I've fallen in love with the Nintendo Switch 2, but that's largely despite what the console is capable of, not because of it. I'm primarily a PC gamer, so as much as I've loved tearing through Mario Kart World, the lack of my Steam library has been a sore point. I normally reach for my Steam Deck when playing PC games on the go, but the Switch 2 has highlighted a few missteps with the original design that I hope Valve addresses with the Steam Deck 2.

If you're in the habit of making System Restore points on Windows 11, first of all, good on you for making backups. It's always good to have something to go back to if a drive goes wrong or a system file goes missing somehow, and if you set it up just right, you can have them automatically make themselves without you even needing to lift a finger.

The standard Windows 11 does the job, but requires some customization out of the box to run at its best and become more user-friendly. I usually use apps like Winhawk or PowerToys to do this, and have never tried Winaero Tweaker until now. Winaero Tweaker is a free application that provides numerous tools for customizing Windows functionality, organized into several sections for appearance, behavior, and more.

Sometimes, you just have to 3D print something that you could otherwise buy, just for the sakes of building it. Even if the end process is a little more convoluted and takes more patience than simply finding the target product on Amazon and clicking the "Buy Now" button, you still learn a lot, get that satisfaction of making something, and have all the knowledge and equipment to repair it if something breaks.

Do you have a Pi-hole set up at home? If not, they're a great way to monitor your network and prevent people from tracking you in ways you don't want them to. We love Pi-hole here at XDA, to the point where we even added two Pi-hole devices to the same network and noticed that it made things even better.

One of my favorite things is taking something that's not at all affiliated with tabletop roleplaying games and finding a way to shove one into it. For instance, there was that time I played D&D with ChatGPT and had a lot of fun doing so.

Data collection without analysis is a waste of time. Analyzing your data is the only way to uncover fresh insights and get valuable information about the population your sample represents. Facts must be extracted after administering questionnaires, and researchers use various statistical tools and techniques when trying to do this. I prefer the easier route: SPSS. It is great for analyzing survey data, since it does not require coding or any special syntax. The point-and-click interface makes things easy; even researchers with no prior experience can quickly learn to analyze surveys with SPSS and bring out valuable facts from figures. Regardless of whether you've distributed a questionnaire virtually or physically, the same method could be employed to analyze respondents' data. In this guide, I'll show you a step-by-step process for analyzing answers obtained after administering survey questionnaires.

As cyber criminals get better and better hardware, we're seeing attacks that eclipse anything we've ever seen before. Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are getting especially nasty, and because they deliver a measurable amount of data during the attack, cybersecurity experts have been monitoring them and seeing if they break any records. Well, one attack just took the record for the biggest DDoS attack ever, and when put into perspective, it's a stunning amount of data being transferred to one IP address.

External GPUs have been around for decades, but despite an influx of mainstream options with the release of Thunderbolt 3 nearly a decade ago, eGPUs haven't really caught on. Despite how simple eGPUs seem as a solution — you literally plug more power into your PC — they're surprisingly complex. Different interfaces passing data over cables that weren't designed for it naturally lead to some issues when using an eGPU. You can still get great performance out of an external graphics card, but there are some common misunderstandings you need to keep in mind.

Once you start using Home Assistant at home, it’s hard not to go overboard. To make the most of it, I used Home Assistant to create a shared shopping list with my family to organize our home better. The idea was to bring some semblance to the chaos: random purchases to stock up the fridge or pantry, and other household items. From impulse buying to double-stocking, it was vexing for me to shop with my family.

Ray tracing made its way into gaming in 2018 with the launch of Nvidia's RTX 20-series graphics cards. At that time, the company made it seem revolutionary and promised a massive leap in visual fidelity. However, the first set of games with real-time ray tracing didn't impress me all that much because they all offered RT features selectively. It wasn't until Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive update in 2023, which unlocked full ray tracing, that the improvements truly felt like a major leap.

There's a lot to love about open-source software, so much so that I've been actively trying to use and support more open-source projects. I currently self-host services like Immich and Automatisch, which are only made possible by the open-source nature of the projects.