When the Steam Machine arrived, everyone, understandably, focused on the hardware and the price. After all, the Steam Machine will live and die on how powerful it is and how much it costs, so people were very interested in both elements.

Playing Windows games on an Android phone has gone from being a party trick to a practical reality at some point in the last few years. Most of the credit goes to Winlator and the open-source stack underneath it: namely Wine, Box64, DXVK, and an increasingly mature set of community GPU drivers. Apps like GameHub and GameNative built consumer-friendly launchers on top of that same stack, and for a lot of people, the experience is now good enough to be a genuine alternative to the likes of the Steam Deck. It doesn't help that GameHub has been marred by controversy, either.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about the streaming industry, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedStreaming was once a reprieve from cable. Not only could you watch whatever you wanted at any given time, but you didn't have to sit through five-minute-long commercial breaks. And the best part was the price: Netflix, for example, cost just $7.99 / month when it launched its standalone streaming service in 2010. Amazon's Prime Video was the same, offering ad-free streaming as a p …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've used Google Maps for years without giving much thought to other navigation apps. It handled everything I needed, so I never had a reason to look elsewhere.

I'm not here to argue about the controversies surrounding image or video generation handled by generative AI models. Artists should be paid for their work, end of. But if you're going to use LLMs and their ilk, running the tools locally is the way to go. It keeps your data private, lets you generate images that commercial tools won't let you, and you don't have to pay a monthly subscription fee.

Out of all the keyboard shortcuts available on Windows, I think Alt-Tab holds the trophy for the one I use the most. It's really handy for quickly swapping between windows, especially if you want to flit between two specific apps quickly.

Considering the privacy implications of letting cloud platforms manage footage of my surroundings, I’ve moved to a completely self-hosted surveillance setup. Frigate is my preferred Network Video Recorder for my FOSS home security system, and with its lightweight nature, terrific support for AI accelerators, and top-notch object detection capabilities, it’s a solid companion to my arsenal of smart home services.

Sometimes, when a bug gets into a Linux system, it takes a little while for people to figure out what's wrong and push an update. It usually means we see some features disabled for weeks, months, or even years while volunteers work out the problem and get a fix out the door. One such example of this is a new update as to what we can expect with KDE Plasma 6.8, which will finally re-enable triple buffering by default for Nvidia GPUs after two years of wrestling with bugs.

Many of you are probably still using DDR4 RAM, but DDR6 RAM is already on the horizon. Poised to surpass even the blazing-fast speeds of DDR5 memory, DDR6 promises 8,800–17,600 MT/s speeds, thanks to a new 4 x 24-bit sub-channel architecture instead of the 2 x 32-bit seen on DDR5 memory. With higher frequencies come greater signal stability challenges, which is why the familiar DIMMs are going away, making way for flat CAMM2 sticks. These modules will be bolted onto the motherboard, lying parallel instead of the perpendicular layout we've been seeing for decades. With server deployment targeted for 2027 and consumer adoption soon after, the ongoing memory shortage couldn't have come at a worse moment. The 2028–2029 window that was planned for DDR6's consumer rollout might not hold anymore, considering the stratospheric prices will only conflate the already sky-high launch prices of this new technology. More memory-efficient LLMs could bring down enterprise memory demand, but that isn't guaranteed to lower RAM prices.

At this point, Obsidian is as much a hobby for me as it is a productivity tool. I like tinkering with plugins and testing out new ones, and I recently came across one that lets me connect my Jellyfin server to my Obsidian vault. Sounds awesome, right? That's what I thought, until everything was set up and I started testing it.

A $280 bike lock on a $10,000 e-bike. I've seen lots of so-called "smart" bike locks over the years, but none so far could justify the added cost. A newcomer that got its start securing ATMs for banks is trying to change that. There's nothing wholly unique about the TMD Chain Lock, but the combination of materials, performance, and insurance-friendly ART-2 certification makes it worth considering.TMD's first bicycle lock combines a Bluetooth proximity sensor and motion alarm with a slender core of hardened steel chain wrapped in a soft and lightweight sleeve of high performance Dyneema and Kevlar fibers. That makes this lock tough, yet flexible enough to conveniently wrap arou …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're into aviation and tinkering with devices, the past few weeks have been a goldmine for you. We previously saw a Raspberry Pi project that turned your ceiling into a sky tracker, followed closely by a project that added the fame functionality to a tidy desk device. Now, a few weeks later, we've seen a third aviation-based DIY project hit the market, and the funny part is, it didn't begin its life as a flight tracker.