Building a PC can be a frustrating process if you don't know what to look for. People often focus heavily on the motherboard, CPU, and GPU. Most people often forget to pay enough attention to other important hardware like RAM, storage, and power supplies.

Self-hosted applications have exploded in popularity over the last couple of years – to the point where you’ll find containerized FOSS solutions for coders, bibliophiles, music enthusiasts, and almost every demographic under the sun. This also includes everyday apps designed to improve several aspects of your life, be it helping you stick to a schedule or designing your ideal meal plans. So, here’s a list of our favorite quality-of-life services you can host on local hardware.

Steam is one of the world's most popular game distribution platforms, making it easy to collect, store, and customize all your favorite games in one place. Although the platform continually develops and adds new features, very few people go further than the store or library pages. But, if you want to get more out of Steam, you can use these five features to help improve the overall experience on the platform and customize it to your liking.

Ilya Sutskever. | Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images OpenAI’s cofounder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, made headlines earlier this year after he left to start his own AI lab called Safe Superintelligence Inc. He has avoided the limelight since his departure but made a rare public appearance in Vancouver on Friday at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).“Pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end,” Sutskever said onstage. This refers to the first phase of AI model development, when a large language model learns patterns from vast amounts of unlabeled data — typically text from the internet, books, and other sources. “We’ve achieved peak data and there’ll be no more.”During his NeurIPS talk, Sutskever said that, while he believes existing data can still take AI development farther, the industry is tapping out on new data to train on. This dynamic will, he said, eventually force a shift away from the way models are trained today. He compared the situation to fossil fuels: just as oil is a finite resource, the internet contains a finite amount of human-generated content.“We’ve achieved peak data and there’ll be no more,” according to Sutskever. “We have to deal with the data that... Read the full story at The Verge.

The search functionality in File Explorer helps you locate specific files or folders on your system. However, when dealing with a large dataset, a standard name search may not be efficient. This is where advanced search filters come into play. These filters enable you to find files based on their size, properties, metadata, type, extension, or even content, saving you both time and effort.

Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Meta is asking California Attorney General Rob Bonta to block OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity.In a letter sent to Bonta’s office this week, Meta says that OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”The letter, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal and you can read in full below, goes so far as to say that Meta believes Elon Musk is “qualified and well positioned to represent the interests of Californians in this matter.” Meta supporting Musk’s fight against OpenAI is notable given that Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were talking about literally fighting in a cage match just last year.OpenAI started as a non-profit but stumbled into commercial success with ChatGPT, which now makes billions of dollars a year in revenue. CEO Sam Altman has been clear that the company needs to shed its non-profit status to become more attractive to investors and continuing funding its ambitions. The stakes are so high that OpenAI will have to return the billions of dollars it raised this year (with interest) if it can’t successfully... Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will meet with President-elect Donald Trump for dinner on Friday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to The New York Times. It’s reportedly Cook’s first time meeting with Trump since the election.During Trump’s first term, Cook established a direct relationship with the president that other tech CEOs have wanted to replicate. As Trump prepares for his second term, Cook may want to discuss potential tariffs, which could significantly affect Apple’s business. Cook may also want to discuss the European Union’s actions against Apple; during his presidential campaign, Trump claimed that Cook called him to complain about the fines Apple faces in the European Union, with accusations of anticompetitive behavior in App Store policies and how it manages platforms like the iPhone and Mac.Cook’s visit follows reports of Trump’s conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai yesterday and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos next week. Trump met with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in November.Tech companies and leaders, including Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have also been appealing to the President-elect with $1 million donations to his inauguration fund.

Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) is a cloud-based service that automates tasks in the Microsoft Office ecosystem. It helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services. Power Automate works seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Excel, SharePoint, Word, and Teams.

We've heard rumors of Nvidia's RTX 50 "Blackwell" range, including the terrifying tipoff that the 5090 will require 600W of power alone. However, the graphics giant has been pretty good at keeping a lid on things, as some parts are still a mystery. If you're curious as to what Nvidia has planned, the company has dropped a ton of hints that it will reveal all during the upcoming CES 2025 event in January.

We've seen some pretty good deals on tablets over the past months thanks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with some of the best tablets going for their lowest prices. Now, one of our favorites, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE, can be had at its lowest price to date, coming in $160 below its original retail at just $290. You can grab this deal from Samsung direct if you're quick.

If you've been looking for a new keyboard, chances are, you've seen the startling amount of options available. And while mechanical keyboards can be more expensive than a traditional membrane keyboard, they tend to offer better durability and reliability, and some can even be upgraded and serviced.

Keeping your cabling tidy outside your PC case is as important as inside the chassis. The latter can prove more challenging depending on how many parts you have installed inside your PC and whether the case has any cable management features. I've put together more desktop PCs than I can recall and have garnered some tips over the years. Here are some handy pointers to bear in mind to create a clean and tidy system.