Despite offering top-tier automation provisions and support for smart home gadgets in all shapes and forms, Home Assistant is well-known for its simple UI. Rather than bombarding you with the typical toggles, settings, and menus, HASS provides an intuitive way to manage your smart devices.

It's really easy to get into the mindset that the more you have going on, the more productive you are. You have your laptop with all of your social apps up, ready to answer any DMs or questions that come your way. Your phone is beside you, on standby in case a notification comes in. Before you know it, you spend more time checking your apps than you do, you know...working.

Thanks to their lightweight nature, minimal overhead, and fast startup times, Proxmox LXCs (Linux Containers) are a popular choice for many virtualization enthusiasts. However, in my journey building and managing various home lab setups, I've found myself going towards Virtual Machines (VMs) and Docker containers. While LXCs certainly have their place, this post will explore the top reasons why VMs and Docker, often in combination, offer a superior experience for my specific needs.

Let's be honest, name tags are really dull. I get that they fill a very simple niche, but that's no excuse for having a plain and forgettable badge, especially if you wish to make a powerful first impression. So, why not put a technical spin on your name tag and really impress the people you meet?

Twitch is announcing a bunch of updates at TwitchCon Europe, including the ability to host a vertical livestream and an open beta test that lets creators stream at a higher quality.The rollout of vertical streams should make livestreams easier to watch in portrait mode on your phone. Down the line, streamers won’t be forced to pick between vertical or horizontal streams; instead, Twitch will let streamers offer their streams in a dual format. The company will start testing the feature with a small amount of channels this summer and expand it later this year.Twitch is also rolling out an open beta of “2k streaming” (which lets creators stream at 1440p) that will be available to all Twitch partners and affiliates. “Upgrading to 2k (1440p) streaming offers a noticeable step up from 1080p streaming, with richer detail, improved clarity, and better performance – whether you’re gaming, making art, or just chatting,” according to a Twitch support page. Before now, the feature had been available in a more limited beta.The platform is introducing a way to rewind streams, too. This could be really handy if you miss something while a streamer is live or just want to go back and rewatch something. Twitch will test the feature first with a small number of viewers this summer.Twitch CEO Dan Clancy teased the vertical streams and many other updates coming to the platform in 2025 in a letter published in February.

Once a niche solution for maximizing silicon yields, chiplets have become the industry’s go-to strategy for delivering more cores at lower costs. AMD popularized the approach with Ryzen and EPYC, Intel reluctantly followed, and now even NVIDIA and Qualcomm are getting in on the act. But while chiplets bring undeniable benefits, including better binning, lower wafer costs, and more flexible design scaling, they also introduce compromises that manufacturers would rather you not dwell on.

If you've never heard of them, the Big Mouth Billy Bass is an animatronic fish that moves and sings along to songs when you press a button. Big Mouth Billy Basses are fun for about a week, and then you'll likely never (deliberately) set it off again. But what if they could do more than just sing the same old songs?

Thanks to the legal discovery process, Google's antitrust trial with the Department of Justice has provided a fascinating glimpse into the future of ChatGPT.An internal OpenAI strategy document titled "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy" describes the company's aspiration to build an "AI super assistant that deeply understands you and is your interface to the internet." Although the document is heavily redacted in parts, it reveals that OpenAI aims for ChatGPT to soon develop into much more than a chatbot. "In the first half of next year, we'll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do," reads the document from late 2024. "The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT's ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task."The document goes on to describe a "super assistant" as "an intelligent entity with T-shape …Read the full story at The Verge.

I recently went on a quest to find the best note-taking tools that can also help with productivity and task management. While there are a ton of solutions that cater to this requirement, one of the most popular ones is Obsidian. In just a few years after launch, Obsidian has become a favorite among enthusiasts thanks to a wide range of features and support for plugins. It can act as an excellent personal knowledge management tool that pro users will certainly appreciate. However, there are a few downsides to using Obsidian. For starters, the app doesn't natively sync between devices for free. Then, there's the issue with needing the app on all devices, since there's no web version of Obsidian by default.

Whether you're jetting off to tech conferences or more calming climes for a holiday, XDA Travel Week is going to get you there smarter and safer. Our self-hosted services travel with us, thanks to VPNs, reverse proxies, and other networking tools that make it seem as though our laptops are always connected to our home networks. Some of us opt for Tailscale due to its simplicity, while others use a variety of other services built on the open-source WireGuard protocol.

I love traveling to new destinations across the globe to explore local cultures. The fact that I have a remote job makes things easier, since I can go on workcations without worrying about skipping work. While going on a vacation is easy for me, planning one is challenging. I like to plan my itinerary well in advance, so I don't miss out on any place that's on my wishlist. Planning a trip well also allows me to dedicate ample time to each place I'm traveling to, since I have a set schedule and I don't need to rush. Until recently, I used to plan all of this using my note-taking app of choice — Google Keep. However, planning an itinerary for multiple days got rather messy due to the app's limitations.

Ever since I started my self-hosting journey, I have stumbled upon several tools that completely changed the game. Self-hosting began as a curious experiment to take back some control over my data and digital life, and it quickly turned into an obsession. I have tested countless applications, and while many were interesting, a select few have become must-haves in my workflow.