Despite being a fan of the Raspberry Pi as a teenager, I'm starting to grow disillusioned with this single-board computer family. After all, rival boards, especially those based on the x86 architecture, have gotten significantly cheaper over the years, while the mainline RPi SBCs have crept up in pricing without offering tangible benefits in DIY projects. While I still have a collection of Raspberry Pi systems I’ve bought over the years, I’ve stopped buying them after the RAM shortage drove their prices to the red zone, and switched to old thin clients for server experiments.

Frame generation has always been a controversial topic among gamers ever since Nvidia introduced it alongside the RTX 4000-series GPUs.

When I first upgraded to the 9800X3D, I had to settle for a 32GB DDR5-6400 CL32 kit because RAM prices were soaring at the time. But when prices dipped slightly toward the end of March, triggered by Google's TurboQuant announcement, I decided to pick up another 32GB kit, assuming it was just a temporary drop before they went back up again. Even though 32GB is still the sweet spot for gaming, I like having the extra headroom when I'm doing several things side-by-side on my multi-monitor setup.

Windows comes with a fair share of tools, but some of Microsoft's best apps require an extra download to install. It's not until I reinstall Windows that I realize which of these tools are missing from a fresh system. Seeing as they're released by Microsoft, it's natural to assume that Windows already comes with all the publisher's most useful utilities, but it doesn't.

If you've owned a Steam Deck OLED for a few years, you may have noticed that the Linux 6.8 kernel messed with its audio probe. It happened late in 2023, and for years, people were waiting for a patch to be released for it. As it turns out, the lack of any updates wasn't due to nobody caring, but because the problem required some delicate care to ensure it didn't break everything else in the process.

For the longest time, I avoided vibe coding. Not because I didn’t understand it, but because I didn’t trust it. As someone with a software development background, I’m used to structure that includes clear requirements, planned architecture, and predictable outputs. Vibe coding felt like the opposite of that. Just prompting an AI and building as you go? It sounded messy. A bit like skipping the thinking part and jumping straight to execution.

My quest for a true Photoshop alternative always felt like a compromise between the clunky, steep learning curve of GIMP, a niche, painting-focused toolkit of Krita, and a browser-based, ad-filled Photopea.

Claude Projects has been part of my workflow for a while now, I don't think I can imagine not using it at this point. When something gets reliable enough, you just build around it and forget to question it. I use it to keep long-running research contexts alive, and to run design briefs without re-explaining the background every time I open a new chat, just to name a few. It's a boring tool in the best way.

In the tech business, you sometimes have a weird moment where you learn that a service is being discontinued, and your first reaction is "Wait, that was still a thing?" For instance, around this time last year, we caught wind that AOL was finally stopping its dial-up service, and I grimace to think what watching a modern-day YouTube video would be like over a 56k modem.

By far and away, one of the best things you can add to your home network is a managed network switch. They're the backbone of your network, connecting your wired devices together and providing connectivity to wireless access points, while providing redundancy, VLANs, and a bunch more.

If you're a Plex Remote Watch Pass subscriber, your monthly or annual fee is about to get more expensive.

I've been gaming ever since this century started, and I spent the first two decades gaming at native resolution. In 2020, however, I bought an RTX 2070 Super, and ever since then, I've been a believer in Nvidia's DLSS technology. It started off shaky, as all things tend to do, but today, DLSS is inarguably the strongest and most popular rendering technique in video games.