HDMI-CEC seemed like a godsend when I first discovered it. I can use my Xbox controller, turn on the console, and it automatically powers on the TV and switches it to the correct input? What could go wrong? For a long time, my living room was blissful convenience, but as time wore on and more devices became connected to my TV, the cracks started to show.

I have used Raspberry Pi boards for years. They remain one of the easiest ways to get started with self-hosting, home automation, and small server projects. My experience with Raspberry Pi boards has generally been positive, but they come with a few limitations. Performance can become a bottleneck once you start running multiple services. Storage performance also depends heavily on the medium you use. MicroSD cards remain among the weakest components in many Raspberry Pi setups, especially when applications perform frequent reads and writes.

Windows built-in backup tools don't really excite users anymore. Microsoft stopped working on improving old backup tools and plans to phase out the Backup and Restore tool. The company introduced Windows Backup as a new cloud-based solution, but it relies on OneDrive. Most users prefer a third-party solution like Macrium Reflect or other popular tools over what Windows has to offer. However, I gave the built-in backup tools a serious try as a primary backup option, and the results showed that they aren’t as bad as some users feel.

I have used both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay before, but switching between them on short city drives never told me the full story. Long drives are different.

Android's app ecosystem is much larger than what you see on the Play Store. While most people stick to Google's official marketplace, I've found that some of the most interesting apps live elsewhere. Over the past few months, I spent time exploring alternative app sources, looking for tools that could improve how I use my Pixel every day.

VS Code has always been my go-to editor, but for the longest time, it still felt like a place where I had to do heavy lifting myself. That changed when I started using the new Agents Manager view with Copilot CLI.

If there's one thing I've learned about the AI scene, it's that it moves incredibly fast. One year's innovation becomes the next year's dead weight, and we're seeing models like Claude getting major updates every month or two.

At Computex 2026, AMD reintroduced the 5800X3D as the 10th Anniversary Edition, and that really put AM4's lifespan into perspective. This isn’t a faster refresh; it's the exact same CPU we got four years ago. Still, many people are excited about its return, which says a lot about just how well AM4 has aged. Sure, you could argue that the PC market is in a rough spot right now, and that moving to AM5 means paying inflated prices for DDR5 memory on top of a new motherboard, but that alone isn't the reason AM4 remains relevant today.

It took me a few months to migrate everything off of cloud storage and onto my own hardware. When it came to replacing OneDrive, I decided to install Nextcloud on my TrueNAS box. I figured I could store my files as easily as OneDrive, so there's no sense paying Microsoft a monthly fee just to host them.

When getting into the home-labbing world, the first thing that most people self-host is their photo library. Camera rolls do nothing but grow, and it's one of the easiest things to move off the cloud and onto your own hardware. All it really takes is launching an Immich instance you can point your phone to, and then you've essentially got a private, subscription-free version of Google Photos that you fully control.

It's been over a year since the launch of the RTX 50 and RX 90 series GPUs, and 2026 is set to end with no new GPU launches. We have the global data center demand and consequent memory shortage to thank for it. So, it's not surprising that the most interesting piece of hardware from Team Red this year is not a GPU but an AI mini PC. The Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform is a $3,999 compact workstation powered by the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the most powerful consumer APU on the market, at least in the x86 world. For this price, you're looking at a 16-core, 32-thread processor, a 40-CU RDNA 3.5 iGPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory. This Strix Halo mini PC is expressly targeted at making local AI workloads on AMD hardware significantly faster and more seamless. With its 128GB of unified memory, this mini PC can beat fan-favorite local AI GPUs like the RTX 3090 and even the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 when it comes to chewing through massive LLMs. It does have to compete with Nvidia's DGX Spark, but it has price and availability on its side, although AMD's ROCm platform still lags behind Nvidia's CUDA.

To celebrate its new status as No. 1 in JD Power's initial quality ranking among mainstream automakers, Ford is opening up about the challenges it has faced in recent years, especially around its reliance on automated systems in production and design. It turns out that those automated systems were not as robust as previously assumed, requiring Ford to hire experienced technicians - sometimes bringing back former employees - to correct errors made by the company's robots. In Ford's view, AI is both powerful and prone to pitfalls. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the data used to train the AI models. In addition, the auto …Read the full story at The Verge.