Month: October 2026

Xbox is testing a weekly streak feature: use your console 3 days a week

Xbox seems to be trying out a new weekly streak feature for some Xbox Insider users on console, with a counter that keeps track of how regularly you use your Xbox.

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A few Xbox Insider members have already seen the streak feature on the Xbox dashboard and inside the profile menu. To keep it going, you have to use your Xbox on three different days in the same week. Each day gets a checkmark, and a flame icon shows how many weeks in a row you’ve kept the streak alive.

Microsoft hasn’t said anything publicly about the test yet. It’s also not clear whether the weekly streak would come with any kind of reward, since it appears to sit apart from Xbox Rewards, Xbox Game Pass quests, and other engagement experiments like Mythic Achievements.

If you’re already on Xbox most weeks, this is one to keep an eye on. If streak mechanics tend to make your downtime feel like homework, though, it may not sound like much of a perk.

For now, the weekly streak feature only seems to be showing up for some Xbox Insider users on Xbox consoles.

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YouTube on Android Automotive now gets background play

YouTube has begun rolling out background play on Android Automotive for YouTube Premium subscribers driving cars with Google built-in, and Google says more vehicles should get it over the next few weeks. One important distinction here: this is for Android Automotive, not Android Auto. So you’ll need a car that runs Google’s built-in operating system, not the phone-projected version that shows up through your handset.

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For anyone who actually uses YouTube Premium in the car, this is a pretty handy change. You can start a video while the car is parked, then keep the audio going once you pull away. That makes podcasts, interviews, live streams, and longer YouTube videos a lot easier to listen to without the whole thing falling apart the moment you start driving.

Google had already said a feature like this was on the way in 2025, and it’s landing at the same time as a redesigned Play Store. According to Google, the new version should work better across different screen sizes and dashboard layouts, make apps easier to find, and support a catalog that now has more than 700 apps. That list includes STARZ, Firefox, Ludo King, and JioHotstar.

It also lines up with Google’s bigger push into in-car video. The company has previously said Android Auto should get video apps later on, and the Android Automotive market market, the in-car video market, and the wider app market are all expected to grow fast over the next several years. The rollout to Android Automotive vehicles should continue over the coming weeks, though safety rules and market-by-market availability are still going to shape where this shows up first.

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3 Body Problem gets seasons 2 and 3 on Netflix after 536 million hours watched

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, adapted from Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, ended up as the streamer’s most-watched sci-fi series released that year, according to Netflix’s What We Watched report. It logged more than 536 million hours.

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Netflix says 3 Body Problem opened with about 11 million views, reached the Top 10 in 93 countries, and stayed in the global Top 10 for seven weeks. That run helped lock in two more seasons, and production on the next chapter is reportedly already underway in the UK and Hungary. A little context matters here, though: Netflix has only been publishing this level of data since 2023, and shows like Stranger Things are often placed in a different category.

The series, reportedly budgeted at $20 million per episode, follows humanity’s response to alien first contact. It has the scale of invasion movies like Independence Day and War of the Worlds, but it also leans into physics, existential risk, and bigger philosophical questions. Its TV-friendly “Oxford Five” changes have won praise for making the story easier to get into, and plenty of criticism too, especially in China, where some viewers see them as a Westernization of the books.

If you’re in the mood for prestige sci-fi with real word-of-mouth behind it, this one’s an easy pick.

You can stream 3 Body Problem on Netflix now.

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Tesla robotaxis now face federal review: alleged school-zone speeding claims

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, opened a case on October 9 after a defect petition targeting Tesla’s 2026 robotaxi service. For anyone who follows Tesla closely, the core claim is straightforward: some driverless Tesla vehicles were allegedly speeding through active school zones.

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Here’s what the petition actually says. Tesla’s Automated Driving System is accused of exceeding reduced school-zone speed limits in roughly 1,000 vehicles, including 2026 Model Y robotaxis and the Tesla Cybercab. NHTSA says it received the petition on September 23, 2026, then opened the case on October 9. The filing points to four incidents drawn from three social media videos and one formal complaint. So far, though, there haven’t been any crashes, injuries, or deaths tied to the issue.

For people tracking robotaxis, this one matters. An evaluation is just the opening step, not a recall, and it can go in a few different directions: a formal investigation, requests for more information, or no action at all. Still, this carries more weight than Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Supervised, or FSD Supervised, because in a driverless service Tesla is the operator, not the person sitting in the car.

You can follow the case through NHTSA filings. It also lands as the third federal action in a little over a month, alongside a Tesla Cybercab design review focused on the lack of side mirrors, pedals, and a steering wheel; a separate NHTSA probe into FSD over red-light behavior and driving on the wrong side of the road; earlier Austin launch videos and user reports about school-zone speeds; and similar NHTSA scrutiny of Waymo over school zones, school buses, and child safety, which ended with a voluntary software recall.

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House of the Dragon gets its ending: HBO confirms season 4 finale

HBO has confirmed that House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel, will wrap with season 4. If the current timing holds, that final season will land on HBO and HBO Max in 2028, and showrunner Ryan Condal is already at work on it.

That also tells you where Warner Bros. seems to be heading next. Aegon’s Conquest has, for all practical purposes, been set up as the follow-up: a June 2029 movie centered on Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya as they invade Westeros on Balerion, Meraxes, and Vhagar. It would be the first Westeros story made for theaters, and the most obvious continuation of the franchise through the Targaryens, the dragons, and the Iron Throne.

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A four-season run also lines up with George R.R. Martin’s earlier view of how the Dance of the Dragons should be told. It keeps the adaptation closer to Fire & Blood and gives the story a better shot at avoiding the rushed pacing that hurt the final stretch of Game of Thrones.

For anyone who follows Westeros, this is a meaningful update, even with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms set to return after its January 2026 debut and several other projects still on the way: 10,000 Ships, the animated series Sea Snake, an animated Yi Ti series, and, based on earlier reports, a Jon Snow sequel that could also involve Arya Stark. There’s also the stage play Game of Thrones: The Mad King, due in August 2026.

You can stream House of the Dragon on HBO and HBO Max. Its final chapter is expected in 2028, now that HBO has confirmed the series will end with season 4.

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Practical Magic 2 gets its digital release date: premium VOD arrives October 13

Warner Bros.’ Practical Magic 2 hits premium digital platforms on October 13, 2026.

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Warner Bros. is giving Practical Magic 2 a standard post-theatrical rollout, not yanking it from theaters, just over a month after its September 10, 2026 opening. By its fifth weekend, the movie had gone from more than 4,000 domestic screens to roughly 1,200, pulled in about $1.3 million, and slipped out of the top 10. So far it has made around $103 million worldwide against a budget of about $75 million. That lines up pretty closely with the 1998 original, which had a similar budget, underwhelmed at the box office, and only later found its cult following. Susanne Bier directed this sequel, which draws from Alice Hoffman’s 2021 novel The Book of Magic. Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, and Stockard Channing all return, with Joey King and Maisie Williams joining as Sally’s grown daughters. Early fan interest was there, then cooled off as mixed word of mouth set in and the critics score landed at 36% on Rotten Tomatoes, though the movie still has the pull of that cast reunion and the easy autumn fantasy vibe.

If you’ve been holding off until you could watch Practical Magic 2 at home, this is probably the moment.

You’ll be able to rent or buy Practical Magic 2 on Apple TV and Prime Video starting October 13, and the 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD release follows on December 1, 2026.

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Paris Auto Show returns: the EVs America is missing

The Paris Auto Show is back this year with a full slate of in-person vehicle debuts, and for the first time in years, it actually feels like the show matters again.

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What jumps out is Europe’s push toward smaller, cheaper EVs and practical family cars, not the SUVs and pickups that still dominate the U.S. That tells you where the market is heading there: battery-electric cars are likely to keep taking a bigger share of sales.

Citroën’s retro 2CV concept makes that point better than anything else here. Citroën expects a production version in about two years, priced at roughly €15,000 ($16,766). The cabin is simple, but it still has personality, with a removable portable radio, an 8-inch touchscreen, and comic-book-style graphics. A budget EV doesn’t have to feel dull. You can also see the pressure building from Chinese brands including BYD, Denza, Geely, and XPeng, all of which showed up in Paris with a stronger presence.

If you care about the most affordable EV ideas, this is a show worth watching. Still, a lot of these cars probably won’t make it to the U.S., because the business case is weaker, buyers here still prefer larger vehicles, and the added burden of safety and regulatory costs, tariffs, import rules, and the 25% Chicken Tax makes things even harder. The split looks sharper when Stellantis is bringing back a V8 Hellcat-powered Charger in America while its European brands keep pushing small electric cars. You can follow these debuts from the Paris Auto Show, even if many of the most interesting ones are likely to stay in Europe.

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Claude Code helps build a Linux kernel performance fix: Linus Torvalds says it was used for the patch series

Linus Torvalds has now turned to Anthropic’s Claude Code for a new Linux kernel patch series, and not for some throwaway cleanup. This one goes after a page-cache bottleneck that’s been around for a long time. In the Linux kernel mailing list post, Torvalds says the tool, working under his direction, produced the eight patches, the test programs, the review work, and even the first draft of the cover letter. The target is a very real slowdown: multiple threads doing tiny reads from the same cached file, which ends up hammering folio reference counts and bouncing a cache line back and forth across CPU cores.

Torvalds gave a concrete example. On a 4-core, 8-thread Intel Core i7-8565U, he said that eight threads issuing 16-byte pread() calls against the same page caused one shared cache line to account for 99.92% of cross-core load through HITMs.

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The fix, as Torvalds described it, is to delay page-cache memory reuse until an RCU grace period has passed. That lets readers inside an RCU read-side section copy data into user buffers without first grabbing a folio reference, while still preserving memory safety. In Torvalds’ testing, throughput went from roughly 10 million reads per second to more than 30 million.

If you keep an eye on Linux performance work, this patch series is one to watch.

Torvalds is still drawing a hard line on responsibility. People have to direct the tool, review the output, and understand the code they’re sending in. He also says Linux kernel contributions that use tools like this now need clear disclosure, including tags such as Co-developed-by. If you want to track the series, it’s on the Linux kernel mailing list.

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Netflix unveils first trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew

Netflix dropped the first official trailer for its upcoming film Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew on October 13, 2026, and it finally gives people a proper look at the streamer’s long-awaited return to C.S. Lewis’ fantasy world. From the footage alone, Netflix is clearly aiming for an origin-story adaptation on full event-movie scale.

The trailer also confirms a February 12, 2027 theatrical release, IMAX included, before Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew arrives on Netflix on April 2, 2027. That’s a bigger cinema rollout than you usually get from the streamer. It’s also the first screen adaptation of Lewis’ 1955 novel, which was published sixth in The Chronicles of Narnia but comes first in the series timeline, so Netflix is starting at the beginning instead of going back to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

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Greta Gerwig wrote and directed the film for Netflix. The company picked up the Narnia rights in 2018 and has set this up as the first of two Narnia films from her.

The story follows Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer after Uncle Andrew pulls them into a string of world-hopping adventures that lead to Aslan, Jadis, and the creation of Narnia itself. The cast includes David McKenna, Beatrice Campbell, Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, and Meryl Streep, with Streep voicing Aslan.

If you’ve been waiting to see what Netflix’s Narnia actually looks like, this trailer is worth your time. Early reaction online is already split, though, with some viewers excited to see what Greta Gerwig does after Barbie and others more cautious about how the books’ religious themes and mythology will be handled.

You can watch the trailer now on Netflix’s official channels.

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Why should you switch to Safari today? Apple explains it in two fun videos

Apple has launched a campaign to remind us why we’re much better off in Safari than in Google Chrome. With a dedicated page and two videos, the company focuses on how Safari is designed to get the most out of our Apple devices and to do so with stronger privacy protections and by offering us a cleaner browsing experience.

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More speed, better battery life, and above all, privacy

Apple explains the situation with data. Safari can give us up to five extra hours of video playback on a Mac compared with what we’d get with Chrome, and it’s up to 35% faster at loading the pages we visit most often.

The key lies in the integration. Safari can optimize performance and power use at the same time, because Apple controls the operating system and the hardware, but there’s much more. While Google’s business model is advertising and it uses its various services, including Google Chrome, to collect data and show us ads, Safari has a completely different business model. The first video focuses on that.

The second video covers Distraction Control. A system that lets us hide any part of a web page just by clicking on it. A system exceptionally useful for browsing, since it lets us interact with much cleaner pages that give us faster access to the information we’re interested in.

Safari also includes the Intelligent Tracking Prevention system, which stops the most common trackers, private browsing locked with Face ID, and Safari profiles, designed to separate our browsing so that tracking, as well as the accounts we’ve signed in to, doesn’t carry over across sessions.

It’s clear that Safari has the advantage of being developed specifically for our devices, but it goes beyond that. Browsing privacy is key, and Apple offers a solution that is nothing like Google’s. Switching to Safari makes more sense today than ever.