3D printing often feels like the perfect answer to everyday annoyances. If something does not quite work in your space, you can design or download a fix and have it ready in a few hours. I have used my printer for plenty of genuinely helpful projects, from cable guides to storage bins. These prints, however, taught me that not every clever idea survives the long-term wear and tear of a real home.

Chromebooks don't tend to live particularly long lives, at least in the eyes of Google. Once they age out of the update window, they slowly begin to migrate to a drawer or e-waste pile somewhere. That's really unfortunate, and it doesn't have to be this way.

During its first seven months on the market, the quality of Nintendo Switch 2 game ports has varied wildly. On the negative side of things, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's port has massive input delay, while Madden NFL 26 on Switch 2 is riddled with bugs and performance issues. Some of the more impressive ports have been of Bloober Team's horror games, Cronos - The New Dawn and Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition.

If you're in the gaming scene right now, you've likely already seen two trends arising after Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at the Game Awards. The first is a whole bunch of memes claiming that Clair Obscur can win awards it's not even eligible to win, and the second is some serious discourse over games using generative AI to create assets.

ZFS has earned its reputation the hard way. It's one of the few filesystems that genuinely delivers on promises like end-to-end data integrity, self-healing, snapshots that don't feel like a hack, and storage management that actually scales as your system grows. Once you've lived with ZFS, it's hard to go back to traditional RAID and ext4 without feeling like you've lost safety nets you didn't realize you were relying on. ZFS can detect and correct errors that a simple RAID or ext4 setup would never catch, and features like instant snapshots and copy-on-write design make tasks like backups and rollbacks easy to make a habit.

Ever since its introduction, Docker Desktop has been the de facto standard for container management, but its resource-heavy nature forced many of us to seek alternatives like Portainer. While Portainer is powerful for fleet management, I have finally switched my entire workflow to Podman, and I can confidently say this daemonless, rootless container engine is better than both its predecessor.

Did you know that, until very recently, Google's website supported the Sega Dreamcast's browser? Unfortunately, by the time you've read these words, it's too late to dig the Dreamcast out of the attic, dust it down, and see for yourself, as the search engine giant has finally cut support for anyone still browsing the internet using Sega's final entry into the console market.

A web browser is much more than just another app, and for most users, it shapes the entire PC user experience. It's your primary interface for work, entertainment, and everything that comes in between. Yet, despite being the most utilized piece of software on modern systems, the browser is rarely scrutinized when performance starts to feel a little off. Stuttering gets blamed on the CPU, rising RAM usage gets written off as "Windows being Windows", and crashes and shutdown often nudge people towards unnecessary hardware upgrades.

It has been a really harsh year for building a PC, hasn't it? Near the start, we saw astronomical prices for Nvidia's newest RTX 50 series, as scalpers bought up GPUs and resold them for a killing. Then, right as the RTX 50 prices began to get sane, we saw RAM and SSD prices spike massively as AI companies began buying them in bulk. We even saw Crucial duck out of the consumer market to better serve business demand.

There are plenty of free note-taking apps out there, but you'll often find a trade-off between privacy and convenience. Cloud syncing often comes at the cost of security or with limited devices on a free plan.

Cookie tins feel like a blessing and a curse. On one hand, when you're in the mood for a cookie, you have to wrestle with the lid for a little while to unleash the goodies within. On the other hand, there's a good reason why people use them to store sewing supplies; they're pretty tough and can last a while.

If you have a home server or home lab, you might always be thinking about upgrades to bolster its capabilities. From more storage and a new GPU to ECC RAM and 10Gb Ethernet, there's a lot you can do to upgrade your home server. That said, you might be ignoring a critical upgrade as you chase better specs. A UPS should be the next investment for your home server, providing not only power backup for uninterrupted operations, but also protection from power anomalies. Without a UPS, you're risking annoying interruptions, data loss, and even permanent damage to your hardware.