Proton Suite has been the default recommendation for anyone serious about digital privacy. It’s a polished, all-in-one powerhouse, but it comes with a recurring price tag that adds up and an ecosystem that can feel a bit too centralized. I decided to see if I could achieve the same level of encryption and peace of mind without the monthly subscription.

A Raspberry Pi can feel like a little miracle, capable of everything from blocking ads to running smart home automations and retro games. It is still just a tiny computer, though, and it has real limits that are easy to forget once ideas start flowing. If you avoid a few common mistakes, the Pi stays fast, stable, and pleasant to work with rather than becoming a flaky box you constantly need to fix. Think of this as a checklist of what not to do, so your next project has a much better chance of just working.

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan to launch an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites on Friday. That brings the total number of satellites the company will have in orbit to around 15,000 worldwide. As part of the approval, the government is also waiving previous requirements that prevented overlapping coverage and enhanced capacity.SpaceX originally sought approval for 30,000 satellites, but for now, the FCC is only greenlighting 15,000. The company will be on a deadline, too. The government says 50 percent of the Gen2 satellites must be launched and operational by December 1st of 2028, with the rest to follow by December of 2031. But the …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you start to hear how Linux might be better than Windows 11 in areas like customization, privacy, and resource efficiency, you can’t help but think about switching. But if you’ve been a Windows user for years and are ready to make the switch, you might be surprised that Linux often takes a bit more setup up front than Windows. If you want the best possible experience, you should conduct some research beforehand.

A giant version of Lockin’s wirelessly charged V7 smart lock was a showstopper on the CES show floor. I picked Aqara's Smart Lock U400 and Roborock's Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor. It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren't about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs. This is what I expected the launch of the interoperability protocol Matter would bring. Once companies could stop spending time and money on working on integrating with half a dozen platforms, they could fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in seven days, he will open-source X's new algorithm and finally give people a peek behind the curtain and possibly a technical explanation as to why your feed is 90 percent rage bait.Elon has always made promises to open-source parts of X, and has followed through to at least some degree, including Grok-1 in 2024. But xAI is now on Grok-3, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) debuted with Windows 10 as a simpler way to run Linux distributions without needing a third-party hypervisor. WSL 2 improved its numerous shortcomings and became an easy way to run and manage multiple Linux distros on Windows. I personally use it with an Ubuntu VM running Docker for a PaperlessNGX instance with a local LLM. WSL now supports GPU passthrough, so running the local LLM by powering it with my NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU isn’t an issue.

PC hardware has never been faster for gaming. Current-gen CPUs are pushing higher clocks and relying on larger L3 caches, GPUs are brute-forcing ridiculous frame rates at higher resolutions, and Gen 5 SSDs advertise speeds that most games don't even know what to do with. It's almost like you have everything you need for a buttery-smooth gaming experience, especially if you're using a high-refresh-rate monitor, but that's not always the case even today. You can have a high-end rig and still feel like something’s holding it back.

Running a full Linux desktop on a Windows or macOS-based machine usually requires dual-booting, a virtual machine on your PC, or a remote desktop connection to a system that's actually running it. But what if I told you there was a way to run Linux so that you can access a full operating system and desktop from just your web browser? That's the promise of containers like LinuxServer's Webtop, and after using it, it's hard not to see why this approach is so compelling.

When we first moved into this house, it was part of an ongoing development, and not every house was occupied (or even built). I wasted no time getting fiber-to-the-home installed and setting up a mesh kit with one node on each floor, thinking that would be perfectly adequate for our needs. And it was, mostly, until we started noticing odd glitches in wireless connectivity in parts of the house.

Sharing files between devices is easy thanks to cloud services, but becomes more difficult when you want an offline-first privacy-focused solution that also supports devices across different platforms.

Whether you're assembling a new rig or upgrading your old powerhouse, 2025 delivered some compelling GPUs across the stack, for every use case and budget. The year brought a mix of solid entries from both NVIDIA and AMD. Amid the show of the Blackwell-powered muscle of Team Green to the value-driven RDNA 4 advancements from Team Red, we also witnessed a surprisingly robust response from Intel with its wild card entry into the market, as the chipmaker continues to win back its place in the GPU market.