Tech News

Valve unveiled Steam Frame, its first standalone virtual reality headset, alongside the return of the Steam Machine and a new Steam Controller. The device runs SteamOS on its own or streams games from a PC over a dedicated wireless connection, without relying on home wifi.

EuroBirdPortal aggregates citizen observer data from across European countries to generate weekly bird distribution maps. Its interface is available in 38 languages, and the project remains active in 2026 under the European Union’s LIFE program.

Chrome rejected JPEG XL in 2023, and three years later, perceptual compression metrics still don’t vindicate its supporters. A technical analysis compares JPEG XL against AVIF and WebP in real-world web scenarios, beyond the symbolism of the open format.

A 64-number cipher that resisted 373 years of decryption attempts fell to Claude Fable 5.1 in under an hour. The key was never a secret alphabet: it was the very book where Thomas Urquhart hid it.

Misleading Google Ads passed Google’s human review twice, even though Gemini flags them as fraud instantly. The case exposes the gap between the AI Google promotes and the AI it actually uses to moderate its own advertising platform.

Website Wizard is a JOSM plugin that automates finding a business’s official website and adds the website tag to it in OpenStreetMap. The whole process takes under 15 minutes and requires no prior experience in mapping or programming. It’s a simple entry point for adding open, verifiable data to the world’s largest collaborative map.

Indie developer Joel Auterson explained why he decided to keep coding without generative AI, even as industry pressure pushes in the opposite direction. His reflection, inspired by his friend Shad’s camera app Uncamera, lays out three possible paths for any software creator in 2026.

An indie developer spent CA$220 over two weeks on Google Ads and discovered a bot farm had generated 60% of his billed installs. Here’s how he identified the pattern, filed an invalid traffic claim, and changed his campaign’s conversion event.

A Bluesky post about keeping old cables went viral among developers, prompting Jim Nielsen to print it out and tape it to his own cable box. The anecdote sums up why hardware kept ‘just in case’ is still the oldest backup policy in the trade.