PDF editors are often too basic to be useful or overloaded with features, pop-ups, and subscription prompts. I wanted something lightweight that could handle the everyday jobs I actually care about, whether I was on a Windows desktop, MacBook Pro, or tinkering with a Linux machine in my home lab.

I’m just as confused as you. | Image: Aundre Larrow W. Kamau Bell is one of those people who has always just seemed to be there. From Totally Biased, to Politically Re-Active, United Shades of America, and We Need to Talk About Cosby, his blend of comedy, social commentary, and political activism has helped him stand out. He's won a Peabody and four Emmys, been a Celebrity Jeopardy! champion, received honors from the ACLU, and been crowned the Ambassador of Fishbone by founding member Chris Dowd. Bell is, if nothing else, a busy man. So we're very grateful that he took time between episodes of his podcast Who's With Me, his comedy tour, and Substack of the same name, promoting his upcoming …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most gamers these days know that they need to fix several default settings before their PC is ready to rumble. Enabling XMP/EXPO, changing the refresh rate in Windows, and enabling PBO on AMD chips are relatively well-known. However, many users still don't touch the default fan curves in the BIOS, and end up leaving performance on the table.

Qwen 3.8 27B was one of the most highly-anticipated open-weights releases that I've seen in a long time, and like many others, I immediately got to work testing it out and playing with it when it dropped. I'm running it on a single Lenovo ThinkStation PGX, the compact workstation built on Nvidia's GB10 Grace Blackwell chip, packing 128 GB of unified memory and 273 GB/s of bandwidth. Out of the box, it manages a fairly dull 15 to 30 tokens a second, but with an SGLang, NVFP4, and DFlash2 speculative-decoding setup that's become the standard recipe for this hardware, it can reach around 50 tokens a second on code and reasoning.

So pretty. | Screenshot: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge I remember having a Spirograph as a kid and being obsessed with it. Its geometric patterns are hypnotic and gorgeous. I also love generative music composition. So bringing those two things together in a browser tab, I'm hooked. Musical Spirograph is a relatively simple concept. A set of points dash around the screen according to mathematical equations, generating hypotrochoids and epitrochoids. Those points pass through a series of concentric rings which trigger specific notes.Honestly, that alone is fun enough, but you can customize it quite a bit. There are six different virtual rotors to pick from, you can have up to three arms drawing …Read the full story at The Verge.

Putting together a Network-Attached Storage server is a popular intermediate-level project for Raspberry Pi tinkerers, and for good reason. A backup rig that barely sips any power and remains small enough to be carried eveyrwhere sounds really neat on paper. That said, its utility starts to shrink when you factor the Raspberry Pi’s ARM CPU, massively-inflated prices, low performance, and I/O limitations into the equation.

AI coding tools have changed so quickly that choosing the right one no longer feels as simple as picking a familiar editor and installing a few extensions. Over the past month, I have rotated between VS Code, Cursor, and Devin Desktop for my everyday coding work to see how each one handled real projects, quick fixes, and longer AI sessions.

Most smart displays come with a fixed set of screens, and you get whatever the team behind the firmware happened to think of. Usually that's a clock, the weather, a calendar, and after that you're stuck with it. I've used a few of these over the years and the pattern's always the same; they're mostly cookie-cutter devices, nothing more and nothing less.

In my latest move a few months ago, I had to transition to a new ISP, and with that transition came the dreaded carrier grade NAT jail cell. My IPv4 was essentially blocked from self-hosting anything I expected to be accessible from outside my home network, but the good news is: my ISP does supply a dedicated IPv6 for me. I turned it on and started binding some services to it, and while those mostly worked without a hitch, I began seeing unusual behavior from my non-IPv6 applications.

Getting the TV I want with the right specs means settling for whatever operating system it runs. However, the OS that ships on smart TVs is typically slower and more limited than any modern streaming device I plug in. TVs come with a locked-down home screen, ads, and a limited curated app store from the manufacturer.

Routers always take the immediate blame for bad Wi-Fi, when in fact there is a list of suspects that should be investigated. I learned this the hard way. After a lengthy stream of router troubleshooting and replacing the device twice, the real culprit behind my network bottleneck finally revealed itself: an old Cat 5 Ethernet cable connecting my modem to my router.

There has been a lot of talk in the self-hosted media community about Jellyfin's future. Some core team volunteers for the open-source project left, and development has stalled (ish). But past the headlines, it's clear that Jellyfin server and client development has continued to grow rapidly for an open-source project.