I'm old enough to remember when TVs weighed half a ton (figuratively) and weren't always in color, and while I love nerding out about OLED and the various permutations of quantum dots that seem to be the next gen of display tech, one thing has soured my TV experience. Okay, two things, because 3D TVs were terrible, but I'm specifically talking about the hostile user experience on almost every smart TV you can buy.

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, which surfaced earlier this week, are linked to a massive lawsuit filed by several school districts, families, and state attorneys general, accusing Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Snap of creating "addictive and dangerous" products that have harmed young users' mental health. (Snap settled earl …Read the full story at The Verge.

Printers are already finicky enough to work with, so the last thing you want is for your software to have its own gripes, too. Unfortunately, as much as I love KDE Plasma, it does have some quirks with printing that make the process a little more annoying than it has to be.

The Loch Capsule in a tiny house that lacks space for a built-in dishwasher. A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can't live without. It's one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one. And now that the kids are grown, it's the appliance I thought I'd miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits.Loch sent me its $459.99 / €459.99 countertop Capsule dishwasher to review in a tiny home on a remote beach and inside a van on a two-month roadtrip. It's an excellent product that washes and dries two place settings quickly at bacteria-killing temperatures up to 75 degrees Celsius (167F) in as little as 20 minutes. It'll even kill bacteria and neutralize viruses on your gadgets with a …Read the full story at The Verge.

Self-hosting used to feel like a technical milestone to me. If the container was running and the dashboard loaded, I felt accomplished. I treated a successful install like a finish line. And honestly, it made sense, self-hosting used to be hard. But after running my own services for months, that mindset started to crack. The setup was exciting, but it was also temporary. What followed mattered more: keeping things running, secure, and stable over time. That’s when I realized the hardest part of self-hosting isn’t getting started, it’s everything that comes after.

This is not an Nvidia Arm laptop, but the old image seemed thematically appropriate. Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It's not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore. There are finally competent Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops running Windows, and - as soon as this spring - Nvidia will finally power Windows consumer laptops with Arm chips all by itself.They won't have an Nvidia graphics chip next to an Intel CPU, but rather an Nvidia N1 system-on-chip at the helm - and overnight, a Lenovo leak revealed that the company has built six laptops on the upcoming N1 and N1X processors, including a 15-inch gaming machine. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Mesh networking is amazing. It allows you to use multiple nodes to create a wide-reaching wireless network for all devices to get online. Compared to just one router with wireless capabilities, a mesh network can improve your Wi-Fi signal strength tenfold, depending on the location and building. I know wired networking is king in the home local area network (LAN) world, but I wasn't expecting it to be that much better than an existing mesh setup.

I resisted setting up automation for my home lab for the longest time, partly because I wanted to manually do the process repeatedly, so that it would sink in to help with learning. That meant I skipped out on handy CLI tools for one-line fixes, but I was focusing on the wrong aspect of setup. If I had to go back again, I'd learn automation tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Packer from the start, because the paradigm shift of seeing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) takes longer if you're already mired in a particular way of working.

A year ago, it seemed like smart glasses were really poised to take over the market. However, it's now the start of 2026 and not much has really changed. People still aren't picking these things up despite them advancing in technology and offering more and more reasons to ditch a traditional monitor.

As PC gamers, we're almost always planning upgrades, tracking component prices, and thinking about the best time to upgrade. Some of us might not intend to upgrade for years, but others with older hardware might have made up their minds. It is then a question of finding the chosen parts at reasonable prices. Personally, I decide to upgrade my PC when my build is old enough, there's no new launch on the horizon, and prices are stable. Sadly, this trifecta actually existed around six months ago, but I was too distracted to take advantage. Since then, the prices of RAM, storage, and graphics cards have broken the stratosphere. We all missed the bus, and there's no telling how long our upgrade dreams need to wait.

For PC gamers, DisplayPort has been the default for some time now. It generally sports higher bandwidth than HDMI depending ont he version, has features tailored to the PC ecosystem, and eliminates the cable confusion that HDMI is prone to. Most monitors have a DisplayPort 1.4 connection that trumps any HDMI 2.0 ports available on the display.

SBC is a fantastic subset of the computing world that continues to surprise me. Before that, I couldn't think of developing single-purpose projects, but now it's exciting to build something new. Previously, I converted one of my Raspberry Pi Zero 2W into a downloading device, and it works fantastically. It sips very small amounts of power and wakes up to my call when the need arises. However, I've found another role for my Raspberry Pi, which is using it as a local password manager device rather than relying on a paid one.