Also, the i486's time is nigh.

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.

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 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.

NotebookLM is a powerful utility that has found a permanent home in the workspaces of researchers, students, consultants, and other "knowledge workers" alike. It's reliable and trustworthy, since all of its responses are grounded strictly in user-provided data. There really was no doubt it would become one of user's favorite data analysis utilities, primarily because it makes it so effortless.

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.

This past month, my rig went through a significant GPU swap. I really like my RX 9070 XT in terms of its performance, and for the price, it's difficult to beat when compared to other cards in the price range, and I didn't have any plans to switch to another card. That was, until, Nvidia all but confirmed that no new RTX cards would be coming down the pipeline for 2026; the first time in about 3 decades that Nvidia hasn't released a new gaming GPU in a 1-year span.

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.

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.

ePaper smart displays in the Home Assistant world have never had a hardware problem. The reTerminal E-series, Waveshare's ESP32 ePaper boards, M5Paper, and the LilyGO T5 lineup have all been on shelves for years, and you can pick up a panel with a microcontroller already attached for cheap. What there hasn't really been is a firmware and integration story that ties any of it together cleanly. OpenEpaperLink got the closest, but you were still flashing an access point, dealing with vendor-specific Arduino sketches in some instances, or writing your own ESPHome configuration and skipping a "standard" entirely.

It feels like for the past decade, Samsung TV owners have had two choices: use the often clunky Smart View, which only those that truly love Galaxy phones use, or sacrifice an HDMI port and a USB power outlet for a Chromecast dongle. However, recent news indicates that, in a massive 2026 software pivot, Samsung has added native Google Cast support to all 2026 models and is bringing the feature to 2024 and 2025 TVs, as well as select 2023 televisions, via a Tizen OS update.

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.