Sean is a senior editor at The Verge, a very good website he helped found in 2011. He thrives at the intersection of gaming, technology, and toys, with a side of consumer advocacy because companies just can’t help themselves, can they? Sean previously led breaking news teams at The Verge and CNET and the reviews program at Gizmodo. He also has that voice. (Contact me securely at Signal: seanhollister.01) Ethics statement, June 2023: Sean’s wife is employed by Apple as a video producer. He therefore does not currently report or edit stories about Apple products or Apple as a company.
From the makers of TinyTV: the $50 Thumby Color and $30 Thumby. Raspberry Pi Pico chips run at just in the low hundred MHz, displays are 0.85 or 0.4 inches respectively! But that’s enough for MicroPython games you can code in a web browser, or even real Doom on the OG Thumby (find installers here). More in my full story.
Why reboot your whole SteamOS handheld to desktop when you can visit the desktop from inside the gaming mode? Nested Desktop does have limitations (no file management, no Steam-within-Steam) but gosh are there times this’d come in handy. Jacob at XDA calls it “the best Steam Deck feature you aren’t using”.
Setup: In desktop mode, tap Steam logo on taskbar > scroll down to Lost and Found > Right-click “Nested Desktop” > “Add to Steam.”
This box isn’t anywhere near as customizably cool as the Framework Desktop, and it’s not even that much cheaper! (It’s the same $1,599 for 64GB or $1,999 for an LLM-friendly 128GB, save that Corsair throws in a 1TB SSD and Windows.)
But I guess the new Corsair AI Workstation 300 does come prebuilt, and you aren’t limited to just two front ports: you get two USB-A, one C, full-size SD and audio right out of the box.
YouTube acoustic explorer Benn Jordan appears to have gotten a starling — a bird arguably better at mimicry than a parrot — to do that! He turns a drawing into sound, the bird repeats the sound, and a similar drawing shows up on the computer. “I saved a PNG image to a bird,” his video claims. The result isn’t surprising because of course these birds can repeat sounds — but how often do we think of sound as encoded visual data?
Not to be outdone by GPD, which teased a handheld so powerful it’s begging to be plugged into the wall, Ayaneo is teasing its own Strix Halo handheld — alongside a mountain of other product. There’s so much you’ll need to scrub through not one, but two “strategy sharing session” videos to see it all. The Strix Halo device will be the Ayaneo Next 2, and it’s promising its battery will be internal unlike the GPD one.
DJI is unusually weak right now, and Insta360 is seizing the opportunity for its first drone: “immersive, creator-ready, and easy for anyone to fly,” with spherical filming so you can fly first then frame shots after. (The company tried 360-degree drone attachments before, but never a full aircraft.)
Will Antigravity even exist in the US, though? The announce doesn’t say. Insta360 is Chinese, and Trump has made it clear that US drones should “dominate.”
