Local LLMs are useful now, and they aren’t just toys

For a long time, running an AI model locally felt like a gimmick, rather than something actually useful. You could generate a paragraph of text, edit or generate an image if you were patient, all while putting up with subpar results compared to the cloud-based behemoths operated by the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. They did everything better, faster, and with fewer compromises, and if you wanted something that actually worked, you had to send your data off to someone else’s servers… all while accepting the trade-offs.

Oliver Wood
New Zealand

This $900 network switch has been flawless for nearly a decade, and it just taught me that it was a mistake

There's something about a network humming along for years without fault. After many hours of painstakingly configuring every aspect of it, from virtual local area networks (VLANs) to DNS filtering, there's little I've found to provide the same amount of accomplishment as getting my LAN fully up and running. The...

Ceyhun Yılmazer
Turkey

I stopped switching between four apps the moment I connected them to Claude Project

For a long time, my workflow was spread across too many disconnected places. Editorial tasks lived in one dashboard, side projects in another. My ideas were scattered across note apps, and my inbox was getting buried under marketing threads. At some point, switching dashboards and keeping context became more exhausting...

Jane Smith
Los Angeles

I finally see why everyone removes Windows bloatware – here’s my complete removal list

There are things Windows is good at, and other aspects where it fails miserably. Bloatware, I believe, falls under the latter. Over the years, Microsoft has been pushing more and more apps on Windows that offer no real utility to the vast majority of users. And after AI integration picked...

Nenad Jakšić
Serbia

Anker’s new earbuds are the first with its AI chip that boosts noise reduction

The Liberty 5 Pro Max feature a larger touchscreen with more controls and the ability to record meetings without a phone. | Image: Anker Anker has announced a new version of its Soundcore Liberty Pro earbuds: the new Liberty 5 Pro. These are the company's first earbuds featuring the Thus...

Ariana Brown
New Zealand

Stop treating the Raspberry Pi 5 as a smart home hub — it’s actually built for something bigger

The Raspberry Pi has always been easy to recommend for home automation, but the Raspberry Pi 5 complicates that recommendation in a useful way. If all you need is a box to run Home Assistant, a few Zigbee devices, and some basic automations, it’s more machine than the job really...

William Garcia
Boston

I used frame generation wrong for months – here’s what helped

Even though I've been using an RTX 4090 since 2022, I barely ever enabled frame generation for anything besides benchmarking. Every time I toggled it on, I was just underwhelmed with how the game felt while moving around, and turned it back off within minutes. Sure, the FPS counter looked...

William Garcia
Boston

Anker’s new earbuds have the best call quality I’ve ever heard

The Liberty 5 Pro series are Soundcore’s most ambitious earbuds yet. Soundcore, Anker's audio brand, has mostly lived in the budget-to-midrange world, but with its new Liberty 5 Pro earbuds, it's aiming at the big guys. The two new earbuds - the Liberty 5 Pro and Liberty 5 Pro Max...

Joel Hakala
Finland

I bought the RX 9070 XT for FSR 4, but the games I actually play don’t support it

When I bought my RX 9070 XT upon release, I expected FSR 4 to be one of the bigger parts of my upgrade. AMD's machine-learning upscaler had been positioned as the answer to DLSS, and the actual gameplay footage that was put out by reviewers backed up the image quality...

Sophia Wilson
Atlanta

Buying Plex Pass Lifetime is still one of the best streaming decisions I’ve ever made

I've been using Plex for more than half a decade, and one reason I've stuck with it is the lifetime subscription I bought. I still think it's one of the best purchases I've made for home streaming because Plex has almost everything you need for remote access and media management.

Nicklas Mortensen
Denmark

States ask judge to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster

A federal judge is officially being tasked with deciding whether to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster. More than 30 states are asking Judge Arun Subramanian to order a sale of the ticketing giant, a "sufficient number" of large amphitheaters, and limit its ability to tie access to its remaining amps to...

Michael Johnson
Chicago

Lenovo’s G02 retro handheld is reportedly packed with copyrighted ROMs, including Nintendo games

The wild world of retro handhelds just got a little weirder.

Felix Smith
Canada

PC gamers are leaving 20-30% performance on the table with this one setting

Let's say you spent months picking out parts or researching a pre-built PC. You made sure to get 16GB of fast dual-channel RAM, so your games would run smoothly, and your desktop wouldn't choke under heavy multitasking. But somehow your system feels strangely sluggish. You notice erratic 1% low frame...