I've been using Proxmox for about six months now, though I've been following the project for much longer. I had a bare-metal TrueNAS instance that I never got around to migrating away from, but I finally bit the bullet at the start of last summer and began the painstaking process of moving all my self-hosted services over. In that time, I discovered something somewhat unusual on the surface: deploying multiple Linux Containers (LXCs) to host Docker made significantly more sense than using a single virtual machine.

I don't know about you, but for me, snowball fights always sound more fun than they actually are. Sure, once the snow has settled and you make your first and second snowballs, it's a ton of fun. But then snow gets in your gloves, and everything gets a bit soggy, and your hands get kinda cold, and then you wanna stop and go inside again. Or maybe I'm just a spoilsport, who knows.

We dark mode users are a very particular folk. When we want a dark mode, we want a dark mode, devoid of any bright lights or anything white. If an app dares to boot into light mode, we screech and cry until we find the setting to turn on its dark mode. It's sort of like the digital version of the vampire, except we don't have any eye strain.

Microsoft has a vision for Windows: to incorporate AI into the OS so it can do things on its own with minimal user input. The more fancy way of saying it, as the software giant often does, is "agentic OS." There was a huge uproar from users when the company revealed its new "agentic OS" direction for Windows, to the point that Microsoft had to provide more clarity.

Unlike a robovac, Mirumi will never eat a sock or get stuck under furniture. | Image: Yukai Engineering Among a sea of new TVs, robovacs, and smart glasses, Yukai Engineering’s Mirumi was a unique standout at CES 2025 earlier this year. The tiny robot has no practical purpose other than looking adorable and bringing a smile to people’s faces by simulating an inquisitive personality. The company planned to release the companion bot sometime in mid-2025, but mere weeks before the year ends Mirumi is finally available for preorder through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.Yukai Engineering originally expected Mirumi to be priced at around $70, but a lot has happened around the world since January, and the tiny bot will actually cost about twice that. The earliest Kickstarter backers can preorder Mirumi with gray, pink, or ivory fur for 18,360 yen, or around $118 with discounts. If you drag your feet, the crowdfunding pricing will end up at 21,803 yen, or around $140, but that’s still discounted from the full retail pricing, which is expected to be $150.Following the Kickstarter there will be a bit more waiting, as Mirumi isn’t expected to ship until April 2026 at the earliest, but as with any crowdfunded product, it’s not a bad idea to brace yourself for delays.Instead of cleaning floors or mowing your lawn, Mirumi is positioned as a companion robot, but one that will benefit others more often. Using a long pair of arms the robot attaches to bag straps or handles and appears to curiously look around by turning and cocking its head from side to side.Using a distance sensor Mirumi can also detect nearby people and appear to focus its gaze and attention on them, but will also simulate the bashful response of an infant by shaking and turning its head away when someone suddenly appears or touches it. Mirumi isn’t overpacked with functionality, and that could be its biggest appeal. It just hangs out with you and quietly watches the world go by while occasionally brightening someone’s day with just a look.

Last month on the dot, we saw Linux breach 3% of Steam's market share for the first time ever. Given how long Linux has been sitting at the bottom of the rankings without much progress, it was a huge occasion for open-source gamers. With SteamOS's Linux base acting as the beating heart of so many handhelds, combined with the PC gaming market turning to the almighty penguin to see what the fuss is about, it has been a good year for people who enjoy open-source apps.

We've all wanted to improve gaming performance at some point, and a lot of the advice we find online sounds convincing at first. I've followed some of those tips over the years, especially when I was still figuring out how different components affected real-world performance. The problem with some of the advice people keep repeating on forums is that it often oversimplifies how games actually behave on modern hardware. More often than not, you end up trying tweaks that fix nothing, or upgrading parts that weren't holding you back in the first place.

The tools I rely on every day might be tools you barely touch, and I'm sure it works the other way around too. That's the special thing about software: the tools we choose typically reflect how we think and work. But even then, there are a few outliers. For instance, when most people hear the word "AI," their mind just naturally defaults to ChatGPT. It's just the way it works!

If you've been thinking about grabbing a new laptop, but don't want to spend a ton of money, these two laptops are going to be the best options to choose from. To be clear, they aren't going to be the most powerful, and they aren't going to be the latest models to hit the market.

Microsoft added a bunch of new features, fixes, and improvements throughout this year. But now that we're only a few weeks away from the end of 2025, Teams users may not get anything major until next year. And the software giant has already started announcing its plan for Teams next year, with fixing its lag issues among the major priorities.

A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W draws so little power that it opens the door to projects you can run continuously without worrying about energy costs. It sits quietly in the background and does its job with a tiny footprint, which makes it perfect for small automations and sensors around your home. These projects show how much you can accomplish with almost no power use, and they all take advantage of the Pi Zero’s efficiency and flexibility in a meaningful way.

Depending on your life story, you might be a Photoshop person, a GIMP enthusiast, or a Photopea evangelist. You might be using a completely different graphics tool, but one thing that might have slipped your consideration is Paint.NET. You probably heard about it, and dismissed it as "Paint++", but that couldn't be more wrong. Paint.NET is a deceptively powerful and versatile tool, and its intuitive UI makes it far more approachable than Photoshop or GIMP. Being free makes it one of the most attractive graphics tools for those who don't want the cost or complexity of other tools, and are content with an easy-to-use yet highly functional alternative.