This “piercing pillow” also works great with earbuds you probably already own. Tech companies love to sell us expensive gadgets to solve all of life's little problems. Sleepbuds sold by the likes of Anker and Ozlo are a good example. These miniature marvels of engineering sit flush in the ear, and allow side-sleepers to doze off listening to podcasts, audiobooks, music, or white noise without annoying their partner. But why pay over $200 for a second pair of highly specialized buds when you can spend a fraction of that for a product that never needs charging, never loses its Bluetooth connection, and won't need replacing in a few years after the battery wears out? Piercing pillows, as the name suggests, promise pain …Read the full story at The Verge.

Remember when Meta was planning to charge a $20 monthly subscription fee for the smart glasses feature that lets people hear each other more clearly - even though that feature runs locally on your glasses and doesn't require the cloud? Meta has paused those plans, spokesperson Tyler Yee confirms to The Verge.The company is not giving up on the idea of a subscription fee for certain features - that's still moving forward. Yee confirms that "some premium features will be subscription-based over time."But Conversation Focus, the accessibility feature, "will remain available for free through our Early Access Program for early testers while w …Read the full story at The Verge.

There are very few things that frustrate me as much as Windows "utility" suites that promise to clean and speed up your Windows PC, all for the price of a yearly subscription. What subscribers really get from them are just startup managers, process monitors, file shredders, and a few other handpicked maintenance tools that they could think of, all onto one single dashboard. The idea they purport is that Windows can't look after itself, while the reality is that Windows, and by extension, you, the user, can clean things up just as well without paying a single cent.

Five years ago, if you were to compare a 5-year-old CPU to the then current-gen parts, the gulf in performance would have been huge. Today, the same comparison would appear starkly different. CPUs from 2020 can be considered old, but not outdated. If you care mostly about gaming performance, then you still don't need to upgrade your "aging" CPU.

I know the temptation to buy a new graphics card when your current GPU doesn't perform as well as it used to. As a PC gamer, I have dreamt about buying a new GPU for the last three years. It was the RTX 4080 Super in 2024 and the RTX 5080 in 2025 that had me reaching for my wallet, but I reconsidered on both occasions.

When I first got into home labbing, I treated every subscription like it was a personal challenge. I started by eliminating some of the easy ones, like Google Photos and Spotify, then moved on to Netflix, Dropbox, and others. As long as a self-hosted alternative exists, my instinct is to kill the subscription and prove that I didn't need it. That mentality has stuck with me ever since, and now I've replaced the most common services. Immich handles my photos, Nextcloud replaced Google Drive, Jellyfin serves my music, and Plex is good for movies and TV.

The rapid development of LLM coding tools has forced the open-source community to ask itself the question: does AI belong in the world of FOSS? How much AI belongs? Are AI-powered tools allowed? What about AI-generated code?

Not too long ago, I avoided DLSS upscaling unless I absolutely needed the extra performance. Visually, it always felt like a compromise. The image looked softer, almost as if someone had smeared Vaseline all over my screen. But Nvidia has improved DLSS so much over the last year and a half, and with DLSS 4.5 today, the upscaled image looks just as good as native 4K. At this point, I can't really tell whether DLSS is enabled unless I check the in-game settings or look at my FPS counter.

When I bought the RTX 4090 nearly four years ago, the GPU market was in a much better spot than it is today. You could actually buy graphics cards much closer to MSRP. In fact, I was able to snag a liquid-cooled RTX 4090 for about $2,000, which looks like a steal in hindsight, considering I couldn't find a single listing for under $3,000 today. While that's partly because it's no longer in production, you also can't ignore the impact AI demand has had on GPU prices over the last couple of years.

People have managed to achieve some amazing things with an ESP32, but I think setting one up to capture a laser pulse and create a 10 billion FPS video showing light travelling across the room takes the biscuit. And while an ESP32 is definitely not capable of recording a single video at that level of slow-mo, someone had an excellent idea as to how to achieve a similar effect using the microcontroller.

If you're privacy-minded, you probably don't want to leave your computer open for someone to use after you've finished connecting to it remotely. But how do you make sure your PC is secured without being there to check? Well, KDE Plasma 6.8 is solving that problem by adding a toggle that automatically locks your server once the last person connecting to it remotely has disconnected.

Self-hosting has been the theme for me for a good stretch of months now, and finding a note-taking app that fits properly has been part of that. The requirements aren't complicated - something quick to capture into, something that doesn't need an account, and something where the data actually stays on the machine it was written on. Unfortunately, not many options actually meet that standard.