We've reached a point where Google and Amazon are charging more money for fewer features while still injecting AI features that we didn't ask for into our private files. In 2026, the hardware, like the Raspberry Pi 5 or N100 Mini PC, is finally fast enough to run professional-grade software locally without the lag of the early 2020s.

The $2 monthly charge for Google One seems like a small price to pay to make a nagging notification disappear, but it’s another subscription you probably don’t even need. Most of us are sitting on gigabytes of forgotten newsletters, massive attachments from 2017, and high-def videos we didn’t realize were syncing to the cloud.

I've always been a staunch advocate of heavy expense on the display in your workstation, gaming PC, or home office setup for the simple reason that it gets more use than other expensive parts like the CPU and GPU. You might not always max out the core clocks and VRAM on those internals, but every minute your PC is operational, you're likely staring at its screen to get things done. That's the essential crux of why I'm dumbfounded when people spend thousands on building a nice PC, but cheap out on peripherals and I/O, even though you'd interact with the latter way more frequently.

My home server, which is really just a repurposed desktop PC that got swept aside to make way for a beefier rig, was chugging along fine with two 4TB hard drives. The drives were mirrored, which I considered a safe enough configuration for the media it was hosting.

Lately, I've been experimenting with a home server that runs on a ZFS pool on a hard drive array. That setup works great when prioritising capacity and reliability, things that I'm obviously looking for in a NAS. I have no trouble streaming large files, and the system has been exceptionally stable for me. But over time, I started observing a few instances where the entire system felt slower than it should. It wasn't something that showed up in benchmarks, but opening directories with thousands of files, like images, certainly took much longer than expected. Apps that scanned large media folders would pause more often than I thought they should. Elsewhere, container workloads that relied on lots of reads also felt less responsive than they should. The hard drives weren't saturated, the problem was latency.

Aether OS puts a full-fledged desktop in your browser that ties directly into the AT Protocol. That means it connects to your Bluesky account and other public records. It offers a pretty full suite of apps, 42 in total, covering text editing, task management, and social media. There's even a rudimentary tracker for making chiptunes, a DAW, and a video editor. Of course, part of the appeal is also the cyberpunk good looks that draw obvious inspiration from The Matrix. Right now, the project is in alpha, and there are a lot of rough edges. Documentation is also basically non-existent. So, if you get stuck trying to use an app, you're kind …Read the full story at The Verge.

Local AI enthusiasts value the elusive trinity of capable performance, generous VRAM, and affordability in a graphics card. The latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD may be powerful for gaming, but when it comes to AI workloads, all of them fall short in one or the other department. The RTX 3090 is over 5 years old, but it still beats the latest GPUs when measured by the three metrics I mentioned above. It has a whopping 24GB of VRAM, can be bought for $600–$800 on the used market, and still boasts great performance for most local AI tasks. It's not a replacement for cloud subscriptions of popular AI models, but it offers the most value to enthusiasts hunting for a relatively affordable yet powerful graphics card for local AI.

Easter gifts do not need to be expensive to feel thoughtful, especially when a 3D printer can turn a small amount of filament into something personal and festive. The best options are usually the ones that print quickly, look charming in pastel colors, and can be made in batches without turning your desk into a production line. That is why the smartest Easter picks tend to be simple, cheerful, and easy to customize. A good print can feel handmade in the best way while still keeping the budget under control.

You can easily spend $100 on a top-tier Wi-Fi 7 PCIe card, but then after doing so, you might find that your speeds are barely hitting Wi-Fi 5 levels and the problem isn't the card; it is that you've essentially put your antennas in a lead-lined box. Most users screw their antennas directly into the back of the motherboard, sandwiching them between a metal case and a wall.

If you're tired of running to your home office every time a server goes down or a container is hung, you might be looking for an alternative solution that is probably sitting right in front of you. I wanted a way to manage my infrastructure from the comfort of my sofa without a bulky laptop. My Steam Deck OLED was staring me right in the face. Pair it with a high-quality dock and the built-in KDP Plasma desktop environment, and you've got yourself something that isn't just a gaming console but instead a portable battery-powered terminal that can monitor your entire network while you're waiting for a game to download.

If you have a sharp memory, you'll likely remember that Microsoft promised more with its Copilot assistant, but the features they demoed back in 2024 haven't made it to Windows 11 yet. Whether this is good or bad news depends on your attitude toward Copilot, but regardless of how you feel about it, it does beg the question: what happened to those features?

Whether it’s TeamViewer’s aggressive ‘commercial use detected’ pop-ups, AnyDesk’s restrictive free tier, or the lag of browser-based tools, the search for a reliable, truly free alternative has long felt like a compromise.