LCLDIY set out to create a portable computer / laptop that embodied the gritty feel of a civilization being rebuilt after disaster strikes. That’s exactly what he’s accomplished with this monster, a massive, heavy beast of a device that appears to have been assembled from spare pieces gathered from the local hardware shop.

The exterior of this thing is a dead giveaway, a big 3D print job created from digital files by LCLDIY using a Nokia port of Blender. The walls are thick, and the edges are all sharp angles, as if someone simply duct-taped a lot of things together for an emergency fix, you know? The screen tilts, which is convenient, but the whole design seems robust while remaining portable enough to fit in a backpack.

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Inside, there’s a 10-inch electroluminescent display that lights up on its own and casts a nice glow throughout. The display is very stunning: a faint halo surrounding the active area adds depth, and the entire thing exudes an old-school vibe that’s ideal for the theme. These panels aren’t cheap; they either come from aerospace surplus stock or a specialized supplier, and LCLDIY chose the fancy-schmancy LJ64H052 or EL640.480 series after some testing because they’re expensive, but the light output is excellent for low-light environments, and it just feels right at home with the overall theme.

Driving that display is a different story, since regular GPUs aren’t well-suited to this particular technology, so LCLDIY had to think outside the box and create a unique open-source graphics card based on the obsolete CHIPS 65548/5 processor. You know what? It works flawlessly, and the design files are available online for anybody to use as a blueprint for customizing the display for future projects.

The rest of the system is rather simple, which is good given the overall ‘survivalist’ vibe. An old cash register motherboard does the heavy lifting, as it’s not exactly rocket science here, and keeping things basic keeps the power demand low and the internal architecture clean. Let’s be honest: the whole point of this device is to be robust, thus the system is meant to run quietly and cool, with no fans that might break the instant you take it out of the house.

Keyboard input is a laser projection device that pops out from the side, similar to having a little projector keyboard that displays a full layout onto whatever flat surface you require, and it even has mouse mode for cursor control. The best thing is that when you close the lid, all your valuables are safe and sound while you’re on the move.
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Some weekends are for comfort, others are for chaos. This one? A bit of both. Whether it’s revisiting a gaming icon that defined an era, diving into a massively upgraded open-world epic, or trying out this generation’s cult classic title set to leave Game Pass soon, this lineup has range.

1. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered

There’s something oddly magical about going back to where it all began, and Tomb Raider I-III Remastered absolutely leans into that feeling. This collection bundles the original adventures of Lara Croft with a fresh coat of paint, letting players toggle between classic visuals and modern remastered graphics on the fly. At its core, though, this is still the same methodical, puzzle-heavy platforming experience that defined the late ’90s with its deliberate jumps, environmental traps, and that constant sense of isolation.

What makes this worth playing today isn’t just nostalgia, but how distinct it feels compared to modern action-adventure games. There’s no hand-holding here. Levels are sprawling, secrets are genuinely hidden, and figuring things out feels earned. That slower, more thoughtful pacing can be surprisingly refreshing if most recent games have felt a bit too guided or cinematic.

Add to that, the remaster does a great job of smoothing out rough edges without stripping away the original charm. More importantly, the controls, while still rooted in the classic grid-based movement, feel far more approachable than they used to. Right now, this one’s a no-brainer if you’re subscribed to PlayStation Plus, where it’s been newly added. Otherwise, it typically sits around $29.99 in the US.

2. Crimson Desert

Crimson Desert has been in the news, and on top of Steam charts, for what feels like forever, but recent updates have quietly transformed it into something far more compelling than its earlier previews suggested. Built by Pearl Abyss, the game blends large-scale open-world exploration with cinematic storytelling, placing players in a war-torn continent filled with political intrigue, brutal combat, and dynamic encounters.

The core gameplay revolves around fluid melee combat, large battle sequences, and emergent world events. But what’s really started to click post-launch is how reactive the world feels. Recent patches have significantly improved movement and abilities, making traversal a lot more engaging, without wasting a lot of the player’s time. Performance has also seen noticeable gains. Earlier complaints around stuttering and inconsistent frame pacing have largely been addressed with optimization updates, especially on mid-to-high-end PCs.

At around $59.99 in the US, it’s positioned as a premium experience, and while it may not be perfect, it finally feels complete. This weekend is a great time to jump in, especially if the initial skepticism kept it off the radar before.

3. Grand Theft Auto V

Few games need an introduction quite like Grand Theft Auto V, but this weekend, it comes with a bit of urgency attached. The game is set to leave Xbox Game Pass later this month, which means this might be the perfect (and possibly last) excuse to jump back into Los Santos without spending a dime. Whether it’s revisiting the story or just causing absolute chaos in free roam, GTA V remains as easy to pick up and play as ever.

At its core, the game follows three protagonists (Michael, Franklin, and Trevor), whose lives intertwine through a series of heists, betrayals, and high-stakes missions. But let’s be honest, most players aren’t coming back just for the story. The real magic of GTA V lies in its sandbox. It’s one of those rare games where simply existing in the world is entertaining enough. Even today, Los Santos feels alive in a way few open-world games manage.

And if the single-player doesn’t hook, there’s always GTA Online, which continues to evolve with new content, modes, and absurdly over-the-top activities. With a usual price hovering around $29.99 in the US, depending on the edition, getting access through Game Pass right now is a steal, especially with the clock ticking.

Instead of raising prices again, Netflix may have to lower its subscription costs in Italy. A court in Rome recently ruled that Netflix owed its Italian users a refund for price hikes between 2017 and January 2024 and a reduction to previous subscription costs. On top of the refunds, Netflix Italia would have to inform its affected subscribers of their right to a refund.

The lawsuit was originally filed by Movimento Consumatori, a consumer rights organization based in Rome. The group’s president, Alessandro Mostaccio, said in a press release that more than 25,000 Netflix users have complained to Movimento Consumatori that they’re not satisfied with the price increases over the years. According to the lawyers representing the consumers, Premium subscribers are entitled to a refund of roughly 500 euros, while Standard tier customers should get back about 250 euros.

Mostaccio also said that if Netflix doesn’t immediately reduce prices and refund its customers, the consumer rights organization would pursue a class action lawsuit to recover funds. A Netflix spokesperson told Reuters that it would appeal the Italian court’s ruling, adding that the company takes “consumer rights very seriously and believe our terms have always ​complied with Italian laws and practice.” On the other side of the world, Netflix again raised prices for its US customers, this time across all of its subscription tiers.

Microsoft wants to offer the ‘most complete AI and app agent factory’.

Microsoft has released three new AI foundational models, created in-house, in a move that places the company in direct competition with enterprise AI rivals, despite its deep ties with OpenAI.

The new foundational models target three of the most commercially viable modalities: transcription, voice and images. The models are already powering Microsoft’s products, including Copilot, Bing and Azure Speech, the company said, and will be available in a preview via the Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

With this, Microsoft is furthering its goals of delivering “the most complete AI and app agent factory”, it said.

‘MAI-Transcribe-1’ is a first-generation speech recognition model expected to deliver “enterprise-grade accuracy” across 25 languages at around 50pc lower GPU costs than its alternatives. The model scores lower than 4pc average ‘word error rate’ on accuracy benchmarks, while GPT-Transcribe is at 4.2pc and Gemini 3.1 Flash is at 4.9pc.

‘MAI-Voice-1’ is a speech generation model that, according to Microsoft, can produce 60 seconds of expressive audio in under one second on a single GPU.

Together, the two models are meant to deliver an audio AI stack capable of assisting in call-centre workflows and other voice-driven services, such as providing live captioning, automatic subtitling and converting interactions into structured data for research.

Microsoft’s second-generation image model, ‘MAI-Image-2’, is expected to offer artists a way to “explore” different visual directions. The model is created in “close collaboration” with artists, the company said, and is meant to help enterprises create branding and communication material.

MAI-Image-2 debuted in third spot on the Arena.ai leaderboard for image model families, and is currently ranked fifth.

Microsoft, valued at $2.7trn, already offers several AI-embedded apps and platform services. Its Copilot Studio lets users build agents, while the Foundry services offer a place to train and scale models.

Meanwhile, a recently announced Copilot integration with Anthropic’s Claude Cowork is meant to target the growing demand for autonomous agents.

Microsoft backed OpenAI in its recent $122bn funding round alongside the likes of Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. Late last year, the company announced a $10bn investment plan for a data centre in Portugal. It also announced a $37.5bn quarterly capital expenditure bill at the end of January.

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In short: Anthropic has blocked Claude Pro and Max subscribers from using their flat-rate plans with third-party AI agent frameworks, starting with OpenClaw. The move, which took effect on 4 April 2026, shifts the cost of running autonomous agents onto users through a pay-as-you-go billing tier. The creator of OpenClaw, who joined OpenAI in February, called the decision a betrayal of open-source developers. Thousands of users now face cost increases of up to 50 times their previous monthly outlay.

Anthropic has ended a quiet subsidy that made its Claude models the engine of choice for the open-source AI agent community. Starting on 4 April 2026, users of Claude’s Pro and Max subscription tiers can no longer pipe their plan’s usage limits through third-party frameworks such as OpenClaw. If they want to keep using those tools with Claude, they must pay separately under a new “extra usage” billing system. Anthropic says it will extend the restriction to all third-party harnesses in the coming weeks.

The announcement landed as a jolt for thousands of developers who had structured their personal AI setups around the assumption that a flat monthly subscription was enough. For many of them, it no longer is.

The economics that broke the model

The logic behind the change is straightforward even if the timing was not. Claude’s subscription plans were designed around conversational use: a human opens a chat window, types a query, and reads a response. Agentic frameworks operate on a fundamentally different model. A single OpenClaw instance running autonomously for a full day, browsing the web, managing calendars, responding to messages, executing code, can consume the equivalent of $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs, depending on the task load. Under a $200-per-month Max subscription, that is an unsustainable transfer of compute costs from the user to Anthropic.

“Anthropic’s subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” said Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic. “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritising our customers using our products and API.”

The scale of the problem was significant. More than 135,000 OpenClaw instances were estimated to be running at the time of the announcement, and industry analysts had noted a price gap of more than five times between what heavy agentic users paid under flat subscriptions and what equivalent usage would cost at API rates. Anthropic’s subscription business was, in effect, quietly cross-subsidising a class of usage it had not priced for.

What OpenClaw is, and why this matters

OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. Originally released in November 2025 under the name Clawdbot, it was a side project: Steinberger wanted to see what would happen if you gave a large language model persistent memory, tool access, and the ability to communicate through messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The answer, it turned out, was that an enormous number of people wanted exactly that.

The project was renamed twice in three days in late January 2026: first to Moltbot, after Anthropic raised trademark concerns about the phonetic similarity to “Claude,” and then to OpenClaw three days later. By 2 March 2026, the repository had accumulated 247,000 GitHub stars and 47,700 forks. It had become what many observers were calling the fastest-growing GitHub project in history, reaching 100,000 stars in under 48 hours at its peak. The framework supports more than 50 integrations and works across Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, and DeepSeek. Tencent built an enterprise platform directly on top of it, demonstrating that OpenClaw’s influence had already extended well beyond individual hobbyists.

A convenient timing problem

The restriction becomes more pointed given what happened in February. On 14 February 2026, Steinberger announced he was leaving his own project to join OpenAI. Sam Altman posted publicly that Steinberger would “drive the next generation of personal agents” at the company, and that OpenClaw would be moved to an open-source foundation with OpenAI’s continued support. Steinberger wrote in a blog post that “teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.”

Anthropic’s restrictions were announced and enforced within weeks of that move, a timeline that has not escaped notice. Steinberger and fellow investor Dave Morin attempted to negotiate a softer landing, approaching Anthropic directly, but by their account only managed to delay enforcement by a single week.

“First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source,” Steinberger wrote in response to the ban.

Whether the timing reflects competitive calculation or coincidence, the effect is the same. The most popular open-source agent framework, now loosely affiliated with OpenAI, has been effectively priced off Claude’s subscription tier.

The cost shock for users

For developers accustomed to unlimited agentic runs under a flat plan, the new billing structure is a significant disruption. Under pay-as-you-go extra usage, per-interaction costs are estimated at $0.50 to $2.00 per task, which makes heavy agentic use expensive in ways that a fixed monthly plan obscured. Some users report facing cost increases of 10 to 50 times their previous outlay. Hobbyist developers and solo practitioners, the cohort that built OpenClaw’s early adoption, are most exposed.

Anthropic has offered two concessions to smooth the transition. Subscribers receive a one-time credit equal to their monthly plan cost, redeemable until 17 April. Users who pre-purchase extra usage bundles can receive discounts of up to 30%.

Users who want to continue running OpenClaw with Claude can do so either through those extra usage bundles or by supplying a separate Claude API key, which bypasses subscription limits but charges at full API rates: $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens for Claude Sonnet 4.6, and $15 and $75 respectively for Claude Opus 4.6.

Anthropic’s closing ecosystem

The decision fits a broader pattern. Anthropic committed $100 million to its Claude Partner Network in March 2026, formalising a web of enterprise consulting and integration relationships built around its own products. Separately, the company has launched a marketplace for Claude-powered software, allowing enterprise customers to purchase third-party applications without Anthropic taking a commission, but through channels Anthropic controls. The pattern is consistent: Anthropic wants the revenue, the data, and the governance that comes with owning the customer relationship, and it is making it incrementally less attractive to route that relationship through tools it did not build.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s own developer environment, is included in Pro and Max subscription plans and is not subject to the new restrictions. The message to developers is implicit but legible: build inside Anthropic’s ecosystem, or pay API rates to build outside it.

Anthropic’s $3 billion raise in early 2026 was accompanied by language about building “artificial super-intelligence for science” and expanding its research infrastructure. What it also reflects is the commercial pressure of running one of the most computationally intensive products in the world at scale. Compute costs do not flatten because users prefer flat subscription pricing. For an AI industry that spent 2025 racing to acquire users, 2026 is increasingly about working out who actually pays for them, and how much.