I'm not going to say you're not a true PC enthusiast if you don't have a few old SATA drives kicking around in drawers and old rigs, but it's incredibly common. It could be an old 500GB HDD pulled from a laptop SSD upgrade, or your first 256GB SATA SSD that got kicked to the curb when you upgraded to an NVMe drive. It can even be that 2TB HDD you bought for your main rig that you planned to use as game storage, but ended up sitting idle. Whichever it is, the instinct to toss them or let them sit in your drawer forever is a mistake.

Do you know about the Wipeout games? If not, they're a futuristic racing game, not too unlike F-Zero, that was first released on the PS1. I still remember having a blast with the demo on my console all those years ago. Good times.

For a long time, I didn't engage with NotebookLM's slide decks, even though I'm a fan of the AI tool's features. However, while investigating whether the AI could generate visuals for certain workouts, it suggested I create a slide deck.

Every week, we get a sneak peek into what people are working on in KDE Plasma. Well, okay, it's not really a 'sneak peek,' given how KDE Plasma is open source, and you can just pop over to GitHub and check out what everyone is working on. However, it definitely feels like we're getting a curated look behind the curtain to see what to expect from future releases, so it's close enough.

At this point, there's little that hasn't been said about the significant drawbacks of GPUs with 8GB of VRAM. These bottom-of-the-barrel cards are disguised as affordable performers, but they are easily beaten by AAA titles even at 1080p. Sure, countless gamers don't daily AAA titles, but the era of 8GB VRAM should have ended long ago. When smaller competitors like Intel can offer 12GB of VRAM on budget models, what's stopping Nvidia and AMD from doing at least that? However, GPU manufacturers will always do what's best for business, and skimping on VRAM seems to be working well for them. With old and new VRAM-saving tricks constantly improving, and a terrible market forcing people to buy subpar products, 8GB VRAM GPUs will not become obsolete anytime soon.

GNOME is a minimalist, albeit too simple, desktop environment. It's a part of so many Linux distros, and is the baseline of what you can expect as a desktop experience. GNOME is not new to me, as I've seen it evolve from 2016 to what it's become now, and it certainly is an improvement. But the pain of adopting such an approach is that it doesn't ship many features that you expect from a DE by default. The difference is more visible when you switch from other OS like Windows or macOS, because certain features like simple app categories and advanced tiling support aren't there.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on Hollywood trends and streaming culture, follow Charles Pulliam-Moore. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sundays at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedUnder David Zaslav's leadership, WBD got very into the practice of shelving its own nearly completed projects in order to cash in on subsequent tax write-offs. To help deal with its looming debt and operating costs, the studio killed Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's live-action Batgirl feature and the Scoob! Holiday Haunt movie from Michael Kurinsky …Read the full story at The Verge.

Browser bookmarks are supposed to make things easier. Instead, if you're anything like me, they quickly turn into a dumping ground. I save links faster than I organize them into folders, and folders get nested inside folders. By the time I actually get around to checking out those links, half of those links are outdated. And for the most part, the most critical ones get duplicated across devices. All that to say that the bookmark bar doesn't really stay all that useful for too long.

I keep saying this, but VS Code is barely an IDE now. It feels more like an open-source platform, almost like an operating system. You can do far more with Visual Studio Code than just write code. You can turn it into a single workspace for notes, tasks, and code without forcing it into something it is not.

In recent months, Valve has been working away on three hardware releases - the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and the Steam Controller - but things haven't been going great for their release. We know they exist, and Valve itself has confirmed they exist, but due to the rising RAM and storage prices, the company has been forced to delay the release date, as it seemingly wants to release all three at the same time.

I used Raspberry Pi 4 as my Home Assistant hub and for IoT projects, since it had GPIO pins. But over time, the performance issues persisted, and I migrated Home Assistant's duties to my mini PC. As I got familiar with the ESP32 microcontrollers, building devices became fun. Yet I wondered if Pi was still needed in the smart home loop.

By now, pretty much every major operating system under the sun has some variation of the night light feature. If you've never used it before (and somehow still have eyeballs with which to read this), Night Light adds an amber hue to your displays once the sun goes down. The idea is that the color change reduces the amount of blue light reaching your retinas, which is responsible for keeping people up at night, as it tricks the brain into thinking it's still daytime.