Ask 3 home lab enthusiasts where to start your home lab, and you'll likely get three different answers. It could be a Raspberry Pi, a cheap N100 mini PC, or a used enterprise box off of eBay. All of those things are small, quiet, sip power, and are relatively low cost as an entry into self-hosting, but in my opinion, they're not the best place to start. For your first home lab, the better machine is probably already sitting in your closet. An old ATX tower is one of the best beginner home labs money can buy, and it's often overlooked as a starting point.

Sometimes, you want to play Settlers of Catan without actually playing against other people. You're just not in the mood to be that one person who has to choose where the Thief goes while the other players shoot you death glares if you even think about placing it on their resource, no matter how good a play it would be. Fortunately, for those of us who cave easily, you can now play a clone of Settlers of Catan in your Linux terminal, because FOSS developers won't stop until you can do everything imaginable in a command line.

I didn't buy a Bambu printer because I wanted another cloud device in my house. I bought it because I wanted fast, reliable 3D printing without turning every project into a maintenance ritual. For the most part, the hardware delivered on that promise almost immediately. The more I used it, though, the more I realized the printer's best qualities were buried under an internet-connected workflow I didn't fully trust.

This week at Computex in Taipei, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C, a new chip aimed at laptops starting at just $300. With just one laptop announced and two additional OEM partners, details are scarce.

Build 2026 is looking to be another AI-heavy affair. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is kicking off its yearly Build developer conference in San Francisco today, sandwiched between the recent Google I/O and Apple's upcoming WWDC event. While tickets to attend Build in person are sold out, the conference is being streamed for free online, with CEO Satya Nadella opening with a keynote at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT.A cursory glance at the featured speakers and virtual sessions suggests that Build will predominantly focus on AI, which isn't surprising given this is a developer event in 2026. The keynote description also says that Nadella and Microsoft leaders will be sharing "how Microsoft is creating new opportunity for …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of the discourse around Valve's upcoming Steam Machine revolved around the underwhelming specs, high price tag, and delayed launch. People were legitimately skeptical about the value proposition, and Valve didn't help by declaring that it would price it like a PC, not a console. However, I feel a large section of gamers is dismissing the Steam Machine prematurely. Valve is being careful to avoid comparisons with consoles, given the disparate price points, but the Steam Machine is absolutely going to compete with consoles in the living room. It has the might of Steam, the perks of PC-centric features, and Valve's excellent track record behind it. Even those within the industry believe the Steam Machine is poised to be the biggest competitor to the PlayStation. When you look at the real value proposition of Valve's SteamOS box, in line with the recent console price hikes, even pricing starts to seem like a non-issue. We might be entering an exciting new age of console wars where Sony, Valve, and even Microsoft will be making huge moves.

My home lab has a habit of turning simple chores into small investigations. Checking backups, cleaning old project folders, auditing Docker Compose files, and making sure services still behave correctly all sound easy until they pile up. None of those jobs is exciting, but ignoring them is how small problems get promoted into weekend projects. I wanted scripts that could handle the boring checks without making me nervous every time I ran them.

Just when the tech world thought Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had locked down the AI-driven development space, Google went ahead and flipped the script.

Qualcomm flew me out to Computex this week, where it announced the Asus Ascent QN10, the first Snapdragon X2 Elite mini PC. While the company did share some of the specs, other details, such as pricing, are unknown.

Note apps have been part of my work for years, mostly because I write about software and keep testing new ones. There's also the UX angle - approachable tools are something I just enjoy poking at. Either way, cycling through all of them isn't realistic and committing to just one has always felt like a bad bet too.

Claude is still the AI tool I reach for most days and that's probably not going to change any time soon. But even on the Pro plan, I still hit the limit caps, especially when I've been doing visual work with Artifacts or Claude Design, and then there isn't much left for regular chat without turning on extra usage. Opus eats through that allowance way faster than Sonnet, and I run Opus a lot. There's also the privacy side - everything I send Claude lives on Anthropic's servers, and while that's fine for most things, the personal documents I'd rather keep on my device. Plus, having a tool that works regardless of whether Anthropic's having a bad server day is its own kind of insurance.

When I wrote the news that Dell was announcing a new XPS 13 at Computex, I called it a MacBook Neo competitor. Now, I've actually gotten the chance to check one out, and I'm calling it a MacBook Neo killer. Honestly, it just seems to be equal or better in every way.