Battery-powered Zigbee sensors are killing your mesh, not strengthening it

When you’re first starting out with a Zigbee network, it’s easy to misunderstand the way that the mesh actually works. You might think the more Zigbee devices that you add, the stronger the coverage becomes. As a result, you buy a ten-pack of battery-powered door, motion, and temperature sensors and place them all across your home, but then suddenly, half of them stop responding or go offline in Home a**istant. This is because battery-powered devices never route traffic or repeat signals. A house filled with 40 battery-powered Zigbee sensors has zero mesh resilience. If it lacks mains-powered routing hardware, understanding the strict functional boundary between Zigbee routers and end devices is the difference between a flaky smart home and a bulletproof automation network.

Dylan Phillips
United Kingdom

I stopped force-shutting down my PC after Windows 11’s August update fixed this one thing

I confess I don’t turn off my main PC that often, but the times I have over the last year have felt like a struggle. It’s set to shut down when I press the power button because I don’t use hibernate or sleep on my desktop. But I’ve pressed the...

Tracey Stone
United Kingdom

RetroArch’s Netplay feature is why it’s still the best emulation frontend

Emulation is the easiest and most convenient way to experience a lot of classic titles these days, but for many games, there's something missing. Many classic titles relied on multiplayer support for their value, but they were designed to be played on the same console, not over the internet.

Josefine Kristensen
Denmark

Lenovo confirms Legion Go issues after gamers report bricked devices

Cursed BIOS. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge When a company's software update turns your computer into a useless brick, should fixes be free? Framework, the modular computer startup, apparently thinks so. But it's not clear that computing giant Lenovo will go that far. Three weeks after a...

Daniel Martinez
Dallas

Plex is asking to share your data for ads, but your opt-out might not be sticking

It's always good to know where your data is going and who's selling it. If you use Plex, there's a good chance you'll see, or have already seen, a big data collection consent screen pop up that asks if you're okay with personalised ads. And while you can opt out...

Uroš Kralj
Serbia

My phone runs an AI a**istant entirely offline, and I stopped uploading my documents to cloud chatbots

Using a chatbot that doesn't let you upload documents is almost unheard of these days - the document workflow is integral to an AI workflow now. And they've gotten really good at working with documents. However, the docs that would actually benefit the most from the summary-and-query treatment are also...

Michael Johnson
Chicago

5 features Claude used to make you pay for that are now free

Almost four years ago, the idea of paying $20 a month for an AI chatbot that simply responded to your queries would have sounded ridiculous. ChatGPT was the tool that introduced millions of people to the concept of generative artificial intelligence, and paying a recurring subscription just to talk to...

William Garcia
Boston

I turned my Raspberry Pi Pico into a leverless fightstick, and it was surprisingly easy

Leverless fightsticks have been the craze of the fighting game community for the past few years, with many variations being released. Many of them could get quite expensive, but after learning a bunch about electronics, I realized they’re actually quite simple. I’m not serious enough about fighting games to buy...

William Garcia
Boston

Open-source maintainers are drowning in AI-generated garbage, and it’s getting worse

Artificial intelligence has been around in one form or another for decades, but it's quickly growing in scope with the rise of the language models (LLMs). These tools are trained on massive amounts of text to understand, summarize, and generate human-like language. LLMs power hosted tools such as ChatGPT and...

Beatrice Gagné
Canada

I retired my Fire TV Stick after a week with a real Android TV box, and the difference is hard to ignore

I've owned many Fire TV Sticks over the years. They were a viable option until Amazon released the new Fire TV Stick with Vega OS. The locked-down, Linux-powered OS doesn't support sideloading Android apps, so I decided to graduate to a real Android device.

Jane Smith
Los Angeles

The cat-and-mouse game over 3D-printed guns has begun

The creator of the world's first 3D-printed gun claims he's developed a way to thwart government-mandated software meant to block 3D printers from making firearms. It's an opening volley in what's shaping up to be an evolving battle between regulators trying to stem the tide of ghost guns and individuals...

Emily Brown
Houston

My most important backup lives on a drive I unplug, and that’s the entire reason it still works

It's very easy to preach about a 3-2-1 backup scheme, but actually doing it takes time. It's not particularly difficult, but the money and effort requirement are often what keep most from actually implementing one. Since growing my family and beginning to move more things to the self-hosted realm, I...

Sophia Wilson
Atlanta

The BenQ RD280UG convinced me that 3:2 displays are the future of productivity

I use ultrawide monitors most of the time, so the first few minutes using this 3:2 display from BenQ was an adjustment. But once I got over the initial shock, I discovered how much nicer it is to read text. Or should I say rediscovered, because I grew up on...