Home labs are perfect for honing your skills while not destroying your home network in the process. But while you're building out your home lab's network capabilities, how do you actually ensure that the two stay separate? A dedicated firewall is what you need, whether a dedicated hardware device or a virtual one. With the right rules in place, you can keep your home network safe from your home lab experiments and still have access to the internet at large.

Right out of the box, any Steam Deck you buy, whether it's a certified refurbished model or brand new, is an excellent piece of kit. In many ways, Valve outdid itself with the Steam Deck, and realistically, you'd never need to change anything about it if you didn't want to.

Illustrator is one of the best vector illustration tools, but with its hefty Adobe price tag, you might want an alternative. Most Adobe alternatives focus on raster graphics rather than vector graphics, with less opportunity for free or open-source vector design tools. Vectorpea comes from the same place as Photopea — a favorite of Photoshop alternative users — but it’s not open-source but rather ad-based and free to use from anywhere. With promising development in the tool, Vectorpea might be the next best thing for vector designs and artwork.

While there are tons of great tablets to choose from, the iPad Air is our top choice for 2025. Not only is the iPad Air sleek, but it also packs tons of power thanks to Apple's M2 SoC. Furthermore, you also get the choice of two sizes, with 11 and 13-inch models.

We all know that SSDs are better than HDDs, most notably because of their speed. However, there are a bunch of ways that SSDs are better than HDDs and make them completely obsolete, and some of those ways are ones that you may never have even thought of. We'll break down some of them, just in case you're still on the fence about getting a new SSD in place of an HDD.

Using a web browser seems straightforward, but many people unknowingly make mistakes that can slow them down, compromise their privacy, or even put their devices at risk. Here’s a list of common mistakes you can make when using a browser, and how to avoid them.

In a world where many students use AI to cheat their way through assignments and exams, there are still students looking for tools that merely make studying a little easier and help them work smarter, not harder. I was one of them as well, which is why I tried ChatGPT, and while it helped, it wasn’t quite enough.

It’s been nearly four years since Spotify announced a HiFi tier for its music streaming service that would support lossless audio. That wait could end this year, Bloomberg reports, as the company works to finalize details, including streaming rights.Spotify could charge as much as $5 or $6 extra per month for the new tier — said to be named “Music Pro” — which is in line with estimates CEO Daniel Ek shared last year. Spotify’s Premium tier currently starts at $11.99 per month before family or student discounts, the result of two price hikes in as many years.Competitors like Apple Music include lossless streaming in their services’ base price, but Spotify reportedly plans to justify the extra charge by including more features in Music Pro, including song remixing and concert ticket sales that would grant subscribers exclusive deals and early access.Earlier this month, Spotify signed a new multi-year licensing agreement with Warner Music Group to secure future streaming rights and help “shape the future of audio-visual streaming,” with HiFi presumably included in that vision. It inked a similar deal with Universal Music Group in late January, with UMG specifically teasing HiFi streaming and offering further ideas of what a “superfan” music service could offer. Notable suggestions included priority access to deluxe edition content and early music releases, as well as exclusive listening party invites and artist Q&A sessions.It’s taken a little longer than expected, but it looks like the world’s biggest music streaming service may finally be ready to turn up the volume on HiFi in 2025.

Your Local Area Network (LAN) is vital to your home and office. It's what handles all internal and outbound traffic, ensuring all clients on your side can communicate with one another, as well as billions of devices worldwide, so long as you have a router and external link. But how does one go about securing their LAN? Here are some pointers on how to not make your LAN vulnerable to outside attacks. Some involve common sense and others require you to do a little work.

I've made it no secret that I really like the M4 Mac Mini ever since I wrote my initial review of it back in November. It has become my primary desktop unless I'm reviewing another device, and I absolutely love this hardware, even if macOS has some problems.

The floodgates were officially open when Intel and AMD brought dual-core and quad-core CPUs to the mainstream in the early 2000s. Core count became one of the biggest metrics of CPU performance and has remained significant to this day. However, with advances in CPU architecture and denser process nodes, the role of core count isn't as critical anymore.

Okay, I'm not going to lie. When I heard down the news grapevines that Microsoft was asking people to sign into an account to use Notepad, I believed it immediately. I mean, it felt incredulous, but it also had that feeling of "Yeah, Microsoft would probably do something like that." Fortunately, the truth isn't that dire just yet, although it's setting a bit of a worrying precedent.