Patrick Holland / CNET:
Apple says iPhone 15 models could be running “warmer than expected” due to a few factors, like an iOS 17 bug and updates to Instagram and other third-party apps  —  Widespread complaints about overheating of the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max can be traced to several factors …

Plasma cutters are ridiculously cheap these days, just cruise by the usual online sources or your local Harbor Freight if you’ve got any doubt about that. But “cheap” and “good” don’t always intersect on a Venn diagram, and even when they do, not every plasma cutter is suitable for use on the spanking new CNC table you’re building. But luckily, there’s a mod for that.

As [Jake von Slatt] explains it, there are two kinds of plasma cutters on the market: high-frequency (HF) start and pilot arc start. The basic difference is that HF start cutters, which comprise the majority of cheap cutters on the market, need direct electrical contact with the workpiece to start the cutting action. Pilot arc torches, which are more suitable for CNC cutters, can strike the arc through a separate conductor without the need to contact the workpiece.

While there are homebrew bodges that claim to turn an HF torch into a pilot arc, [Jake]’s approach is a bit more complicated, and necessarily so. His add-on box intercepts the ground clamp — which is actually the positive conductor for plasma cutting — and switches it through a heavy-duty HVAC contactor. The 24 VDC coil of the contactor is controlled by a homebrew current sensor made from a huge toroid ferrite core wrapped with 20 turns of 6 AWG welding wire.

Before winding, the core is split in two and epoxied back together with a small magnetic reed switch bridging the gap. A simple 24 VDC power supply runs the whole thing. When the torch starts, the nozzle is connected to ground through the contactor, but as soon as the arc strikes and starts pulling cutting current through that toroid, the magnetic field closes the reed switch, which opens the contactor via a small DC relay. This removes the connection between the nozzle and ground, leaving the plasma to carry all the cutting current.

We’ve featured many, many CNC plasma cutter tables before, but most of these builds have concentrated on the table more than the cutter. It’s a refreshing change to get some insider tips on what kinds of cutters work best, and how to adapt what you’ve got for the job.

The Humane Ai Pin, up-close on a model at coperni’s Ready to Wear show during Paris Fashion Week, September 29th, 2023. | Photo by Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

It’s Paris Fashion Week, and Humane was designer Coperni’s latest buzzy tech name to be included. Humane’s Ai Pin — a device we’ve so far only seen in silhouette on the company’s website or peeking out of Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri’s breast pocket in a TED demo earlier this year — was pinned on the clothes of multiple Coperni models during its presentation. And it’s a rounded-corner square thing that makes me think just a little of a Star Trek: TNG-style communicator.

The Coperni showcase doesn’t answer our many questions about the device since nobody seems to have used it on the runway as far as we can tell, but at least we know basically what it will look like now. We still have no real idea how self-contained it is, whether it…

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The Simpsons creator Matt Groening draws strike sign collectibles for picketers. | Image: Brittany Woodside / The Writers Guild of America

From its new writers room staffing minimums to guarantees that staffers will receive a bigger cut of streaming residuals, the WGA’s new labor contract is set to fundamentally improve working conditions in the entertainment industry.

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The Simpsons creator Matt Groening draws strike sign collectibles for picketers. | Image: Brittany Woodside / The Writers Guild of America

From its new writers room staffing minimums to guarantees that staffers will receive a bigger cut of streaming residuals, the WGA’s new labor contract is set to fundamentally improve working conditions in the entertainment industry.

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Associated Press:
NSA’s outgoing director Paul Nakasone announces an AI security center, after an NSA study identified protecting American AI models as a national security issue  —  The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center — a crucial mission as AI capabilities …

I hadn’t intended to buy a Google Pixelbook in 2017. I was more or less managing with my sluggish Toshiba Chromebook 2, and paying $999 for a glorified Chrome browser seemed utterly wasteful to me, no matter how refined the hardware looked. But a fantastic deal changed my mind, and so I found myself unboxing Google’s wonderful first-party Chromebook after having it shipped halfway across the globe from the US to Lebanon.

At the time, few people knew what a Chromebook was. To me, an online writer who spent 95% of my working day inside Chrome and WordPress, a Chromebook was the cheapest machine for the job. But the Pixelbook was an exorbitant Chromebook: 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, two USB-C ports, an Intel Core i5 processor, and a 3:2 high-resolution display. It was overpowered for the job and overpowered for Chrome OS, but perfect for someone who wanted a future-proof investment.

Apple’s FineWoven cases are getting a lot of criticism, but not everyone hates them.

I hadn’t intended to buy a Google Pixelbook in 2017. I was more or less managing with my sluggish Toshiba Chromebook 2, and paying $999 for a glorified Chrome browser seemed utterly wasteful to me, no matter how refined the hardware looked. But a fantastic deal changed my mind, and so I found myself unboxing Google’s wonderful first-party Chromebook after having it shipped halfway across the globe from the US to Lebanon.

At the time, few people knew what a Chromebook was. To me, an online writer who spent 95% of my working day inside Chrome and WordPress, a Chromebook was the cheapest machine for the job. But the Pixelbook was an exorbitant Chromebook: 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, two USB-C ports, an Intel Core i5 processor, and a 3:2 high-resolution display. It was overpowered for the job and overpowered for Chrome OS, but perfect for someone who wanted a future-proof investment.

When do you post your projects? When they’re done? When they’re to the basic prototype stage? Or all along the way, from their very conception? All of these have their merits, and their champions.

In the post-all-along-the-way corner, we have Hackaday’s own [Arya Voronova], who outlines the many ways that you can start documenting your project before it’s even a fully fledged project. She calls these tidbits “breadcrumbs”, and it strikes me as being a lot like keeping a logbook, but doing it in public. The advantages? Instead of just you, everyone on the Internet can see what you’re up to. This means they can offer help, give you parts recommendations, and find that incorrect pinout that one pair of eyes would have missed. It takes a lot of courage to post your unfinished business for all to see, but ironically, that’s the stage of the project where you stand to gain the most from the exposure.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the folks who document their projects at the very end. We see a ton of these on Hackaday.io and in people’s personal blogs. It’s a great service to the community, frankly, because at that point, you’re already done with the project. This is the point where the reward, for you, is at its minimum, but it’s also the point where you feel least inhibited about sharing if you’re one of those people who are afraid of showing your work off half-done. The risk here, if you’re like me, is that you’re already on to the next project when one is “done”, and going back over it to make notes seems superfluous. Those of you who do it regardless, we salute you!

And then there’s the middle ground. When you’re about one third of the way done, you realize that you might have something half workable, and you start taking a photo or two, or maybe even typing words into a computer. Your git logs start to contain more than just “fixed more stuff” for each check-in, because what if someone else actually reads this? Maybe you’re to the point where you’ve just made the nice box to put it in, and you’re not sure if you’ll ever go back and untangle that rat’s nest, so you take a couple of pictures of the innards before you hot glue it down.

I’m a little ashamed I’m probably on the “post only when it’s done” end of things than is healthy, mostly because I don’t have the aforementioned strength of will to go back. What about you?

Google has to be kidding with its repair policy for the Pixel Watch. The company calls the $349 wearable “beautiful inside and out,” but it’s hiding an ugly secret from customers — there’s no way to repair a broken Pixel Watch.

Katrina Manson / Bloomberg:
US DoD Chief Digital and AI Officer Craig Martell says the agency wants to use AI safely and urges companies to be more transparent about their AI software  —  – Defense Department is holding symposium to discuss AI  — Official says agency wants to use the algorithms safely

Style is crucial to wearable devices in a way that’s not necessarily true of other personal gadgets. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

When I first saw the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses a few weeks ago, I noticed something. In the event space Meta had so carefully prepared, there was a wall showcasing the different frames, colors, and lenses. It was meant to visualize all the different style options — more than 150, in fact. But standing about 10 feet away, they all blended together.

That bothered me.

For the most part, my hands-on with the Meta smart glasses went better than I’d expected. Photo and video quality was dramatically improved thanks to the new 12MP camera. Pain points like audio leakage seemed to be addressed because they now have five microphones instead of one. Sound quality was also better and supported spatial audio. You could livestream with them! After…

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John Thornhill / Financial Times:
An interview with Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström about his upbringing, his VC firm Atomico, the vitality of Europe’s startup space, a Skype “mafia”, and more  —  The Skype co-founder turned venture capitalist on how Europe’s start-ups can challenge America’s giants

Plus: Stolen US State Department emails, $20 million zero-day flaws, and controversy over the EU’s message-scanning law.

While the toy brand kills its plans for an oil-free plastic alternative, it’s still pumping out billions of non-biodegradable bricks a year. Can Lego ever be sustainable?

The Stir It Up Lux turntable was (mostly) easy for a vinyl newbie to set up—and it’s a beauty to look at.

Image: TIFF

Fingernails, a sci-fi romcom coming to Apple TV Plus from director Christos Nikou, imagines a future where one very specific technology has changed the world. In this timeline, scientists have figured out how to conclusively determine if two people are in love. This upends relationships as we know them, with couples sticking steadfastly to the results of the test; if they get a negative result, they end up splitting up. It’s a cute conceit for exploring the ways relationships can grow stale or change over time, and Fingernails builds on that with its darkly comedic vibe. It also has a surprising amount of body horror — the nature of which you might be able to glean from the title.

The film centers on Anna (Jessie Buckley), a teacher who…

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The Logitech Pebble Keys 2 K380S keyboard is good, but never steps up to become great.

Google Assistant, but make it Bard. | Illustration: The Verge

If there’s one job I’d like AI to take from me, it’s my daily email deleting ritual.

Every morning at 8:30AM, Google Calendar pings me with a reminder containing just one word: EMAILS. Thus, my formal workday begins as I speed-delete nearly every email that landed in my inbox overnight. They are largely useless and clog up the space between legitimate emails that I need to read and respond to.

Imagine for a minute, though, if you could just tell an AI assistant to show you your most important emails and delete all the rest. I asked Google Assistant on a Pixel 7 Pro to do this, and it just wordlessly escorted me to my inbox so I could deal with it myself. Thanks a bunch.

Google, like almost every other tech company in the world, is all…

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Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge

Monarch Tractor’s Praveen Penmetsa has a grand vision for agriculture, and it includes autonomous electric smart tractors powered by AI.

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While the toy brand kills its plans for an oil-free plastic alternative, it’s still pumping out billions of non-biodegradable bricks a year. Can Lego ever be sustainable?

The DIY days of making gadgets better and longer-lasting are long past—and possibly, hopefully, in the future.

Should you buy the Sony Xperia 5 V?

OpenAI’s new image analysis update for its chatbot is both impressive and frightening. Here’s how to use it, and some advice for your experiments.