Nathan Edwards is The Verge‘s Senior Reviews Editor. He has been writing and editing reviews of computer hardware and consumer tech since 2007. He spent five years at Maximum PC building desktops and reviewing components, and seven at Wirecutter, where he was the first editor for PCs and home networking, and eventually led the computing, mobile, networking, and peripherals beats, among others. He enjoys mechanical keyboards, cargo bikes, making his life more complicated while trying to make it less complicated, and developing new hyperfixations. His French is terrible and his Osage is almost beginner-level. 𐓏𐓘𐓯𐓤𐓘͘
There’s an art to building a small-form-factor PC. When my recent upgrade doubled my CPU power draw, I had to choose: buy a bigger case to accommodate a more powerful cooler, or cut a hole in the side of my old one.
I chose the coward’s route. But today I found the FFS PC subreddit, where the case boundaries are merely a suggestion, and CPU coolers, GPUs, and power supplies protrude in all directions. Perfect.
Yet another reason we need local news: Cleveland’s WKYC interviewed the guy who’s been piloting a hot-dog-shaped motorboat on Ohio rivers. A hot dog boat? I never sausage a thing.
Ryan Norbauer spent half a decade and several hundred thousand dollars reinventing the keyboard. It worked.
0An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.
According to an NPR report, “Members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”
This would be a mildly funny April Fools’ Day gag if it were a fake product announcement. But CYL Any Keys is a real keycap set you can buy today. And it’s from GMK, so it’s a high-quality mildly funny April Fools’ Day gag, with doubleshot legends and support for mAny different keyboard layouts.
I’m holding out for MTNU Any Keys, though.
I’ve spent the past week typing on an early unit of the Norbauer Seneca, a mechanical keyboard that’s entirely custom, from its Topre-like electrocapacitive switches to its astonishingly smooth stabilizers. I also spoke at length with its creator about the process of making the board and why it’s so damn expensive. Stay tuned next week, feel free to ask about it in the comments, and meanwhile: just look at this keyboard.
I guess people are pretty interested in Framework’s new Strix Halo desktop, Strix Point 13-inch (it’s translucent!) and 12-inch convertible laptop, because I’ve never been put on hold to visit a dang website before.
My colleagues who are veterans of the PS5 restock wars tell me this is normal. Y’all are really out here waiting in line online?
Google updated the name last week for Maps users in the US, though Maps users in Mexico still see Gulf of Mexico and people outside either country see both names. Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum said Monday that the country would “proceed to court” if Google did not reverse the change. Google defended the change in an earlier letter to the Mexican government, saying that it follows “longstanding maps policies impartially and consistently across all regions.”