When people talk about self-hosting, it's usually around media servers, photo backups, and cloud storage replacements. And I agree, those are important, and that’s why I built my own home server in the first place.

The impending tripling of Plex's Lifetime Plex Pass cost to $750 is a big change. I've been using Plex for a long time, and in that time I've had to pay for the mobile app, then not pay but have features missing without Plex Pass, and watch the UI get more crowded.

The modern smart home has a problem, built by competing voice assistant manufacturers that don't want anyone else's devices to take over. No matter how well the devices connect into that ecosystem, they still have to play by the rules set by Amazon and Google, and be at the whimsy of how their voice models work.

Every homelabber follows a similar pattern. You start with a few containers, then you add monitoring, and then you add more monitoring. Eventually, you start writing scripts to check things automatically. I did the same and went further, adding cloud LLMs like Claude to analyze and report. But each time, after a few days, when the cost, privacy trade-offs, and external dependency didn't sit right with my self-hosting approach, I removed it and got back to the basic monitoring dashboards to hunt for everything. Service status — Uptime Kuma, container state — Portainer, resource monitoring — Beszel.

Every standalone desktop 3D printer shipped today promises the same unwritten joys of manufacturing anything you can design, in any material, straight from a spool of plastic. Yet for sheer cost efficiency and other inexplicable reasons, you'll only see a roll of Polylactic Acid or PLA shipped as the trial filament with most new printers. It is affordable, odorless, and behaves beautifully on a bare glass bed without generating toxic fumes. The ease of use has made it a universal default for print after print based on the dangerously incorrect assumption that if it looks solid on the build plate, the print will perform well in real-world conditions.

Raspberry Pi is a capable, tiny computer that can run multiple tools without needing a huge amount of power. It's not a PC replacement, but it can help you run self-hosted tools that try to replace popular paid services available as a web tool or a licensed copy. Rather than spending money each month on a popular tool, you can use a self-hosted alternative because of multiple advantages.

Technology changes extremely quickly, and AI is certainly no exception. NotebookLM, however, has always felt like a bit of an outlier here (and I say this in the best possible way). It's a tool that got upgrades here and there, sure, but it remained largely unchanged at its core for a long while. We were anticipating significant upgrades at I/O 2026, but the company decided not to bring it up by name at all (well, it did get a slight mention at the very end, tied to some Gemini/science announcement).

Hm! | Photo: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO will probably make him the richest person to ever walk the planet. And while his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk's actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse - gleefully.This is not a serious person, but his abuse of the world is deadly serious. In the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the US Agency for International Development, whose mission was a boon to public health around the globe. M …Read the full story at The Verge.

Many of us, while allocating our budget for a new build, tend to focus on the parts that directly affect performance. It's easy to convince ourselves to spend more on a faster GPU, CPU, or even RAM because we can actually see the difference when monitoring our frame rates in MSI Afterburner. I'm not against this approach, but it usually results in cutting corners on other components that give you peace of mind in the long run.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this day would never come. Siri has spent a decade and half somewhere between "sort of useful at a few things" and "utterly disastrous, why did I even try, can it honestly not even set a timer." But the wildest thing just happened: Apple put out a new version of Siri, and it actually seems to be pretty good.On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay talk about their early experiences with Siri AI, and what it means for users, and the rest of the AI industry, for the iPhone's built-in assistant to be good enough at most things. There's very little about Siri AI that feels bleeding edge or brand new, but …Read the full story at The Verge.

Linux has never been a mainstream option when it comes to operating systems, but the platform has been experiencing something of a surge in recent years, thanks in big part to the Steam Deck, which propped up Linux as a great platform for PC gaming. And things have been building up more and more, but Linux is still not a big enough platform to earn mainstream support from developers and publishers.

Nothing Phone 4A Pro | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge If you're thinking about upgrading your phone, "the best time was yesterday," according to Nothing CEO and co-founder Carl Pei, echoing a message we heard during MWC. As Android Authority reports, Pei said in a post on X that the RAM shortage has already impacted Nothing's less expensive mid-range phone: "For Phone 4A , memory costs doubled between when we decided to build the device and when it launched. They've doubled again since." He warned that "Phone prices are going up, and they'll keep going up into next year." Pei says RAM can now account for over 50 percent of the cost of a new phone. Nothing's just the latest phone maker to warn …Read the full story at The Verge.