Scratch the surface of Windows (and macOS), and you’ll find a command line console underneath, a lingering remnant of how these operating systems started out: as user-friendly graphical wrappers built on top of text-based, monochrome interfaces. If you’re as old as I am, you might remember having to launch apps and games on a computer by typing out text commands, rather than pointing and clicking. The modern-day methods are much easier, of course, but the old ways are still available — and they’re actually still useful for multiple tasks, as the list below shows. To begin with, Windows kept the Command Prompt utility as a reminder of its MS-DOS roots. That was later joined by PowerShell (Command Prompt with extras), and in the latest...

"Old age" sounds like a pleasant way to go, comparatively—a peaceful winding-down. But what exactly does it look like?

The Pac-Man arcade cabinet from Arcade1Up brings retro gaming joy to the whole family.

Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, and Catherine O'Hara are part of the year's best animated film.

Steven Johnson is a very meta author. He writes frequently about science and technology, and likes to immerse himself in the things he’s covering, even using them to change the way he writes books. A couple of years ago, a few months before ChatGPT launched and the AI boom took over the tech world, Johnson got a magazine assignment that sent him really, really deep down the AI rabbit hole. And he never came back up. Now, in addition to writing books, Johnson is also working at Google. He’s part of the team building a product called NotebookLM — “Notebook,” as the team calls it. It’s a note-taking and research tool: you upload documents and import web links, and Notebook’s Gemini-powered AI helps you organize things, extract information,...

From Canvases to Lists, learn how to use some of these recently added—but still not widely known—Slack features.