Image: Nintendo Sure, it’s not straight-up horror as the early teasers suggested, but even still, Emio — The Smiling Man is among the darkest games Nintendo has ever made. It’s a murder mystery that doesn’t skimp on the murder and throws in an unsettling urban legend for good measure. More than that, though, it’s just a really great mystery on a platform that has steadily become an ideal home for them.Emio is actually the continuation of a decades-old franchise from Nintendo called Famicom Detective Club. Created by Metroid designer Yoshio Sakamoto, the games originally never launched outside of Japan, until a pair of surprise remakes hit the Switch in 2021. Emio is the first entirely new entry in the franchise since the late ’80s — but even still, not... Continue reading…

We generate more data every day than at any other time in history, and most of it is stored on hard drives (HDDs) or SSDs for future use. While most of the time that data is safely stored, there are multiple scenarios where even the best NAS drives can fail, not to mention accidental deletion by users. When that happens, there are various ways to recover or restore the missing data, with varying levels of success. It's important to know that professional data recovery is also expensive. If the software-based methods fail, the costs go up substantially, as hardware repair or reconstruction is a tricky task.

As its name implies, PoE allows you to send both power and data to your devices over a single Ethernet cable. On paper, it may sound like a niche feature, as most servers, PCs, laptops, and NAS cant be powered via an Ethernet cable. But if your computing environment consists of smart gadgets, Power over Ethernet can go from somewhat useful to an absolute game-changer and here are four reasons why you should outfit your home lab with PoE technology.

From craving any graphics card to wondering which one to buy, we all grew up. I fondly remember the struggles of getting games to run without a discrete graphics card on my "gaming" PC 20 years ago. While integrated graphics have come a long way in the last 15 years, you still need a dedicated graphics card for serious gaming.

Google Pixel phones have always had excellent software, but the elephant in the room was that Google hardware has been below par for the majority of its life cycle. In fact, I'd go as far as saying Google only finally got the hardware right last year with the Pixel 8 phones. Before that, there was always a glaring, significant hardware flaw of some kind, from the second Pixel's display problems to the third Pixel's hideous notch to the Pixel 6's dim display and Pixel 7's bad thermals. And even last year, the Pixel 8 hardware was nowhere near the best, it just wasn't bad.

Image: NASA US astronaut Barry Wilmore called NASA ground crew on Saturday, asking for help with a repetitive knocking sound that was coming from the Boeing Starliner craft. The interaction was captured by a NASA Space Flight forum member, who included a recording of it in a post that was spotted by Ars Technica.In the recording, Wilmore asks NASA crew in Houston to configure their call so that he could show them the noise, which he says is coming from the speaker inside Starliner. Then, a repetitive clanging sound with slight there’s-something-on-the-wing vibes can be heard. The Earthside crew member describes it as sounding “almost like a sonar ping.”Starliner crew reports hearing strange "sonar like noises" emanating from their craft. This is... Continue reading…

The next version of the Mac Mini may be so much smaller than this. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s next Mac Mini won’t have USB-A ports, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in today’s Power On newsletter that the new desktops will start to hit Apple’s warehouses in September. The higher-end variant with an Apple M4 Pro chip will ship in October, he writes.The version with an M4 Pro will still cram a lot of ports, including five USB-C ports (two in the front and three in the back), an ethernet port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack, according to Gurman’s sources. And the new Mac Mini will apparently have an internal power supply. That’s not too shabby for a computer that’s expected to be about the size of an Apple TV.Is it time to say goodbye to USB-A? Maybe. Probably. But no matter how you feel about that,... Continue reading…

Obsidian and Notion are two of the top note-taking and knowledge management software solutions. Thanks to their unique approach to productivity and flexibility, both platforms have gained a devoted following. While Obsidian is laser-focused on delivering a personal and interconnected knowledge base, Notion takes a different route with powerful and customizable collaborative workspaces.

Shopping for storage can be a strange endeavor. In many cases, items with the same capacity and the same connector (with the same theoretical speed limitations) can cost wildly different prices. Demystifying this can be a process in itself, and comparing SSD features while shopping for one can be just as difficult.

With its straightforward user interface and powerful features, Proxmox is an amazing hypervisor for newcomers as well as home lab veterans. But the difficulty gets raised a ton once you start looking into the more advanced aspects of the virtualization platform.

If you want to access Windows while on another operating system, there's always the Microsoft Remote Desktop app. As the name suggests, it lets you access a Windows machine regardless of what kind of machine you're on. Well, we say "as the name suggests," but the app has received a name change, and people aren't very happy with Microsoft's decision-making.

Whether you have a great gaming PC, one of the best laptops, or even a mini PC, Windows will somehow still find a way to give you unexpected errors. There are many ways to fix these random issues, but DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management) commands are something most people aren't familiar with. System admins regularly use DISM to configure, tweak, and repair system images.