I've used the Pixel Launcher ever since I switched to a Pixel phone, and I completely understand why so many people like it. It's fast, clean, and blends perfectly with Android. Everything feels smooth, from opening apps to searching for files, and Google's animations make the whole experience feel polished. It also avoids the clutter that many manufacturer launchers add, which is something I've always appreciated.

Tablets are in a unique position in the North American market. As productivity devices, they're often lacking in screen real-estate or performance compared to a regular laptop, but they're big and powerful enough to replace a phone for similar tasks. As gaming devices, they're limited to touch controls without an external controller present, but pack enough punch to run more than just native-Android titles.

The AI boom caused a huge spike in PC hardware demand, which, in turn, drove up prices. Everything from GPUs to sticks of RAM saw price increases, to the point where it became unfeasible for gaming hardware manufacturers to continue selling their devices at their current prices. So, pretty much across the board, all gaming hardware manufacturers increased their prices.

I have bounced between Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and even Nextcloud over the years, and for the most part, they all did the same basic job well enough. My files stayed synced, I could access them from almost anywhere, and switching services rarely felt like a major upgrade.

There are plenty of different streaming devices available on the market, and picking the right one for what you need is essential. I purchased a Roku Stick — thinking it would be straightforward to use. It is cheap and has the essential apps you'd expect and a store where I can pick from what is missing.

There is an unwritten rule in the homelab community. When something stops working, we immediately look at our own setup first. The same thing happened a few days ago. One morning, my external access broke. I checked everything from my internet connection to router settings, firewall, and reverse proxy. The server was running, the service was running, and the internet itself was working. And yet, external access was still dead. Everything was configured exactly the way it should be. Then I started rechecking everything, and this time I noticed something: the problem wasn't inside my network at all. Something had quietly changed between my router and the wider internet without me noticing.

While NotebookLM (now rebranded to Gemini Notebook) is often touted as a research or productivity tool, its ability to answer questions about supplied sources makes it useful for searching through and summarizing key points in documents. This makes it well-suited to interesting use cases that leverage this source-based interactivity.

Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time Shanahan said only that the accident was his fault. But during a recent press conference he shared more details about the incident, including the fact that he had his Tesla's Autopilot engaged at the time. Shanahan was not passing the buck, however, saying it was his fault regardless of whether or not Autopilot was engaged. "I've had Autopilot for nine years, so I'm pretty comfortable with it and, you know, who knows what happened when I turned around? Whether it malfunctioned or whether I knocked it off? That's somethi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Mark Zuckerberg's yacht "The Launchpad" | Image: Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the closest vessel was actually Mark Zuckerberg's super yacht, Launchpad.Michael Love, a passenger on the Wilderness Legacy, posted on Bluesky that the captain announced the Launchpad was closer, but "repeatedly refused to respond," which was met with booing from the passengers. The AIS tracking (embedded below) seems to support that the Launchpad was closer to the vessel in trouble, but then stopped near the entrance …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sadly, there hasn't been a new episode of No Dogs in Space since July of 2024. Part four of the podcast's series on Can wrapped up an abbreviated season three, which focused on experimental rock. Don't get me wrong, I loved seasons one and two, but the show seemed to be gearing up for a deep dive into Krautrock, and I was hype. Unfortunately, that episode ended with hosts Marcus Parks (Last Podcast on the Left) and Carolina Hidalgo declaring they were going to do another season on punk (the topic of season one), only for the feed to go quiet. If you're a music obsessive, this is a must-listen podcast. Over the course of 73 episodes, the hu …Read the full story at The Verge.

I use Pangolin for exposing my self-hosted services publicly and Tailscale for private external access. Both work as expected. While I was setting up Headscale as a self-hosted alternative to Tailscale's cloud control server, I ran a few ping tests between devices on my home LAN. Surprisingly, some replied at 5-19ms (direct), others at 88-102ms (relayed through Tailscale's DERP). That made me wonder why traffic was detouring when both devices were on the same network. A few days ago, I was going through Pangolin’s changelogs, and the latest 1.21 update claimed to support same-network detection. That one line in the changelog made me ask myself: does this feature actually deliver what Tailscale couldn't? But the honest answer to this question took more digging than I expected.

I was getting tired of the ads and promotional content plastered across my smart TV’s interface. I’d already set up a Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi 4 to block the trackers that feed those ad profiles. So plugging my LG C2 into the network and pointing it at the Pi-hole for DNS felt like the obvious next step.