TheRaspberry Pihas such a deep relationship with robotic rovers that you can still find regular competitions for them, like Pi Wars. Today, however, we’re showing off a cool DIY robot rover kit, known as theStoRPer, created by Jo Hinchliffe, that you can build at home. It has an open source design and is powered by one of our favorite microcontrollers, the Raspberry Pi Pico. According to Hinchliffe, the kit is mainly a chassis with a custom-designed PCB....

TheRaspberry Pi Pico,and subsequently the RP2040 microprocessor, have become popular choices for those in the cosplay community as well as makers looking to make wearable tech in general. Today we’ve got a really cool wearable to share created by maker and developer Umut Sevdi. Using our favorite microcontroller, Sevdi has created an open-source smartwatch called theWearPico. Like most smartwatches, the WearPico is intended to work in tandem with a smartphone. It interacts with a mobile app and provides some features that work with the phone like managing calls and receiving notifications....

A Mesa 3D Graphics Library developer hasimplementedsupport for CPU-based ray-tracing in Vulkan, reportsPhoronix. While we applaud the effort, early testing of the driver in Quake II RTX indicates mainstreammodern CPUsaren’t going to convince anyone to give up theirgraphics card. Developer Konstantin Seurer’s screenshot shows that the ray-traced version of Quake II only runs at 1 frame per second after all his Vulkan Lavapipe driver travails. Linuxdeveloper Seurer admits his work is “mostly” based on porting code from theRADVVulkan drivers, which were designed for owners of old and new AMD Radeon graphics cards (including emulated RT on pre-RDNA2GPUs)....

Now is one of the best times to get a top-quality gaming monitor. More specifically, theHP Omen Transcend 32-inch quantum dot OLED (QD-OLED) gaming display is available at Newegg for its lowest price ever. It’s typically priced around $999, but today it’s been discounted to just $759. We reviewed theHP Omen Transcend 32 monitorlast month and loved its performance, rating it 5 out of 5 stars. It oozed quality and made for a top-notch experience in every metric we tested it against....

UPDATE 30-06-2025, 10am PT: VancouverMac.ca has provided us with additional information about its services and Apple PCs storage upgrade capabilities. While the company officially advertises storage upgrades for M1-based Macs only, it says that upgrades for other Apple Silicon-based Macs are identical, but some parts may differ. Once upon a time, Apple’s MacBook used M.2-like SSD modules that could be easily replaced or upgraded. Still, starting from the 2015 MacBook 12 systems, the company began soldering SSD components down to motherboards to make laptops thinner, thus making upgrades virtually impossible....

Fans of RISC-V, the open source ISA, can finally get their hands on DeepComputing’s DC ROMA RISC-V AI PC. The release also includes an option to buy theDC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard IIas a replacement for theFramework Laptop 13. As of writing, the PC is listed for $399 and is currently sold out. However, the mainboard replacement option is still in stock and listed for $359. This PC is intended for those who want more customization potential, which perfectly suits this modular AI PC....

One of the most unexpected stories from last week was that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman allegedly plans to build an AI processer thatwill design AI chips and produce them in-house.The Financial Timeson Tuesday revealed some additional information about the venture: While Altman is indeed looking to develop his own alternative to Nvidia’s AI and HPC GPUs, he’s apparently talking to TSMC about chip production. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is allegedly in talks with both TSMC and Middle Eastern investors to start a new chip venture aimed at reducing OpenAI’s dependence on Nvidia (or rather, Azure datacenters runningNvidia’s H100 that Microsoft procures in massive quantities) and fulfilling its growing need for processing power....

Today atAmazon, theSamsung 990 EVO 2TB SSDis discounted to one of its lowest prices ever. It debuted with a somewhat unreasonably high MSRP of $239, so it’s exciting to see it listed for a price as low as $129. This SSD is notable compatibility-wise because it can work with PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x2 interface modes. So far, no expiration has been confirmed for the discount so we’re not sure for how long it will be offered at this price....

SemiKong, a new LLM trained by Aitomatic and its partners in the “AI Alliance”, is theworld’s first large language modelspecifically crafted to serve the semiconductor industry’s needs. SemiKong seeks to become part of the workflows of semiconductor design companies and act as a digital expert in the field, contributing to getting new chips out the door significantly faster. According to Aitomatic, the company responsible for developing the SemiKong LLM, the semiconductor industry desperately needs to collect expert information....

PC cases, power, and cooling specialist SilverStone has introduced a new workstation chassis that goes big on HDD capacity. The newSilverStone Seta H2can fit up to 15 3.5 and 2.5-inch drives (h/tComputerBase). To max it out, you would fit eleven 3.5-inch plus four 2.5-inchers. This is a lot of spinning rust capacity in 2025, but the Seta H2 is no shrinking violet at over 70 liters. With such a huge number of drives, and its variables of configuration (drive cages, choosing between 3....

‘This app is preventing shutdown’ isn’t such a rare event to experience in Windows. You might have noticed this message while trying to shut down your computer with an application opened. Generally, theShut down anywaybutton automatically closes any open application. However, it becomes annoying when you have to go through the same message every time. More often times than not,Windows might also fail to shutdown because of malicious applications. Moreover, sometimes, the icon listed on the screen might be something you aren’t aware of, making it harder to narrow down the cause....

Microsoft’s newSurface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 7are shipping, and the folks at iFixit have already started examining the repairability of the devices. Surprisingly, the team has almost nothing but praise for how Microsoft enables technicians to service the latestSurface tablet and laptop. Releasing its typicalwalkthrough of disassemblingboth devices on YouTube,Shahram Mokhtari from the iFixitcrew goes through the process of removing just about every component to demonstrate how easily someone could repair their new Surface device at home....

The Calendar view in the Microsoft Teams application is essential to perform various functions, including hosting and scheduling meetings. Some of the users have recently reported calendar missing in the desktop application of MS Teams. Although this issue could result from a fluctuating internet, there could be more severe problems behind this error. You can attempt to resolve this issue by switching to a better internet connection. If this isn’t enough to fix Teams not showing calendar, this article will guide you around this issue....