There’s a weird moment in every 3D printing hobbyist’s journey where the printer stops being the problem, and the shopping cart takes over. You start with a machine, a spool of filament, and a few basic goals. Suddenly, you’re being told you need a hardened nozzle, a premium build plate, a specialty dryer, vibration feet, carbon rods, exotic filament, and a drawer full of upgrades before your prints can be “good.” Some of that advice comes from people who are genuinely trying to help. Some of it comes from people who seem to enjoy buying printer parts more than printing.

Also, the i486's time is nigh.

2026 has been a great year for CachyOS, and we're only a quarter of the way in. Earlier in the year, we saw CachyOS dethrone Arch Linux as the top distro for reports in ProtonDB, which ended a year-long reign and showed a pattern of people checking out CachyOS for their gaming needs.

I’ve been obsessed with the Linux ecosystem for a long time, and FOSS distros currently comprise the majority of my home lab. However, Linux wasn’t very approachable in the early 2010s, as most flavors didn’t have the same hardware compatibility or QoL services as their modern counterparts. Well, the current FreeBSD situation is a lot similar to how Linux was perceived back in the day.

Using agentic AI for tasks is the new big thing, whether that's for productivity collaboration, automating workflows, or offloading cognitive load to a silicon second brain. It's an incredibly powerful tool, but I'm not comfortable setting it free on my main system. LLMs make mistakes, whether it's confidently offering the wrong answer as true, or making hilariously dangerous decisions about data security.

I gravitated towards a Pixel phone solely for the stock Android experience after years of juggling between Chinese OEM ROMs like MIUI and ColorOS, like the allure of a reference design GPU. Instead of replacing it with Niagara Launcher and stripping the phone bare of bloatware, I used it as-is for years, focusing only on the home screen customization. As a result, I've locked down a few widgets that truly earn their space on my home-screen grid, even though every app's 1x1 icon would also suffice.

For someone who strayed away from anything AI-related for a long time, hosting my own large language models made me aware of how productive local models can be. Whether it’s aiding my troubleshooting efforts after a botched project renders my home lab offline, extracting precise text snippets from abysmally long documents, or helping me organize my bookmarks, local LLMs are now a staple part of my FOSS arsenal.

I've been around Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling long enough to see it swing between "must-have toggle" and "turn it off immediately," depending on who you ask (or how my YouTube Shorts algorithm is feeling on any given day). Ever since it arrived with Windows 10, HAGS has been regarded as an optimization miracle by some, and an unnecessary complication by others. You'll find benchmarks praising its latency improvements, all while the comments will be rife with anecdotes of smoother gameplay with it disabled.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but at the very least, it seems to know when it needs to change course for its own good. After over a year of the company adding Copilot to all of its apps, it finally pivoted direction after users told Microsoft that they were sick of AI tools. Now, the company is trying its best to win back users by improving on some of the more common pain points people have with Windows 11, like the Start menu.

Who’s asking for this? | Image: Turtle Beach Turtle Beach's latest collection of PC peripherals are so focused around touchscreen displays that the company even slapped one on a gaming mouse. The $160 wireless Command Series MC7 features a 2.25-inch touch display bar on the left side of the mouse, which seems to be located in just the right position for users to worry about accidentally hitting it with their thumbs.The display bar is designed to function like a built-in Stream Deck, allowing users to assign customizable commands for macros, apps, and OBS controls. It also brings to mind the infamous MacBook Pro Touch Bar, which was easy to accidentally hit while typing until the feat …Read the full story at The Verge.

I don't think I'm being too controversial when I say that a good VPN should let you pick which country's servers you'd like to connect to. Sure, connecting to a node in your own country is fine for privacy and guarantees the best speeds possible, but sometimes you want a website to believe you're visiting from somewhere else, at which point you need a server picker.

The auto design world is full of advanced 3D visualization tools and VR sculpting platforms, but your average new car still enters the world as a sketch. Those sketches traditionally see endless iteration and refinement from all angles before being turned into 3D models by hand, some dying in the digital world, others sculpted into clay to better visualize lines and profiles. That's just the beginning of a design and development process that often takes a half-decade or more. That means many new cars hitting dealerships this summer were first sketched in 2020 or 2021, initiatives kicked off when alternative fuel incentives were widesprea …Read the full story at The Verge.