There is an unwritten rule in the homelab community. When something stops working, we immediately look at our own setup first. The same thing happened a few days ago. One morning, my external access broke. I checked everything from my internet connection to router settings, firewall, and reverse proxy. The server was running, the service was running, and the internet itself was working. And yet, external access was still dead. Everything was configured exactly the way it should be. Then I started rechecking everything, and this time I noticed something: the problem wasn't inside my network at all. Something had quietly changed between my router and the wider internet without me noticing.

I was getting tired of the ads and promotional content plastered across my smart TV’s interface. I’d already set up a Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi 4 to block the trackers that feed those ad profiles. So plugging my LG C2 into the network and pointing it at the Pi-hole for DNS felt like the obvious next step.

The AI boom caused a huge spike in PC hardware demand, which, in turn, drove up prices. Everything from GPUs to sticks of RAM saw price increases, to the point where it became unfeasible for gaming hardware manufacturers to continue selling their devices at their current prices. So, pretty much across the board, all gaming hardware manufacturers increased their prices.

Local AI has become much easier to run, but most people still think you need an expensive graphics card to get started. I wanted to find out how true that really is. Instead of comparing different models, I decided to run the same local AI model on two very different systems and see how much the hardware changed the experience. I expected the dedicated GPU to win, but I was more interested in how close integrated graphics could get. After spending time with both setups, I came away with a few surprises that changed the way I look at running AI models locally.

Microsoft has been on a mission to consolidate its apps lately. It began when it announced it was scrapping WordPad and turning Notepad into, essentially, another WordPad. Then it said it was scrapping Remote Desktop and replacing it with 'the Windows app.' Last year, Microsoft announced it would remove Publisher from its 365 plan, and now that the deadline is quickly approaching, the company took some time to explain why it had to go.

Tablets are in a unique position in the North American market. As productivity devices, they're often lacking in screen real-estate or performance compared to a regular laptop, but they're big and powerful enough to replace a phone for similar tasks. As gaming devices, they're limited to touch controls without an external controller present, but pack enough punch to run more than just native-Android titles.

Ford is rolling out a new AI-powered assistant that can answer questions about your Ford or Lincoln vehicle, such as how much fuel you'll need for your next road trip or whether your truck can tow that new motor boat.The app is rolling out first to the Ford and Lincoln mobile apps, where it will work as a chatbot that can answer questions about the vehicle's capabilities or future service needs. Since the app is linked to the customer's vehicle, the assistant knows many of the details about the particular make and model, including fuel levels, cargo capacity, and towing capabilities. Ford plans on rolling out a voice-powered assistant that …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've used the Pixel Launcher ever since I switched to a Pixel phone, and I completely understand why so many people like it. It's fast, clean, and blends perfectly with Android. Everything feels smooth, from opening apps to searching for files, and Google's animations make the whole experience feel polished. It also avoids the clutter that many manufacturer launchers add, which is something I've always appreciated.

While NotebookLM (now rebranded to Gemini Notebook) is often touted as a research or productivity tool, its ability to answer questions about supplied sources makes it useful for searching through and summarizing key points in documents. This makes it well-suited to interesting use cases that leverage this source-based interactivity.

Solar energy, at any time of day or night - that's the dream of space mirror projects. Futurists have been imagining satellite mirrors that could reflect the sun's light onto the Earth's surface for over a century. Russian scientists experimented with the concept in the '90s with the Znamya project. The idea is to put a large mirror in orbit and angle it such that sunlight can be reflected onto a specific geographical area for illumination or the generation of solar power. Now, the California-based company Reflect Orbital wants to try this idea again, launching a test satellite named Eärendil-1 as a precursor to a fleet of up to 50,000 spa …Read the full story at The Verge.

There was a time when upscaling existed purely to rescue weak hardware. You enabled it because you had no other choice, accepted the softer image, and enjoyed the extra frames. That era is effectively over. Both AMD and Nvidia have pushed AI-assisted reconstruction harder than ever. As such, the question of whether upscaling is worth using is now obsolete. The real question now is which company is doing it better when you push the tech to its absolute limits.

With Linux 7.2 seeing its seventh release candidate, Linus Torvalds seems confident that the kernel will be released next weekend. While the size of rc7 was larger than usual, Torvalds chalks it up to the new norm (alongside AI coding), where AI agents are finding bugs faster than humans can. Despite that, the bugs look minor enough to forge ahead with 7.2's release, meaning everything is set to continue as normal unless something huge is discovered.