True story: when we forgot to pack a hairdryer on a beach trip last year, I bought Wolfbox’s awesome MF100 mini blower instead. (It’s one of the top-rated ones in comparison tests.)

Seems a lot of people got password reset requests from Instagram over the last few days, including several Verge staffers and members of their family. The email might look legit. It might even have that little blue checkmark in Gmail. But, it probably came from a scammer. Honestly, it’s best practice to never click links in emails anyway.

The Sandwich Alignment Game is the time-waster you didn’t know you needed this weekend. You could lose serious time placing these 57 sandwiches on a D&D-style alignment grid. Now, some people might say this isn’t really a game, but I disagree. Deciding whether an eggplant parm or a meatball parm is more lawful than the other requires real mental dexterity.

It’s not just a tongue-twister — the Pocket Taco is GameSir’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone, not to be confused with 8BitDo’s tiny Game Boy styled controller for your phone. This one’s Bluetooth rather than USB-C, and cradles your phone’s bottom instead of hanging off the USB-C port. It also has a $35 price and a March release date.

It’s just one of two Game Boy-styled mini-controllers that cradle your phone at CES 2026. This one plugs directly into your phone with USB-C, is coming summer 2026, but doesn’t have a price yet. GameSir has a Bluetooth one for $35 that’s coming March and cradles your phone. (YouTube video version here.)

The company calls it Senso, and it’s cute! Detachable heads and charger so you can leave the probe in soil. Light, temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, plus a whole AI pitch I’m not quite buying. I’d be more tempted if it weren’t a Kickstarter and had a local smart home API. (YouTube version here.)

Before saying goodbye to CES 2026, I roamed around without a destination in mind to soak up the scene with my camera. After a week of operating at breakneck pace for long hours, it felt meditative to just capture a tiny glimpse of tech on display — including some human (and very non-human) moments.

There were a couple Steam Machine mockups at Jsaux’s CES booth, but they were just shells showing off the company’s cheesy looking stickers. The front display concept wasn’t there.

Anil Dash wrote a really fun, really deep history of Markdown, the text markup language John Gruber created that has subsequently become totally ubiquitous online. Dash also argues that the idea behind Markdown, and the forces that made it huge, hold important lessons that the current tech industry — and AI companies in particular — could really stand to learn from.

Former Polygon staffers Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah are launching a new publication called Mothership, “which aims to analyze games specifically through the lens of gender and identity.”

A Waymo made the unfortunate decision to drive on light rail tracks in Phoenix with a passenger inside while a train was approaching. The passenger made the right call to abandon the robotaxis, even if it meant getting out in the middle of traffic. Valley Metro, which oversees light rail service, says there were no significant delays as a result of the incident. This comes a few weeks after a blackout caused a massive Waymo traffic jam in San Francisco.