After failing the first time, I knew I didn’t want to build my smart home at the mercy of someone else’s servers. From smart home hubs to devices, nearly everything felt cloud-dependent by design. Over time, I noticed the side effects of that — laggy responses, delayed or failed automations, and occasional device failures. Turning a light shouldn’t require a command to take a trip across the internet. But that’s what was happening.

When you set up a NAS, you naturally expect to grow it in size over the coming years by adding more drives, attaching an expansion unit, or upgrading to a bigger NAS. However, downsizing the NAS after using it for a few years isn’t that common — although I did manage to do it. I didn’t decide to downsize my NAS because I ran out of space or wanted to save money. The real reason for this downsizing operation was to make the NAS much more efficient than it already was. It was doing too much, and I wanted it to do only the things it was actually meant for and good at.

Every January, the world of consumer electronics heads to Las Vegas to spend the first full week of the year in the desert presenting, prodding, and gawking at all the new gadgets and gear debuting at CES. The show has once again delivered an avalanche of products, both innovative and vaporous, that will shape the industry in 2026. The Verge's team has been working around the clock to share the experience. Some of it wowed us while some of it weirded us out, but that's part of the fun of CES. After taking it all in over the past week, there are some gadgets that stood out from the rest. They innovated on an existing product, entirely ret …Read the full story at The Verge.

Towerborne, a side-scrolling action RPG published by Xbox Game Studios that has been available in early access, will officially launch on February 26th. But instead of launching as a free-to-play, always-on online game as originally planned, Towerborne is instead going to be a paid game that you can play offline."You will own the complete experience permanently, with offline play and online co-op," Trisha Stouffer, CEO and president of Towerborne developer Stoic, says in an Xbox Wire blog post. "This change required deep structural rebuilding over the past year, transforming systems originally designed around constant connectivity. The res …Read the full story at The Verge.

While it might seem reasonable to enable every single graphics setting in a game (if your GPU supports it), some settings are better left alone. From visual distortions and post-processing effects to techniques aimed at minimizing artifacts, numerous settings ruin your gaming experience instead of improving it. Disabling them is almost always better, and you don't even need to worry about downgraded visuals, since many of these effects do little to add to the experience. As a bonus, you'll probably see an FPS boost in your games by disabling some of them, so it's a win-win in most cases.

Meta has forged agreements with three nuclear power providers in an effort to secure the vast amount of electricity it needs to power AI data centers. The agreements with TerraPower (which is backed by Bill Gates), Oklo (backed by Sam Altman), and Vistra are expected to deliver 6.6 gigawatts of energy for Meta's projects by 2035 - which is enough energy to power Ireland.These AI projects include Prometheus, the first of several supercluster computing systems, which is expected to come online in New Albany, Ohio, sometime this year. Meta is funding the construction of new nuclear reactors as part of the agreements, the first of which may co …Read the full story at The Verge.

Synology was once the top recommendation when it came to Network-Attached Storage systems. However, that all started to change once the company started making small changes here and there, with some even being labeled as "anti-consumer".

The Pioneer Sphera can be installed into a single-DIN space in your dash. I fully believe that once someone hears Dolby Atmos music in their car, they won't want anything else. The sonic envelopment turns your car cabin into an immersive, engaging experience. Every time I hear a demo - be it in a Rivian, Cadillac, or Mercedes - it leaves me energized and excited. But up to this point, Dolby Atmos has only been available in luxury vehicles that have a whole array of speakers. Pioneer is changing that with the Sphera, an aftermarket in-dash receiver with a 10.1-inch capacitive screen that enables Dolby Atmos playback in Apple CarPlay. And it works with as few as four speakers installed in your car, creating the At …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is making it a lot faster and easier to add links to text inside Word documents. Instead of having to open a menu item to insert a link or use the CTRL + K keyboard shortcut, you can now simply paste a link on top of the text you want to hyperlink.This new feature reduces the amount of clicks you need to do an everyday task like linking URLs, and it works across Word for the web, Windows, and Mac. It's similar to the way WordPress any many other content management systems and text editors let you quickly insert links. Now we're just waiting on Google Docs to join the club.Microsoft has started rolling out this feature to all Wo …Read the full story at The Verge.

With Ubuntu, Debian, and other popular distributions shipping with stable desktop environments, the Linux ecosystem is more approachable than ever. But as much as I love the GUI enhancements to my favorite distros, I rely on the all-powerful Linux terminal a lot during my coding tasks and virtualization experiments. As such, I also keep my Linux virtual machines and bare-metal setups equipped with a couple of CLI tools, even when the system in question has a proper graphical interface.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the country will take action against X following reports that the platform's Grok AI chatbot is generating sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors, as reported earlier by The Telegraph and Sky News."It's disgusting," Starmer says during an interview with Greatest Hits Radio. "X need[s] to get their act together and get this material down. And we will take action on this because it's simply not tolerable." @ghrnews EXCLUSIVE: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tells us he "will take action" on "disgraceful and disgusting" reports around child abuse imagery on Elon Musk's Grok AI. It's as the Internet W …Read the full story at The Verge.

Well, it's time to get stuck in with 2026. Before we say goodbye to 2025, though, I think it's worth taking the time to look back at all the cool stuff that got made over the year. After all, we saw (and even made) some awesome DIY projects over the past year, and I think there are some that don't deserve to be forgotten. So, as one last hurrah to the world of ESP32 tinkerers in 2025, here are my favorite projects from that year.