Welcome to The Drive, a new weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! I'll also highlight anything noteworthy from XDA reviews published in the week.

Building your own custom router is a great addition to any home network, but an especially big upgrade if you're a homelabber or tinkerer, allowing you more insight, control and security over your network than a traditional ISP router would allow. But having a dedicated router is a bit of a pain, and while there are some downsides to virtualizing your router (and prerequisites), it's a great way to keep one less device lying around your apartment.

Multiple graphics cards used to be sighted back in the day but there's not much use for them with regards to gaming. Home lab is a completely different matter with some setups allowing for truly wonderful experiences. Ever wanted to host 10 virtual gaming PCs from a single system? You can do that and much more with some networking and virtual know-how. Here are a few ways a multi-GPU setup may make sense for home lab use.

There are a lot of great motherboards on the market right now, especially if you're searching for one for AMD's AM5 chip. With that said, we have a great lineup of AM5 motherboards we'd recommend, but if you're looking for our top choice, then it has to be the Asus ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming. You really can't go wrong here, with support for Ryzen 9000 CPUs, along with PCIe 5.0 graphics and PCIe 5.0 SSD slots.

It is no secret that we are well and truly in the age of DDR5 RAM. Prices are nowhere as prohibitive as they used to be, and the latest processors from both AMD and Intel have completely transitioned to the latest memory standard. Gamers have experienced the benefits of the blazing-fast transfer speeds of DDR5 RAM, and previous-gen DDR4 memory is gradually being phased out.

I recently switched from macOS to Windows after using the former for five long years. Well, at least when I'm working from my desk. I made some changes to my home office, including building a new gaming PC, which means my MacBook is reserved for when I'm traveling or occasionally working in a café. While the transition was smoother than I expected, there are some features on macOS that completely spoiled me. Things like Spotlight Search and Quick Look are extremely helpful, saving a ton of hassle on a daily basis.

Compared to third-party tools, hosting apps and services on your own hardware requires a certain level of technological expertise. And the complexity goes up a notch when you try to run containers on bare-metal server distros instead of hosting them on typical desktop operating systems like Windows 11.

While Excel is a powerful tool for organizing data and performing complex calculations, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of numbers and bland cells. At times, when you deal with large databases, your spreadsheets may look like a never-ending number factory. But they don’t have to! With a few simple tweaks, you can transform your spreadsheets from drab to fab and impress your boss.

The great thing about PC building is that it is wonderfully inclusive. You can build a budget system for as cheap as you want, or take things to the extreme with an overkill rig that would put NASA to shame. PC enthusiasts are rarely satisfied with standard hardware, always striving to maximize performance, minimize temperatures, and eliminate as much noise as possible.

When you’re searching for the best operating system for your home lab, you’ll encounter a myriad of cool distros, ranging from the uber-popular Proxmox to the hardcore, production-centric Harvester. However, you've likely noticed that the majority of these operating systems are Linux distros, while Windows is largely non-existent in the home lab space.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.Just as it’s good to remember that chatbots will confidently lie to you before you trust an AI-powered search engine, checking whether posted claims or images come from a reputable account can help you consider their veracity. At the moment, Meta’s platforms don’t offer much of the sort of context Mosseri posted about today, although the company recently hinted at big coming changes to its content rules.What Mosseri describes sounds closer to user-led moderation like Community Notes on X and YouTube or Bluesky’s custom moderation filters. Whether Meta plans to introduce anything like those isn’t known, but then again, it has been known to take pages from Bluesky’s book.

The PS Placeable makes the PSP into a tiny PS2. | Image: Retro Mod Works What if you could turn a PSP with a broken screen into a miniature PS2, connect a Bluetooth controller to it, and play PSP games on your TV? That’s the idea behind Retro Mod Works’ PS Placeable, a mod that “consolizes” the PSP and was featured yesterday in a video from the YouTube channel Macho Nacho Productions. Retro Mod Works charges $274.99 for a prebuilt PS Placeable. Those are waitlisted at the moment, though — a message on the site says the project is a “one man show” and that the demand for the Placeable was higher than anticipated. Retro also offers to mod customer-provided PSPs for $100 less, and there’s an option preorder DIY parts and do the conversion work yourself. The mod requires either a PSP-2000 or PSP-3000 revision, as the first PSP didn’t have a video output. It’s not clear when the DIY parts will ship — we’ve asked Retro Mod Works and will update if we get a reply. Image: Retro Mod Works A stack of PS Placeables. The primary person behind the project, named Dan, told Macho Nacho host Tito Perez that he “hated the idea of buying digital games” for which he has physical copies, and wanted a way to add Bluetooth controller support while preserving the UMD drive. He’s also mentioned in replies on Reddit that his goal is to help people revive broken PSPs with the mod, which doesn’t need the console’s screen.But buying one of these mod kits can be pricey or require skills most people don’t have. If you just want to play PSP games on your TV and don’t care about having a UMD drive, the PSP Go — which lacked Sony’s oddball optical drive but supported Bluetooth controllers and also had a way to output video — is still pretty easy to come by.