My home lab has grown dramatically over the last few years to the point that it's become a critical part of my everyday productivity stack. What started as a simple NAS now includes a whole range of Docker containers, virtual machines, and monitoring tools. I depend on these tools daily, and as part of maintenance, I have to check logs or change configurations to ensure everything is working as I expect.

Every time I turn on my TV and boot into the Google TV interface, I wonder, "why did this beautiful display deserve to get trapped in the mess that is Google TV, and can I free it?" My TV boots extremely slowly. It takes its sweet time to get to the homepage and then to load apps. It makes sure to test my patience every time it does that.

I worked at a local small-town newspaper for a year as a reporter and staff writer, and I thought Otter.ai was the best way to record events, interviews, and meetings through its live transcription capabilities. I blindly used it since the instructors in my community journalism class all said it's the best way to remember the order of a conversation and ensure accurate quotes.

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every Windows user finds themselves keying a shortcut, subconsciously, perhaps a dozen times a day. The common ones have become so universal that many web interfaces and desktop apps use the same commands for simple tasks such as copying, pasting, and saving. But what about the shortcuts that we use less frequently and don't always remember, or the ones we don't know about at all?

Claude Code has a reputation for being a developer tool, and that reputation keeps a lot of people away from it who'd actually get something out of it. I avoided it for months for exactly that reason. The thing nobody really spells out is that Claude Code is mostly just file access. You point it at a folder, and from then on it can read, write, and reorganize whatever lives in there. The coding part is one use case, not the whole thing.

Over the last few years, my home lab has transformed from a box that I tinker with into a box that I rely on. At first, it ran some random services I'd spin up occasionally, but now it's my NAS, AI inference box, photo library, and backup server. As a result, it deserves a little bit more TLC than I have given it in recent years. I've kept the same old Corsair mid-tower case for essentially its entire lifespan, and when it was time to give it a big storage upgrade, I decided it was also time to put it in a case befitting a true home server, and it's one of the best upgrades I've ever made.

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over 100,000 songs each.According to Reisner, the sets have been downloaded thousands of times and, while it's impossible to know exactly who has used them, Google and Stability have both confirmed they have in research papers. Some of the sources, like the Free Music Archive dataset, are free to stream for personal use but re …Read the full story at The Verge.

If there's one thing I've learned after just a few years of running home servers, it's that self-hosting software often asks you to choose between being powerful and being user-friendly. So many times, you either get a polished experience locked behind subscriptions and paywalls, or you get an open-source alternative that has you navigating layers of menus and settings. Thankfully, Jellyfin now sits comfortably in the middle, finally leaning towards the user-friendly side.

For most people, AI and productivity go hand in hand. We use AI tools to automate tasks, save time, and get work done faster. That's how I initially viewed Claude, too. I expected it to help me improve efficiency and remove friction from my daily workflow. And it did. But the real value wasn't the time it saved. It was the way it changed how I approached creative work. Instead of simply helping me execute ideas faster, Claude helped me develop better ideas from the start. It became a space for exploration, reflection, and decision-making; something far more valuable than a traditional productivity tool.

Indulging in the “Dark Souls of synthesis.” | Image: Aleksander Stojanov / Hainbach Stefan Paul Goetsch, better known as Hainbach, is a German experimental composer, artist, and YouTuber who is perhaps most famous for making music with laboratory equipment and scientific instruments. He describes it as being like the "Dark Souls of synthesis." Despite using "hard mode" production techniques that often rely on telephone line testing equipment and gear salvaged from nuclear testing facilities, Hainbach is also incredibly prolific, releasing six albums in 2025 alone, along with a handful of singles and EPs. His latest, Gentle Hum, is a collaboration with Ah! Kosmos (Turkish composer, Başak Günak). The album is a melancholic co …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Cloud Kill Switch poses a systemic threat to hardware ownership in smart homes. The tech industry has normalized remote bricking to save on API server maintenance. However, the ultimate enthusiast response is a strict local-first validation model. If a device requires an external handshake to flip a relay or read a census date, it should not enter your house.