When I first started exploring the internet in the late 90s, it was a different place than it is now. Wilder. Less regulated and corporatized. In those days, personal websites dominated; there was no "front page of the internet." Most users had their browsers open to their favorite, most-used sites (or their email). Fun fact: browsers were actually used for browsing back then, not just jumping between subreddits. The internet has lost some of its charm over the years, or so I believed, but it's actually just tucked away in dusty corners.

Chess sits in a weird spot with technology. We once had AIs fighting one another and against human grandmasters in the 90s as tech companies pushed the boundaries of what a system can do. Then the computers just kinda solved chess, and now you can hop on an online chess game and get rocked by an AI that would have taken a supercomputer to calculate back in the day.

Whenever people think of Linux, the first thing that springs to mind, regardless of whether they're an open-source vet or if they've never even touched a Linux PC before, is Tux. Tux is the penguin associated with the Linux kernel as a whole, and he's found his way onto operating systems, merch, and various memes that depict the image creator's distaste for Windows.

One thing I've learned from using Claude Code is that, sometimes, you just have to let Claude cook. Ideally, Claude will generate a ton of code in a heartbeat, but sometimes it needs to chew the cud for a little longer, which usually means it's time to stand up and grab a mug of coffee. But what if you wanted to know what Claude is up to without being tied to the monitor?

Back in December 2025, I figured I could stop my Pascal-era GTX 1080 from gathering dust by using it to host LLMs on Ollama. Despite some snags with the drivers, this experiment turned out pretty well, and its utility skyrocketed when I began pairing it with my self-hosted FOSS stack. But having spent the last couple of weeks tinkering with different providers and LLMs, I realized that 8B models weren’t the only ones I could run on my aged gaming companion. With a little bit of elbow grease, I managed to build a fully Linux-based LLM pipeline using repurposed hardware that not only frees me from the API limits on cloud models, but also ensures my private files don’t leave my local network.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on Netflix, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBoggle has become a spectator sport in my household. Everyone crowds around the TV while one of us plays, and the crowd either helps shout out words or waits patiently for their turn. There's a lot of yelling. But it's a game that my family can hop into easily, and once someone starts playing, it seems everyone slowly drifts into the room to join in. The surprising part is that the experience is ha …Read the full story at The Verge.

Moving into a home advertised as pre-wired is a massive win for us technophiles and networking enthusiasts. Those small square plates with RJ45 termination in every room help us envision endless possibilities ranging from zero-latency gaming to crystal-clear video in every morning stand-up. A friend was reveling in similar joy recently, assuming he'd just need to hook up a router and a switch for gigabit nirvana, but it was an older house and the reality was far more complex.

As an avid traveler, over the years I've considered investing in a travel router simply because hotel Wi-Fi tends to be terrible, and I hate logging into the same captive portal over and over again. The usual recommendation tends to be something like a Gl.iNet Slate or a similar compact router. These devices are extremely useful, but they are yet another thing to charge, to pack, and one more gadget to keep an eye on while backpacking.

Many tools promise the ‘all-in-one’ workspace to simplify our lives, but often end up being more fragmented than ever. While dedicated productivity apps struggle to balance features with performance, Visual Studio Code has emerged as a dark horse in the space by offering the exact opposite: a lean, local-first environment that adapts to any workflow.

I'm a huge fan of Linux's KDE. It's my favorite desktop environment by far, and sometimes, simply learning that an OS uses KDE is enough of an excuse to give it a try. So, when I heard that the Bluefin distro had a KDE fork called Aurora, I knew I had to give it a try.

Vibe-coding has quickly become the new productivity hack for everyone. Instead of spending hours setting up boilerplate, configuring databases, or wiring APIs, AI tools can now generate working applications from a single prompt. But after seeing countless demos of polished dashboards and landing pages, I wanted to test something closer to real software development. So I built the same backend-heavy SaaS app using Lovable and Claude Code to see which tool actually improves developer productivity once the project becomes complex and difficult to debug.

The X300 Ultra is mostly let down by its rather dull design. A few months ago, I wrote that the telephoto camera is the only lens that matters any more, at least when it comes to Ultra-class flagships. As phones got better, cameras became where manufacturers tried to stand out. As cameras got better, telephoto lenses became the next point of focus. The most recent Ultra phones from Xiaomi, Oppo, and Huawei have all made the telephoto, above all, their selling point. Vivo's X300 Ultra is doing something different.Instead of pushing its telephoto hardware to further extremes, Vivo has mostly left it be. The company has focused its efforts on a significantly improved 35mm main camera, unique among the …Read the full story at The Verge.