If you spend most of your time in graphical apps, it is easy to assume that serious productivity depends on windows, buttons, and menus. Once you start living in the terminal, though, a different picture emerges. Modern command-line tools are fast, scriptable, and surprisingly pleasant to use once you get past the first hour of the learning curve. These five applications show how far a terminal workflow can go and might convince you that you do not always need a GUI to get real work done.

This cutaway shows how the Bluetti Charger 2 can be integrated into your vehicle. | Image: Bluetti Bluetti's latest car charger can quickly charge power stations at a very fast 1200W - about 10 times faster than plugging it into the 12V cigarette lighter outlet. The Charger 2, as it's called, can also reverse the flow of electrons to jump-start your vehicle or maintain its starter battery when used with a Bluetti power station like the Apex300.For perspective, I typically consume about 1.6kWh per day from power stations when vanlifing around Europe. So, in perfect conditions (that don't exist), I'd only have to drive about 75 minutes to recoup a day's worth of energy if using the Charger 2. The DC-DC charger hits that maximum 1200W ch …Read the full story at The Verge.

While ChatGPT has been rising in popularity, it feels like GPT-5 just isn't delivering the results I'm looking for. Alongside this issue, ChatGPT Plus or whatever AI alternative you use can set you back hundreds of dollars a year just to rent intelligence. I had to take a step back and think about the fact that there has to be a better option out there from both a usage and price perspective.

Building a NAS can seem deceptively simple. After all, at its foundation, it's a computer with a hunk of storage, running some kind of operating system that allows you to access its storage volumes from your network. Like many things in the self-hosting world, however, it's rarely that straightforward. The problem is that most of the decisions that matter don’t let their ramifications be known until months or even years later. By then, changing course is expensive, disruptive, or downright impossible without migrating all your data. Looking back, there are a few lessons I wish someone had drilled into me before I ever laid my hands on a drive bay.

It's important to have your data backed up in multiple ways. While you can always check the health of your drive, you'll never really know the exact moment that it will go out. Naturally, popping everything into a NAS and having it set up with the proper RAID configuration is going to prevent a lot of headaches. But if you can't go all out like that quite yet, we think this device might be a huge game changer.

NVMe drives have been supported for a long time on Windows, but the definition of "native" has changed over time. Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 added it first, in the form of StorNVMe. As far as we can tell, this has been the standard way of interfacing with an NVMe drive since then, with Microsoft adapting NVMe devices to a storage model built around long-standing SCSI abstractions, rather than as its own protocol. Now, that's changing, as Microsoft is rolling out a truly native NVMe driver for Windows Server 2025 and, as a result, Windows 11, too.

Most of the work I do in Affinity isn’t even editing or designing; it’s spent thinking of ideas, remembering constraints, remembering where tools and features are, re-reading briefs, problem solving, and second-guessing myself. Actually using the app is secondary to all of my mental processes, especially when I’m working on larger projects or batch files. This is where NotebookLM comes in.

By 2022–2023, building a DDR5 system stopped being "too expensive," with prices of motherboards and memory dropping sufficiently to incentivize mass adoption. By 2024–2025, DDR5 had become the norm, and building a DDR4 system had become a niche instead, relevant only for budget builders. What has happened in the last few months, however, has turned the scales again, making people think twice before building a DDR5 PC. Thanks to outrageous RAM prices, it's now much more expensive to build a DDR5 system than a DDR4 one. The performance differences are getting dwarfed by the huge gulf in the price of DDR4 and DDR5 RAM. We're now at a stage where building a DDR4 system is the smarter recommendation.

When The Lego Group announced that its biggest innovation since 1978 would be a tiny proprietary computer brick, the reactions were divided. I heard from people concerned this was the death of imagination from a company that's all about imagination - and from people who thought it sounded pretty cool!Personally, I walked in skeptical. My kids loved Lego's previous computer bricks, the Lego Mario toys, but don't play with them for long because they're predictable and fiddly to use! But I walked out with a grin on my face. These Smart Bricks are far smarter and more imaginative than I expected. This isn't like Lego Mario where scanning a b …Read the full story at The Verge.

In theory, I've always liked Clicks' keyboard smartphone cases as a concept. I'm a sucker for nostalgia and fondly remember the QWERTY keyboard era (I was so good at sending text messages on my BlackBerry Curve 8300), but I've never been able to fit the accessory into my life. This is in part because previous Clicks cases were designed for specific phones and I find myself constantly switching between various devices for work, but also because the case makes your device really bulky.

On December 31st, a brand-new account on Polymarket placed a bet: Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, would be out of office by the end of January. It was the first in a series of increasing bets. On January 3rd, the US bombed the Venezuelan capital, kidnapped Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people along the way. The account cashed out with almost half a million dollars.It would be a misread to describe the surprise invasion of Venezuela as imperial expansion driven by the dictates of capitalism; it is, somehow, worse. Normal capitalism requires a working relationship with reality. Normal capitalism thrives on predictabili …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nintendo has been pretty much the sole contender in handheld gaming for a few years, but that seemed to start to change when Valve introduced the Steam Deck in 2022. With more power, better controls, and a surprisingly competitive price, there were very valid reasons for someone to go with a Steam Deck over a Switch, and even a Switch 2.