'Buyer's remorse' is a feeling that many PC builders and enthusiasts are all too familiar with, and it's no wonder that many gamers make upgrade decisions they later come to regret. With hundreds of components to pick from, dozens of new standards, and the entire internet shouting conflicting and contradictory advice on popular online forums, even experienced builders fall into patterns that waste money and marginally improve performance.

Windows File Explorer as we know it today has been around for decades, and while Microsoft has made an effort to modernize it with subtle UI tweaks, it still feels like the same old tool underneath. That can be a pro or a con, depending on your point of view, but to me, File Explorer leaves a lot to be desired. It works, but it gets in my way a bit more than I'd like.

There are so many smart home sensors available that it can sometimes prove difficult to choose the right ones for the job. The issue with choosing a "wrong" sensor if you could be stuck with one that frequently calls home to some far-away server, locks you into a closed ecosystem, requires cloud connectivity, and perhaps won't last as long as competitor alternatives. Though they aren't necessarily always expensive, the costs can quickly accumulate, so we must get it right the first time.

You probably know you should have proper backups. You have important data spread across home servers, NAS boxes, VPSes, and maybe a few cloud buckets. You also know the options usually fall into two painful extremes. Either you wrestle with fragile scripts and cron jobs, or you pay for heavyweight tools that feel like they belong in a corporate data center, not your homelab or small business. Zerobyte is trying to sit in the middle. It gives you an easy web interface, but under the hood, it uses Restic, one of the most respected open source backup engines. That mix of a modern UI, strong encryption, and support for almost any storage you already use is what makes it interesting if you care about data resilience.

Using Whisper plugin in Obsidian to turn audio into notes works well, but handling recordings with multiple speakers is still a challenge. When recording meetings, lectures, or discussions, I often need to re-listen and manually figure out who said what. The plugin in Obsidian works mostly for lectures or single-speaker audio, but I wanted transcription notes that were easier to read and know who spoke what. Sure, Google Meet and Teams do offer built-in transcription. But they don't work at live events where you get to record only audio.

The Game Awards this year was filled with many big announcements, including a few that were based in a galaxy far, far away. While rumors and whispers about new Star Wars games being at the show were lingering around online, nobody knew for certain what would be announced, if anything at all. But luckily for Star Wars fans who tuned in, they got a big surprise that many were not expecting. Not only are we heading back to the Old Republic, but for an all-new adventure that is a spiritual successor to one of the best Star Wars games ever made.

The reign of Raspberry Pis as a home server has ended. The majority of hobbyists enjoy using Pis to self-host apps, IoT projects, host media libraries, develop, and run network utilities. That charm still exists, but it's high time to stop pushing Pi’s limits for home server tasks. Its hardware limitations get exposed when you try to juggle a bunch of projects simultaneously.

Microsoft OneNote doesn’t need any introduction. It has been the default choice for millions, a powerful workhorse for capturing everything from meeting notes to late-night ideas. Yet, the price of its power – reliance on OneDrive, vendor lock-in, and occasional sync headaches – began to feel too high.

In case you haven't seen or heard the news, Netflix is in the process of buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a major purchase that will shake up the entertainment industry. While the sale of the media conglomerate will definitely affect movies and television, it will also have influence on video games as well. Warner Bros. has been involved with video games for a long time, with various developers at studios that have made some of the biggest game releases with some of the biggest franchises of all-time. Now that Netflix is looking to buy them, this could mean major shifts to what happens to them in the near future.

NotebookLM has been on everyone’s radar this year, and it’s easy to see why. It’s probably the best tool out there right now for researching and learning thanks to its insanely good synthesizing capabilities. It’s so pivotal to many of our workflows; I even use it alongside my design apps, as well as to take care of boring everyday tasks.

Say what you want about Windows 11, but it’s still one of the most popular operating systems on the planet. According to Statcounter, Windows users accounted for around 70 percent of the global desktop OS market share in November 2025. Of that slice, around 53 percent are on Windows 11. As bloated (and at times frustrating) as it may be, Windows 11’s ubiquity means most people will have to work with it to some degree at some point, so we might as well make it behave. Here are five settings that are helpful for not only speeding up your workflow, but also making it a little more comfortable, too.

We are living in a post-wire world. Look around any modern coffee shop or open-plan office, and you’ll see a sea of AirPods and wireless noise-canceling headsets. The audio industry has spent the last decade convincing us that cutting the cord is the ultimate upgrade. For my phone, I agree, but for all other applications I respectfully beg to differ, and that includes my desk setup. It is my primary station for professional work, movies, and weekend gaming sessions, and I am happily, stubbornly stuck in the wired world of the audiophile past.