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Archives for June 2026

SwitchBot’s Standing Circulator Fan is worth fighting for

8

Verge Score

It’s quiet, battery powered, smart, and moves a decent amount of air for its size.

Thomas Ricker
Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
This LLM in a box is powered by a hand crank.

As spotted earlier by The Register, CrankGPT is a concept project from a two-person team at Squeez Labs that runs private, local AI models without needing a power-hungry data center. Instead, you have to literally crank out your own power for each of the chatbot’s answers.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Madison Square Garden accused of exposing millions of visitors’ data.

A proposed class action lawsuit alleges MSG failed to protect the data of over 26 million guests. It comes just days after 404 Media reported that hackers claimed to have published data stolen from MSG, which is known for its extensive surveillance system.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Google’s Nobel Prize-winning AI researcher is joining Anthropic.

John Jumper, who has worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind since 2017, announced his departure from the company on X. In 2024, Jumper and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an open-source AI model that predicts protein structures.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
Norway is putting restrictions on AI use in school.

As Reuters reports, the new restrictions will go into effect in August, limiting how students in different age groups use AI:

Pupils from first ​through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general ​rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to ‌16, can ⁠cautiously adopt tools under teachers’ supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
A little fun with iOS 27’s Spatial Reframing.

The AI-powered feature is designed to adjust the angle of a photo you’ve taken… but maybe not reconstruct your entire head.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Doom composer Bobby Prince has died at age 81.

In addition to creating the heavy-metal soundtracks for Doom and Doom II, Prince also worked on the music for Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D.

You can read his obituary here.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Akai quadruples the processing power of its cheapest full-featured MPC.

The $799 MPC One G2 has an 8-core processor with 4GB RAM, and 64GB of internal storage. That means you can run 32 plugin instances and 16 audio tracks simultaneously, up from eight of each in the previous model, and polyphony is now 256 notes, up from 64.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
Apple says dropping support for some Watches is about processing power.

Cait Dooley, Apple Watch and Health Product Marketing Manager, was quick to tell TechRadar that older Apple Watch models will still work with newer iPhones and receive security updates. It’s just that Siri AI and some other watchOS 27 features require a bit more horsepower.

“The great new features in watchOS, including the capabilities of Siri AI and the new tap gesture, work best with the processing power that is in Apple Watch Series 9 and later, Ultra 2 and later, and SE 3. Older devices can still be paired with iPhones that are running the latest software and continue to receive security updates, so they can continue to have a great Apple Watch experience.”

Our long national sunscreen nightmare is almost over

Other countries have been doing it right for over 20 years. It’s about time we caught up.

Victoria Song