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Microsoft’s latest Insider preview — distributed as KB5074157 and identified as Build 26220.7653 — quietly stitches together a set of modest but meaningful improvements to Windows 11: modernized Account Settings dialogs rebuilt on WinUI, native support for .webp desktop backgrounds, and faster Copilot prompt suggestions in Click to Do, all delivered as part of a controlled, enablement-style rollout to Insiders. Background / Overview Windows 11’s development continues to be iterative rather...

A satirical post on royaldutchshellplc.com that lampooned Big Oil’s lobbying in Venezuela did more than provoke laughs — it became a live, hybrid experiment in media, law and generative AI: a satirical text created with AI assistance, a second AI (Microsoft Copilot) asked to assess its legal safety, and a human editor publishing the loop as both commentary and case study. Background The long-running Donovan–Shell story begins long before any AI was asked for an opinion. John Donovan and his...

Bose remains one of theadphonese easiest brand names to recommend when shoppers ask for comfortable noise‑cancelling headphones that “just work” with a Windows PC — but the mundane reality for Windows 10 users is more nuanced. This feature brings together verified pairing how‑tos, model recommendations for Windows 10 compatibility, shipping and purchase considerations, and an actionable troubleshooting checklist you can follow end‑to‑end. The goal: get reliable stereo audio for music and...

Nex Computer’s NexPhone has reintroduced a provocative idea to the mainstream: a single mid‑range handset that claims to be a true “phone‑as‑PC,” shipping with Android, a containerized Debian Linux desktop, and an optional, rebootable Windows 11 on Arm image — complete with a purpose‑built, tile‑forward Windows Mobile UI that deliberately evokes the old Windows Phone look. Background / Overview The NexPhone is the next chapter in a long-running experiment to collapse the gap between handheld...

Microsoft has quietly completed a major compatibility milestone for Windows on Arm: the Xbox PC app is now available on all Arm-based Windows 11 devices, unlocking local installs from the Xbox catalog and expanding playable Game Pass titles beyond cloud-only streaming. Background Arm-based Windows PCs (commonly called Windows on Arm) have long promised superior battery life, thin-and-light designs, and always-on connectivity, but gaming remained a practical weak point. Most AAA PC games are...

Microsoft quietly pushed the same January 16 Beta-channel package to the Dev Channel this week — a matched cumulative update identified as KB5074157 that surfaces as Windows 11 build 26220.7653 — leaving some Insiders asking why Dev got the Beta build several days late and what that timing means for testers and IT teams. Background The Windows Insider Program runs multiple preview streams (Canary, Dev, Beta, Release Preview) to let Microsoft test features at different stability levels...

Microsoft has quietly closed one of the longest-standing gaps in the Windows-on-Arm story: the Xbox PC app now runs natively on Arm-based Windows 11 systems, enabling local installs for a large portion of the Game Pass library while keeping cloud streaming as a seamless fallback. Background Windows on Arm has long promised mobile‑class battery life and thin, fan‑friendly designs, but the platform has been held back by three hard technical challenges: instruction‑set compatibility (x86/x64...

Vibrant cubist-style harbor plaza with tourists on stone steps by the water.

Thand Student Innovation Center’s new Artificial Intelligence Innovation Studio is more than a cluster of laptops and whiteboards — it’s a deliberate campus-scale push to make generative AI, agentic systems, AR/VR and model-driven workflows accessible to every Iowa State student, faculty member, and staffer, with dedicated hardware, pro-level subscriptions and hands-on mentorship to match. Background The AI Innovation Studio opened on the third floor of the Student Innovation Center as a...

Halo: Campaign Evolved arriving on PlayStation 5 alongside Xbox Series X|S and PC is a watershed moment for a saga that spent nearly a quarter-century as an Xbox-defining exclusive, and Halo Studios is framing that move as less about platform politics and more about growing Halo’s community, modernizing the original story with Unreal Engine 5, and using the remake as a bridge into a new era of Halo development. Background: why this remake matters Halo: Combat Evolved launched in 2001 and...

Microsoft began rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7653 (KB5074157) to the Beta Channel on January 16, 2026, a focused preview quality update that brings WinUI‑based modernized dialogs for Settings > Accounts > Other users, faster Copilot suggestions in Click to Do on eligible Copilot+ devices, and native support for .webp images as desktop backgrounds — bundled with a broad set of bug fixes and a handful of known issues that Insiders and IT teams should validate before wide...

Sensor Tower’s new State of Mobile 2026 makes one fact uncomfortably clear for game studios and comfortingly clear for creators and productivity vendors: TikTok dominated app downloads and attention in 2025 while AI assistants exploded, and for the first time consumers spent more on non‑game apps than on games. The report places generative AI and attention monetization at the center of last year’s market dynamics, while independent trackers show meaningful differences in raw download totals...

Microsoft’s chief executive did not mince words in Davos: the AI industry is running an energy experiment and the public’s patience will not be an unlimited resource. Satya Nadella used the World Economic Forum stage to crystallize a blunt thesis — generative AI is only socially legitimate if it demonstrably improves health, education, public services and productivity — and warned that otherwise we risk losing the “social permission” to burn scarce electricity creating digital “tokens” that...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone hiccup on October 29, 2025 left millions of users and dozens of enterprise customers scrambling as Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services reported intermittent failures and timeouts, with Microsoft ultimately tracing the outage to a configuration deployment problem in Azure Front Door (AFD) and confirming the incident lasted for more than eight hours. Background Microsoft 365 and Azure are tightly coupled across countless business processes: email...

Microsoft has pushed Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7653 (KB5074157) into the Dev Channel — the same 25H2 enablement-package build Microsoft previously published to Beta — and with it shipped a modest set of visible polish, Copilot-era experience tweaks, and a broad collection of reliability fixes while keeping a handful of known issues active for testers and IT professionals to validate. Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 (Dev & Beta Channels)) Background /...

The smartphone that wants to be your laptop is real — and it comes with Android 16, a full Debian Linux desktop and an optional bootable Windows 11 partition, all packaged into a $549 midrange handset that pledges to revive the spirit (if not the entire ecosystem) of Windows Phone. Background / Overview Nex Computer — the company behind the long-running NexDock laptop shells — has announced the NexPhone, a ruggedized device built around a single engineering thesis: one pocketable device...

If you’ve got an old Windows 10 PC that can’t meet Windows 11’s TPM, Secure Boot, or CPU requirements, turning it into a Home Assistant server is one of the most useful and long‑lived repurposing moves you can make. Home Assistant (often abbreviated HA or HAOS for Home Assistant Operating System) turns disparate smart devices into a single, local, automatable system—no mandatory cloud subscription required—and an old desktop or tower can make a far more capable, expandable hub than a cheap...

Nex Computer’s new NexPhone promises a single pocketable device that can act as an Android smartphone, a Debian Linux workstation and — most unusually — reboot into a full Windows 11 desktop when docked to an external monitor, a bold pitch backed by specific hardware and a clear shipping timetable. by taking refundable reservations ($199 to hold a $549 early price), claims a midrange hardware stack with a 12 GB / 256 GB configuration and a Qualcomm QCM6490 “Dragonwing” processor selected...

Microsoft is steadily turning two of Windows’ most familiar utilities — Notepad and Paint — into capable, AI-aware productivity and creativity tools, with the latest Insider updates adding richer Markdown-style formatting, nested lists and strikethrough in Notepad and new AI-driven features such as a Coloring book generator and refined fill controls in Paint. Background Microsoft has been iteratively modernizing Windows’ inbox apps for several years, moving beyond the ultra-minimalist roots...

Microsoft has quietly completed one of the most visible missing links for gaming on Windows on Arm: the Xbox PC app is now available as a native build for Arm-based Windows 11 machines, letting owners of Snapdragon‑powered Copilot+ laptops and other Arm PCs download, run and manage a far broader swath of Game Pass and Xbox PC titles locally rather than depending solely on streaming. Background Microsoft and its partners have been improving Windows on Arm steadily over the past two years...