BMW’s latest M cars are hot commodities. Demand for the M5 is surpassing the automaker’s expectations, and now we have word that buyers are placing orders for the new M2 CS in greater numbers than initially predicted. This is forcing BMW to increase the number of build slots in certain markets, including in the United States.
Sylvia Neubauer, BMW M’s Vice President of Customer, Brand, and Sales, told BMW Blog there’s “huge demand” for the new M2 variant. We don’t know how many CSs BMW plans to produce or how many each market will receive, but Neubauer said that it has had to increase allotment by “quite some units.” Demand is also up in Germany and China.
Photo by: BMW
The 2026 M2 CS is one of BMW’s hottest M cars ever. Under the hood is the brand’s twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter straight-six engine producing 523 horsepower and 479 pound-feet of torque. That’s 50 more hp and an extra 36 lb-ft of torque over the standard M2 with the eight-speed automatic, which is the only gearbox available in the CS. However, it is rear-wheel drive, unlike BMW’s other CS models.
The M2 CS is also lighter than the regular M2, primarily due to its carbon-fiber body, with BMW claiming it weighs 97 pounds less. However, it still weighs in at nearly 3,800 pounds. It can reach 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds and hit a top speed of up to 188 mph, but all that performance commands a steep price.
The 2026 M2 CS starts at $99,775 before any options, and people are lining up to pay six figures for BMW’s chunky coupe. If you want one, be prepared to stave off some competition.
Valve has added a new performance monitor to Steam that can help you understand why a game may or may not be running smoothly. Not only does it break out a game’s overall frame rate, it can tell you how many of those frames were generated by techniques like Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, according to a post.
The change is included as part of an update to the Steam Client that’s available now, though Valve notes that this “first version” focuses on “Windows users and on the most common GPU hardware.”
The company says the new performance monitor currently offers up to four different levels of detail: a single FPS value, FPS details, CPU and GPU utilization, and “FPS, CPU, GPU & RAM Full Details.” The more you choose to show, the more of your screen will be taken up by the performance monitor.
Steam previously offered a simple FPS counter, but separating out generated frames from the frames fully rendered by your graphics cores can help you better understand key differences between what you see and how a game feels. “Frame generation can’t help with things like input latency that matter to competitive gamers, but it can make things look visually smoother on today’s high refresh rate monitors,” Valve says in a detailed support document about the performance monitor.
In practice, what that should mean is that you can see whether your game feels like it’s running at just 30 fps because it actually is running at 30 fps inside the game engine, even though you’re seeing a visually smoother image due to Nvidia and AMD’s added “fake frames.” (It’s a whole debate in the PC gaming community, and it appears Valve isn’t taking sides here.)
Valve has already given handheld gamers a taste of these quick insights by building tools like MangoHud into the Steam Deck and SteamOS, which similarly let you monitor your CPU, graphics, RAM, and carefully ration out your battery life. But having a way to do so built into desktop Steam will make the insights much more accessible to many more gamers.
In the future, Valve says that it has plans to “add some additional pieces of data to the performance overlay going forward, to detect certain common bad hardware performance scenarios, and to show a larger summary of your game’s performance in the overlay itself when you hit shift-tab.”
Phiphen Games Releases Debut Title Ruffy and the Riverside ACCESS Newswire
‘Ruffy and the Riverside’ Feels Like Pure Joy and Has All the Makings To Be a New Age Classic (Review) VICE
Mini Review: Ruffy and the Riverside (PS5) – A Cute Platformer with Missed Potential Push Square
Banjo-Kazooie and Paper Mario mix together in this delightful puzzle platformer that has me swapping textures to solve puzzles by changing the world MSN
Liquid Glass is a huge new change coming to iOS 26. (Apple)
It’s true: Apple’s iOS 26 (not iOS 19) is coming your way this fall with some cool new features you’ll want to try. For those of us who’ve been loyal to the iPhone for nearly two decades, we’re most excited about the fresh home and lock screen redesign. Dubbed Liquid Glass, the new look and feel will extend across all of Apple’s upcoming operating systems. The overhaul was one of several big changes coming to iOS, macOS, iPadOS and the rest of Apple’s software suite, all of which were showcased during the company’s WWDC keynote on June 9. If you’re a developer, you can check out the iOS 26 beta 2 now; the public beta coming in July.
After overpromising on AI plans last year, Apple kept its iOS roadmap focused more on basic quality of life improvements this year. There are multiple useful additions coming to the Phone and Messages apps on your iPhone, for instance: Apple execs outlined the ability to weed out spam texts or other unknown senders and an option to hold your spot on a phone call when you’ve been waiting for a representative to pick up. Plus, a treasured feature that we took for granted is coming back (hint: it’s in the Photos app).
Siri, meanwhile, is in a holding pattern. Apple has previously specified that its smarter voice assistant — first promised at WWDC 2024 — is delayed until some point “in the coming year,” so you shouldn’t expect any major changes in the current betas. But there are reports that Apple is aiming to give Siri a bigger brain transplant by basing it on third-party artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, which could make 2026 a pivotal year.
Keep reading to check out the most notable features coming to your iPhone this fall, according to Apple. Also, make sure your iPhone is eligible to download the iOS 26 update (thankfully, most recent models are).
What is iOS 26?
While the current iPhone operating system is iOS 18, Apple is skipping the numbering ahead to iOS 26 later this year. The company has decided to line up its iOS version numbers with a year-based system, similar to car model years. So while iOS and its sibling operating systems will be released in late 2025, they’re all designated “26” to reflect the year ahead. (Meanwhile, iOS 18 is still getting new versions this summer, too.)
It’s official, we’re moving to iOS 26. (Apple)
What is Liquid Glass design?
Let’s be honest. Out of everything announced at WWDC this year, the new Liquid Glass design was the star of the show. The iPhone’s home and lock screens have looked pretty much the same year after year — the last exciting thing (in my opinion) was the option to add your own aesthetic to your home screen by customizing your apps and widgets. So seeing the home and lock screens’ new facelift is refreshing.
So what exactly is Liquid Glass? Apple calls it a “new translucent material” since, well, the apps and widgets are clear. However, the screen can still adapt to dark and light modes, depending on surroundings. You’ll also notice buttons with a new floating design in several apps, like Phone and Maps. They’re designed to be less distracting than the current buttons, but are still easy to see. While the design overhaul has proven to be controversial since its announcement, some — including Engadget’s own Devindra Hardawar — like the new direction, even if it’s somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft’s translucent Windows Vista Aero designs from nearly twenty years ago.
That said, as of the newly released iOS 26 beta 2, Apple has already incorporated some user feedback into the design, dialing back the transparency in at least some places. And while it will continue to evolve, Apple users won’t be able to escape it: Liquid Glass was designed to make all of Apple’s OSes more cohesive. Here’s a look at how the translucent aesthetic will look with the new macOS Tahoe 26 on your desktop.
What are the new and notable features of iOS 26?
iOS 26 has a laundry list of new features. Among the most worthwhile:
Phone app redesign: You’ll finally be able to scroll through contacts, recent calls and voicemail messages all on one screen. It also comes with a new feature called Hold Assist that’ll notify you when an agent comes to the phone so you can avoid the elevator music and continue on with other tasks.
Live Translation in Phone, FaceTime and Messages: iOS 26 is bringing the ability to have a conversation via phone call or text message with someone who speaks another language. Live Translation will translate your conversation in real time, which results in some stop-and-go interactions in the examples Apple shared during its presentation.
Polls in group chats: Tired of sorting through what seems like hundreds of messages in your group chat? You and your friends will soon be able to create polls in group messages for deciding things like which brunch spot you’re eating at or whose car you’re taking on a road trip.
Filtering unknown senders in Messages: If you haven’t received spam texts about unpaid tolls or other citations, you’re lucky. For those of us who have, those annoying messages will soon be filtered away in a separate folder.
Visual Intelligence: Similar to a reverse Google image search, this new feature will allow you to search for anything that’s on your iPhone screen. For instance, if you spot a pair of shoes someone is wearing in an Instagram photo, you can screenshot it and use Visual Intelligence to find those shoes (or similar ones) online.
Photos tabs are back: For anyone who’s still frustrated with the Photos changes made last year, you’ll be happy to know that your tabs are coming back. Library and Collections will have their own separate spaces so you don’t have to scroll to infinity to find what you’re looking for.
Apple’s Hold Assist will be nifty for those pesky services that put you on hold for 10 or more minutes. (Apple)
Which iPhones will be able to upgrade to iOS 26?
A few iPhone models that run the current version of iOS — iPhone XR, XS and XS Max — won’t be compatible with the latest upgrade. But any iPhones released in 2019 or later will be eligible for the iOS 26 update.
Not listed here are the presumed new iPhone 17 models (or maybe iPhone 26?) that are all but certain to be announced and released in September.
When will the iOS 26 beta be available?
If you’re a developer, you can check out the iOS 26 beta 2 now. The iOS 26 public beta will become available in July via the Apple Beta Software Program. If you’re not already a member, you’ll need to sign up to try out all the latest features. Just visit beta.apple.com and sign up with your phone number or email address. It’s free.
Once you’re in and the beta is available, you can install it by going to Settings > General > Software Update and selecting iOS 26 public beta.
A word of caution: Don’t sign up with your main iPhone unless you’re OK with any risks that occur with using an OS that isn’t finalized.
When will the final version of iOS 26 be released?
iOS 26 will be released to the public this fall. It usually comes in September, within a week of the Apple iPhone event. Last year, it rolled out to iPhone users on September 16 — exactly one week after the iPhone 16 lineup was announced.
If you’re more interested in the Apple Intelligence features coming, here’s everything Apple revealed for iOS, macOS and more during WWDC. Also, check out how iOS 26 screenshots could be an intriguing preview of Apple’s delayed Siri rework.
Update, June 30: Noted ongoing iOS 18 releases, and reports that Apple is considering additional external LLMs for Siri.
Update, June 25: Noted changes added in iOS 26 beta 2.
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Mumbai: Three children aged 12 to 16 died of disseminated tuberculosis (TB) at one of the major public hospitals in the city over the last month not due to lack of treatment but because private general practitioners failed to diagnose the disease early.Disseminated TB refers to the spread of the disease from the lungs to other organs. Sometimes, even chest physicians miss its signs in paediatric patients. For instance, a 15-year-old girl was sent to the hospital as a drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) patient without further evaluation. “All we were told was that she had a headache. As soon as she arrived, she collapsed and had to be put on a ventilator. She was severely neurologically impaired with meningitis,” said a doctor from the hospital’s paediatric department.The girl’s parents told the hospital that she had been vomiting for the past month: a classic telltale sign of disseminated TB. The hospital sees a few such cases every month. “Such patients visit general physicians first who fail to refer them to specialists till it is very late. That is what happened to the three who died,” the doctor said.The head of the hospital’s paediatric department said DR-TB remains a serious issue in children. “We are seeing every type of TB in children: abdominal, pulmonary, bone, brain, intestine, skin. Most of these patients rush in too late and in terrible distress, sometimes unconscious, with convulsions that cannot be controlled, and they all turn out to be TB patients.”Paediatric TB cases in Mumbai account for about 7-9% of all TB cases, according to data from BMC’s health department. The city reports around 60,000 TB cases annually. There is a considerable delay in seeking treatment for TB in the first place, and stigma as well as limited access play a role in this.Ganesh Acharya, a city-based TB-HIV activist, said, “A delay of two to three months in the treatment of children with TB is common. Families visit multiple general doctors who diagnose them with cough and cold, and in the end, it becomes a case of disseminated TB.”For children aged 12-16, delayed diagnosis is far more common as parents often stop consulting paediatricians and instead take them to general practitioners. A former paediatrician at Sion Hospital who routinely treated TB patients said, “There are complex reasons as to why general practitioners are unable to diagnose TB patients; one is that the manifestation of TB in children is very different than that in adults.“In children, it can show up as pleural effusion (fluid in chest) or severe bronchitis, said the doctor. “There’s a wide range of symptoms. That’s why general practitioners often don’t recognise it as TB.”Dr Tanu Singhal, paediatric consultant at Kokilaben Hospital, said, “TB is common even among well-off families. General practitioners may miss or sometimes misdiagnose it, but these families often go to specialists early themselves if the child doesn’t improve.”
Nintendo of Canada has announced that the pricing of the Switch, its accessories, its games and even Amiibo figures, will all be changing in Canada come August. The pricing adjustment is being made “based on market conditions,” according to the the announcement.
It’s not clear how much the price of the Switch family of products will be changing — Nintendo said new prices will be posted on its Canadian website on August 1 — but presumably they’ll be going up. The company currently sells the Switch for CA$400, the Switch OLED for CA$450 and the Switch Lite for CA$269 in Canada. Meanwhile, the Switch 2 launched for CA$630 in June.
The market conditions Nintendo is responding to could be the result of the suite of tariffs the US government applied to nearly all of its trade partners in April 2025. When the Switch 2 debuted at $450 in the US, many people assumed the new cost of doing business in North America was being factored in. That the price of the Switch is changing before the Switch 2 could be a confirmation of that fact.
While not an intentional ploy to get customers to spend more, if the Switch inches closer to the Switch 2 in price, there’s plenty of good reasons to buy the newer console over the older one in August. In many ways, the Switch 2 is just a nicer Switch.
11 Bit Studios has drawn the ire of players for the undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in its recent release, The Alters. The new project from the team behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine is a narratively and thematically interesting take on a science fiction survival game. The project contains a lot of dialogue and written text, and some players in-game copy that appeared to be generated by a large language model. The Steam storefront that games disclose when they contain material that is either pre-generated or live-generated by artificial intelligence, and The Alters had not been tagged as including AI content. The studio has issued a lengthy statement in response to the complaints.
One instance involved AI-generated text in a graphic asset. 11 Bit Studios said this asset was only meant to be used as a placeholder during development. “This was never intended to be part of the final release,” the company said. “Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated.”
The other AI use that players uncovered was in some cases of translations. According to 11 Bit Studios, AI was used for subtitle translations on the licensed movies that can be played in social area of the in-game base, which it said were made by an external source without creative input from its team:
“Due to extreme time constraints, we chose not to involve our translation partners and had these videos localized using AI to have them ready on launch. It was always our intention to involve our trusted translation agencies after release as part of our localization hotfix, to ensure those texts would be handled with the same care and quality as the rest of the game. That process is now underway, and updated translations are being implemented.”
AI is an increasingly delicate subject for creative professionals. Many companies with large language models have either been accused of or admitted to training on copyrighted content, which has made AI an ethical nonstarter for many artists and many players. But when studios are regularly faced with negative working conditions surrounding crunch, it’s also understandable why the gaming industry might be inclined to look for ways to speed up the process of shipping a title. The reactions to AI appearing The Alters is likely just the latest in the ongoing conversations about when and how this tech might be a part of game development.
Most of us have clicked on a bit.ly or t.co link without a second thought, and these links are practically everywhere. These are known as link-shorteners, or URL-shorteners, and these services are baked into social platforms, email tools, and even print ads. Plenty of people use these for all kinds of things, but why use a publicly-hosted URL shortener when you can host your own instead?
Here’s the thing with URL shorteners: they collect a lot of data, and that data goes to the companies that you use to make those URLs. If you self-host both the domain and the database yourself, you decide how long links live, how data is stored, and how each redirect behaves. This has a few benefits, and these benefits are ones that a public shortener can’t match.
Link longevity
Plus, you own the data
One of the biggest benefits of self-hosting a link shortener is the complete control that you have over it. Back in 2018, Google announced the deprecation of its own shortening service, called “goo.gl”, and eventually shut it down completely in the summer of 2024. That meant any URLs on the service were permanently dead, and anything that used a hardcoded goo.gl link would no longer work. While developers had years to make their move and get off the service, that’s not quite the point. The lack of control is the issue, and self-hosting your own service means that you don’t ever have to worry about that.
What’s even better is the complete control. If you shut down your link shortener, you know it’s truly gone. There’s no worry that the links are still in some database somewhere, and it means that when they’re gone, they’re actually gone.
Flexibility and rule-based redirects
Passwords, expiry dates, and more
Depending on the URL shortener that you use, you can do a lot of fun things with it. Most URL shorteners will allow you to replace the URL if it breaks while maintaining the same link, while others will allow you to do a whole lot more, too. I’m using Snapp, which is a fairly basic shortener, but it allows for link expiration, setting a secret password for accessing the shortened URL, and a maximum number of uses can be set before it expires. And that’s for a basic self-hosted shortener. Tools like Shlink will offer a lot more.
There are many options to choose from, and others you could try out include YOURLS, Polr, and Kutt. Snapp took mere minutes to set up and deploy, but the other options are all worth looking at, too.
Recognition and a personal touch
Your own URL is better than a generic bit.ly
If you’re hosting a URL shortener on your own server with your own domain, then you can have a personal touch with every URL that you share with others. You don’t need to rely on generic bit.ly addresses; you can have it be what you want, when you want, and that’s great for both businesses and for individuals who just want to have a bit of personality in their shortened URLs.
Many tools also offer native QR-code creation, and Snapp does too. That means you can create a custom short URL for something else, put it in a QR code, then share that QR code with others. Other services that offer a similar QR code creation ability for a URL will have built-in tracking and may even have a limited time that the QR code is active for which can only be unlocked by paying money, so not only does it add a personal touch, but it can be cheaper, too.
Better analytics
Many URL shorteners give you more data
If you want to see who’s clicking your link and from where, that’s another place where a self-hosted link shortener can come in handy. You can use the links as part of a marketing campaign, or simply share them on social media and then see where people are clicking the link from. It gives you additional statistics, and many self-hosted services give you the option of deciding what data is collected and how. For example, Snapp by default just shows geolocation data and doesn’t have many other tracking options.
Of course, if you’re using something like Cloudflare Proxy to route traffic to your self-hosted URL shortener, then much of this data will be abstracted. A proxy works both ways; your URL shortener will only see the IPs from Cloudflare’s CDN, though your IP address isn’t exposed either. Snapp may not have it all, but comparable tools like Shlink and YOURLS do.
A URL shortener can be a powerful tool
While you may not necessarily have a need for a URL shortener, they can be extremely useful to some people. Generating a QR code that can point to a site of your choosing can be great, and I’ve used it for things like QR codes that point to a Discord invite when I’ve run events in the past. You could also use it for your own self-hosted services if you didn’t want to create a lot of A records for individual services, though this would require a lot more setup with your reverse proxy to only accept traffic from the correct referrer. Still, it’s worth playing around with, especially if you have ideas of how it could be useful to you!
I use as many ad-blocking programs as possible, but no matter how many I install, real-life advertising is still there, grabbing my attention when I’m just trying to go for a walk. Thankfully, there may be a solution on the horizon. Software engineer Stijn Spanhove recently posted a concept video showing what real-time, real-life ad-blocking looks like on a pair of Snap Spectacles, and I really want it. Check it out:
The idea is that the AI in your smart glasses recognizes advertisements in your visual field and “edits them out’ in real time, sparing you from ever seeing what they want you to see.
While Spanhove’s video shows a red block over the offending ads, you could conceivably cover that Wendy’s ad with anything you want—an abstract painting, a photo of your family, an ad for Arby’s, etc.
How close are we to real-life ad-blocking?
While it’s a test at present, real-life ad-blocking for the people doesn’t seem far off. The technology is there now: current-generation consumer AI glasses like Meta Ray Bans can already identify what you’re looking at with scary accuracy.
Replacing ads is a little trickier, though. While there are AR smart-glasses on the market, like the XReal Airs, and upcoming Snap Specs, and AR experiences in VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 can already strip out parts of the real environment and replace them, there isn’t anything on the market with full AR that is practical enough for wearing all the time. Battery life and weight are the problems, but those are solvable. There are so many companies competing for the smart glasses market, it seems like only a matter of time until it’s practical to achieve real life ad-blocking.
What do you think so far?
Companies versus consumer and the creation of the ultimate echo chamber
I could see this being a killer app for smart glasses in the near future: It’s the kind of things that consumers would really want. But it’s also the kind of thing that advertisers and marketers would really not want, and this might be the biggest obstacles to real-life ad-blockers. You could envision a “cat-and-mouse” game similar to the one that’s been playing out online for years, with companies trying ingenious ways to thwart the ad-blocking glasses, like disguising ads as something else. Would there be legal challenges? Would there be issues with a mega corporation that releases smart glasses not wanting to piss off every other company? And what happens if you want to edit out ads for the very device you’re wearing?
There are sociological concerns as well. People probably wouldn’t stop at replacing ads with pixel art. They’d be editing out anything that personally annoys them: homeless people, construction sites, other humans who have traits they don’t like. Curating your own visual experience in the real world could lead to the creation of personal echo chambers that make the world look more to your liking, but less like it is, the ultimate echo chamber.
Ethical concerns aside, I would be first in line for a pair of glasses that edited reality to my liking. I know I would use them responsibly, even if I’m not sure about everyone else. Maybe I wouldn’t wear them all the time. Just almost all the time.
