sending sensitive data to a third-party data center.
Announcing a vision is easy; executing it in a market dominated by NVIDIA’s CUDA software moat is the hard part. For the Agent Computer to hit critical mass, AMD needs to execute on three fronts:
When this shift hits critical mass, likely around 2028, your relationship with technology changes from “operator” to “manager.”
Imagine starting your morning not by checking 50 unread emails, but by reviewing a three-paragraph summary from your Executive Agent. It has already cross-referenced your calendar, flagged a conflict in your 2:00 PM meeting, and drafted three potential responses to a client inquiry based on your past writing style.
This isn’t a chatbot you “talk” to; it’s a background process that has “agency.” You might tell it, “I need to plan the quarterly review,” and the computer—locally—spins up a Research Agent to pull data, a Design Agent to create the slides, and a Logistics Agent to invite the stakeholders. Your life changes from a series of manual micro-tasks to a series of high-level approvals.
AMD’s “Agent Computer” initiative is more than a product launch; it is a declaration of independence from the cloud-centric AI model pioneered by NVIDIA. By focusing on local, massive-memory inference and autonomous agentic frameworks like OpenClaw, AMD is attempting to redefine the PC as a local intelligence server.
To succeed, AMD must solve its historical software hurdles and convince a skeptical enterprise market that “Sovereign AI” is worth the investment. If they do, they won’t just be competing with NVIDIA; they will be leading the charge into the most significant computing shift since the graphical user interface. The age of the computer as a tool is ending; the age of the computer as a colleague has begun.
Smart home company Aqara has launched what it says is the first camera certified for Matter, the open source standard that enables interoperability across brands, like Google and Amazon. The Aqara G350 is an indoor security cam that also functions as a Zigbee and Matter hub in the Aqara Home app, which means the camera will enable you to control various devices across smart home protocols from different brands within one location.
The camera itself comes with a 4K wide-angle and a 2.5K telephoto lens, providing both panoramic and closeup views. It also has 9x hybrid zoom and a pan-tilt mechanism that can give you 360-degree coverage of the room it’s in. The camera uses AI-powered tracking to keep people and pets in frame, as well as to determine which events and sounds are truly meaningful before sending you an alert. The Camera Hub G350 is now available via Aqara’s website, Amazon and other retailers for $140.
Aqara has also introduced the G400 wired doorbell camera that can connect to the internet either via Ethernet or dual-band Wi-Fi 6. It has a lens with 2K resolution and 165-degree ultra-wide field of view, so that it can capture visitors even when they’re standing close. The camera has on-device detection capabilities to recognize people and motion even without being connected to the internet. Connected, its cloud-based AI features enable it to identify faces, packages, vehicles and animals. You can connect the Aqara G400 doorbell camera to major smart home platforms, such as Apple Home with Homekit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Samsung SmartThings. It’s now available for sale on Aqara’s website, Amazon and other retails for $100.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/aqaras-matter-compatible-camera-promises-easier-smart-home-integration-124500865.html?src=rss
Valve announced the specific criteria for VR titles to receive the ‘Steam Frame Verified’ label on the Steam store.
Steam Frame is marketed by Valve as a “PC streaming first” product, primarily meant for gaming PC owners, but it also supports fully standalone play without a PC, just like a Meta Quest or Pico headset.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
The challenge with Steam Frame as a standalone experience, however, is that it accesses the regular Steam store, and the vast majority of VR content on Steam is designed to run on a powerful gaming PC that draws hundreds of watts from mains power.
Steam Frame is slightly more powerful than Quest 3, with around 30% more GPU power and eye tracking that can drive foveated rendering in supported titles. But it’s still significantly less powerful than a PC, due to running on a mobile chipset powered by a battery. While Steam Frame can run almost any VR title on Steam, it can’t run the majority well.
Since Steam Frame was announced, dozens of VR game developers have been working to optimize their titles to run standalone on Valve’s headset. Some are repurposing their Quest or Pico builds, leveraging the fact that Steam Frame can run Android APKs, while others are building a lower graphics tier than their current lowest.
For buyers of Steam Frame who want to use the headset standalone, Valve intends to make it easy to find titles optimized to run on Steam Frame by adding a ‘Steam Frame Verified’ label to those that it has tested and found to run well. It’s a continuation of its strategy with Steam Deck, which has a ‘Steam Deck Verified’ label.
At GDC 2026, Valve revealed the specifics behind what a game will need to do to earn the Steam Frame Verified label.
The label will apply to both VR and flatscreen titles. For standalone VR, the title must run at 90 FPS, while standalone flatscreen games need to run at 720p 30FPS at minimum.
Valve’s 90 FPS VR requirement is far stricter than the Meta Horizon Store or Pico Store, which both allow 72 FPS VR titles. The PlayStation Store allows 60FPS reprojected to 120Hz as the minimum.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
In VR, a higher frame rate reduces the feeling of sickness that some people experience. And below 90 FPS, with the kind of low persistence displays needed for VR headsets, many people can see a distinct flicker in the periphery of the image for bright scenes. Valve is thus prioritizing the user experience over having as many Steam Frame Verified titles as possible – a fascinating move.
Still, getting VR content built for a powerful gaming PC to run at 90 FPS on a 10-watt mobile chipset from late 2023 will be no easy feat for developers, and for some it will be a downright impossible task.
It’s a reminder of Valve’s “PC streaming first” positioning for the product, and that the company is sticking to the values the industry established in early 2014, when both Oculus and Valve declared that 90Hz was the minimum bar for high-quality VR.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
The looming question remains, of course: when will Steam Frame actually launch? Last month Valve announced that it needs to “revisit” its “exact shipping schedule and pricing” amid the global memory shortage, though the company said its goal is still to ship in the first half of this year.
Blender 5.1 is out today with many exciting improvements for this leading open-source 3D modeling software. From AMD GPU hardware ray-tracing being enabled by default at long last to more mature Vulkan support and performance, Blender 5.1 is a great release…
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The Amazon Echo Show 11 arrived in late 2025 as the successor to the Echo Show 10 (3rd Generation), and it now sits at its lowest price since release, according to price trackers. Amazon currently lists the smart display for $169.99 (originally $219.99). The Echo Show line has always been about turning Alexa into something you can see as well as hear, and this version leans heavily into the display. The 11-inch touchscreen runs at 1,920 by 1,200 resolution and measures about 8mm thick, making it thinner and larger than the screen on the Echo Show 10. In practice, it works well for everyday household tasks. You can follow a recipe from across the kitchen, keep a video call open while doing other things, or leave a calendar visible during the day.
The biggest design change from the Echo Show 10 is that the screen no longer rotates to follow you. Amazon replaced the moving display with a fixed panel that appears to float above a fabric speaker base. That said, if you want to rotate or tilt the display, Amazon does sell a $39.99 magnetic stand. As for connectivity, the Echo Show 11 supports Wi-Fi 6E and broader smart-home compatibility—it works well with Zigbee, Matter, and Thread, allowing it to function as a hub for lights, plugs, locks, and other connected gear without an extra bridge. One change longtime Echo users may notice is the lack of a physical camera shutter. Older models included one, so people who liked that extra privacy safeguard may miss it here.
Feature-wise, the Echo Show 11 runs the same experience as the smaller Echo Show 8. It launches with Alexa+, Amazon’s new AI-enhanced assistant, currently in Early Access and included with a Prime membership. The new Alexa+ feels more conversational and better at handling natural language requests, notes this PCMag review. The only real drawback is that the interface can feel busy, and you’re paying more for screen size rather than new features. If you want a bigger display and stronger sound in one unit, this deal makes sense. If you’re fine with a smaller screen, the Echo Show 8 delivers nearly the same experience for less.
Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 is now available for this LLVM/Clang-based compiler stack used by the Compute Runtime on Linux and under Windows is used both for graphics and compute…
Flexibility is an underrated aspect of fitness, especially since we tend to lose some of our mobility as we get older—how many of the older folks in your life can comfortably reach overhead? But whether you’re doing it for lifestyle improvements or athletics, stretching can be boring, and progress can be slow. How do you know if you’re stretching enough? Fortunately, a study has given us some guidelines.
These guidelines are for static stretching, which is the traditional kind where you hold a position. (Other mobility work, including dynamic stretching, is still good for you, but it wasn’t included in this study.)
Stretching has both short-term and long-term effects. We often think of flexibility as a long-term journey (we are becoming a more flexible person over time)—but there is also a more dramatic temporary effect that occurs during and right after the stretching session. Let’s talk about that first.
You may remember that when I did a three-minute video with toe touching exercises, I couldn’t quite touch the ground at the start. By the end, I had my palms flat on the ground. This short-term effect is an excellent way to unlock flexibility that you need to use for a given purpose. For example, dancers will stretch right before a practice or performance. And if you need a little extra ankle mobility to get the most out of your squats, or some extra shoulder mobility to do overhead lifts, that’s a great reason to do some stretches for those body parts in your warmup.
According to the study, you can maximize the short-term benefits of stretching from four total minutes of stretching for that muscle. That doesn’t have to mean a single four-minute stretch; it could be 30 seconds, eight times, or one minute four times. And they don’t have to be the same type of stretch, so long as they hit the same muscle. Less than four minutes will still give you some benefit, but four minutes is the most that the researchers found to help.
If you’re looking to get more flexible in the long term, the number to aim for is 10 minutes, per muscle, per week. Again, this can be broken up. If you have a routine that stretches each muscle for two total minutes (4 sets of 30 seconds, for example), doing that routine five days a week will get you there.
Or perhaps you’re already interested in those short-term benefits I mentioned above, so you’re doing a warmup session that racks up three or four minutes per muscle. Those count toward your ten minutes for the week, so you may not need to do any extra stretching sessions beyond those warmups—as long as those warmups include all the muscles you are targeting.
You don’t have to do every stretch in existence; just pick a few muscles or body parts that you’d like to make more flexible. Pick a favorite stretch or two for each, and get into the habit of performing those stretches for a minute each day. Here are some of my favorite stretches to get you started:
The best stretches for calves and ankles (especially good for squatting)
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that stretching is more effective the harder you do it. Stretching doesn’t need to be painful to be effective. The recent study found that hard stretching and gentle stretching both worked about equally well.
Flexibility trainers often say that your best bet is gentle stretching, where you can feel the stretch but it’s not painful. Being gentle about it lets you stretch longer and more often (and enjoy the process more!), which are the factors that really help you to make progress.
Marshall is launching a smaller companion for its highly rated Bromley 750 party speaker. The new Bromley 450 retains the larger model’s guitar-amp motif but comes in a petite, less expensive package.
The Bromley 450 carries over its larger sibling’s 360-degree audio trickery. Like equivalents from other companies, Marshall’s “True Stereophonic 360-degree sound” fools your brain into perceiving more directionality than its form factor allows. Lighting effects (“inspired by ‘70s stage shows”) also carry over from the larger model. However, this new speaker lacks the “sound character” control found in the Bromley 750.
Marshall says you can expect over 40 hours of playtime. If your party somehow goes on longer than that, you can swap out its battery on the fly (using the same one found in the Bromley 750). Or, you know, just plug it into a power outlet. And if your event turns into a performance, you’re covered with mic and instrument inputs.
The Bromley 450 measures 360 x 261 x 492mm, making it about 25 percent shorter than its big brother. At just under 27 lbs, it only weighs about half as much. That helps to explain Marshall’s decision not to include wheels on this model. (But don’t worry, it still has a handle.) The speaker has an IP55 rating for dust and water resistance.
The Marshall Bromley 450 may be less expensive than its larger counterpart, but it still costs a pretty penny. It’ll set you back $800 when it goes on sale on March 31. You can order it on Marshall’s website and from select retail partners (including Best Buy, Sweetwater and Crutchfield).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/marshall-adds-a-junior-sized-party-speaker-to-its-lineup-120000871.html?src=rss
Like its big brother the Koppenberg, the Paterberg is a cobbled climb known for its inclusion in the Tour of Flanders spring classic.
The Boys: Trigger Warning is coming to Quest 3 & Quest 3S next week.
ARVORE Immersive Games and Sony Pictures Entertainment have announced that The Boys: Trigger Warning will release on Quest 3 headsets on March 26. The made-for-VR game is adapted from the successful Amazon show, and features voice acting by several of the show’s cast.
The Boys: Trigger Warning presents a totally new story set in the world of The Boys. Players will choose stealth or chaos, use unstable Supe powers like telekinesis and laser eyes, and engage in brutal fights against enemy Supes.
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The immersive VR title comes just weeks ahead of the fifth and final season of the TV series.
The Boys: Trigger Warning launches on the Meta Horizon Store on March 26. The game will cost $29.99, with a limited-time pre-order price of $23.99.
The game is also coming soon to PlayStation, where it can now be wish listed.
