I always get excited when I bring home a new smart home speaker or another smart device. Turning on lights or music using your voice feels magical and is also a neat party trick. Voice control truly feels like the future. Configuring a morning routine with my smart speaker to watch it trigger the automations sounds fun.

Discord made huge waves among its community when it announced that it would begin rolling out age checks worldwide. Originally intended only for countries like the UK, where age scans are mandatory, Discord has claimed it'll begin asking everyone for face or ID scans to help protect teen safety.

Sam Altman announced on X that Peter Steinberger, the man behind the trendy AI agent OpenClaw, was joining OpenAI. He said that Steinberger has "a lot of amazing ideas" about getting AI agents to interact with each other, saying "the future is going to be extremely multi-agent." He also said that this ability for agents to work together will "quickly become core to our product offerings."OpenClaw, previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot, exploded on the scene earlier this year and became the darling of the tech world. Its rise was swift, but not without its bumps along the way. Earlier this month, researchers found over 400 malicious skil …Read the full story at The Verge.

While it seems like a new AI model is entering the game every single day, only a handful of names actually dominate the conversation. For the longest time, I bounced between Gemini, Perplexity, and, of course, ChatGPT. I relied on each for different tasks, convinced that rotating between them was the only way to get the best results.

I went into Gerbera with a simple goal: to make my media library visible on every UPnP device in the house without turning the setup into a weekend project. It delivered on that promise fast, especially when I ran it in Docker and treated it like a small, single-purpose appliance. Within minutes, it was showing up everywhere I expected, and it played nicely with Infuse on my iPhone and Apple TV. Still, once the novelty wore off, I kept noticing how much I rely on Jellyfin’s polish to make movie night feel effortless.

It's no surprise that games have been taking up more and more space these days. The optimist in me wants to say it's because we're exploring bigger, more feature-rich, and more graphically intense worlds, but there is a pessimistic side that believes that, because we're at a point where terabytes of data come easily, game developers just don't put in much effort to squeeze their game down.

I found out I had way more monthly subscriptions than I initially thought, and that was after trimming down quite a few. It's easy to sign up for services and forget about them; in fact, according to a 2024 report, the average American has between four and five subscriptions and pays roughly $924 per year — that's about $77 per month — on subscriptions. That's easy to believe, especially when a premium-tier Netflix subscription is $25 on its own. Throw in just a couple of other streaming services and those costs stack up fast.

I've been getting into atomic Linux distros lately, which is a sentence I can only really say on a tech blog and not among my friends. But while I've only used an atomic distro on a PC, I am interested to see how it'd run on a mobile device. I'm not so brave as to wipe my current phone and go all-in on using Linux on it just yet (well, a non-Android Linux OS, anyway), but now that I've learned that there's an atomic Fedora OS that works on mobile phones, I might just give it a go.

The hype surrounding the 2026 Steam Machine revival is nothing if not palpable at the moment. Valve seems to have finally perfected the "console-like" PC experience, offering a sleek, living-room-ready box that promises to bridge the gap between the desk and the couch. Right now, things are a bit iffy, though, with the future of the Steam Machine unclear, along with its pricing and software capabilities. That's thanks to the ongoing AI boom and the RAM crisis, which have proven to be a bane for PC hardware enthusiasts in 2026.

Gamers are always trying to squeeze out the most performance from their hardware, especially in competitive titles. Every frame and every extra millisecond of latency can make the difference, and even in titles where it's not as serious, nobody is going to complain about extra FPS. DLSS is great at providing extra frames at the slight cost of visual fidelity, and for most games, this is a net positive, but it's not necessarily the "future" of PC gaming. It's already here, and it's good. The real future of gaming is asynchronous reprojection, a technology that promises much lower latency and a smooth experience regardless of framerate.

When Windows 11 was released in the preview channels, I was among the early adopters. The iteration in its early days looked promising, particularly the modern UI, though compatibility with older hardware was a concern. Frankly, I liked the centrally-aligned taskbar, the updated Settings app, and even the new File Explorer, and I made my peace with the revamped Start Menu. As for hardware limitations, I soon found out that installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware was as easy, and there was no major downside to it, as long as the system wasn't super old.

Back in 2023, we were all having the same conversation: was it finally time to move on from DDR4? I asked myself that exact question when I built my own PC that year, and decided to jump onto AM5 with DDR5, convinced that it was the more "future-proof" choice. DDR4 felt like it was aging out, nearing the end of its lifecycle, and sticking with it seemed like delaying the inevitable.