ZFS has earned its reputation the hard way. It's one of the few filesystems that genuinely delivers on promises like end-to-end data integrity, self-healing, snapshots that don't feel like a hack, and storage management that actually scales as your system grows. Once you've lived with ZFS, it's hard to go back to traditional RAID and ext4 without feeling like you've lost safety nets you didn't realize you were relying on. ZFS can detect and correct errors that a simple RAID or ext4 setup would never catch, and features like instant snapshots and copy-on-write design make tasks like backups and rollbacks easy to make a habit.

With the RAM crisis now affecting auxiliary industries like storage and GPUs, PC parts and laptops are flying off shelves. I've had several people reach out asking me if they can get a mini PC with equivalent specs on paper to substitute for a full-fledged desktop. It is incredibly tempting to look at those sleek, palm-sized anodized aluminum boxes and imagine a future where your desk is free of mid-tower mayhem. I get the allure because I alternate between a mini PC and a mid-tower on the same desk setup, but you need to know some things before taking the plunge.

Cloud gaming is on the rise, somehow. A report from Cloud Dosage states that cloud gaming revenue is set to surge 173% globally by 2030, estimated to hit nearly $29 billion, but this is a shocking sentiment for myself and many other gamers who don't know a single person who uses a cloud gaming service.

If you were expecting 2025 to be the year we finally got Star Trek replicators in our kitchens, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we aren't quite there yet. 2025 wasn't a landmark year for novel breakthroughs in 3D printing technology, at least for tabletop printers and hobbyists. Instead, this year was defined by refinement. We saw metal printing get a "brain" that fixes mistakes before they happen, and the use of AI for something other than generating images and essays, in slicer software. Tool-changer CNC machinery stepped down from its pedestal of elite industry-only clientele to serve a few hobbyists with deep pockets, through projects from Snapmaker and EufyMake.

When I first started buying gaming mice, I obsessed over the DPI spec the same way many beginners do. Every new model seemed to one-up the last, and I assumed a higher DPI automatically made it better. Back then, if a mouse advertised 12,000 DPI, I was immediately sold because nothing else mattered to me. It took me at least a couple of years of playing first-person shooters regularly to realize that pushing the DPI setting beyond 1600 wasn't really improving my aim in any way.

During its first seven months on the market, the quality of Nintendo Switch 2 game ports has varied wildly. On the negative side of things, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's port has massive input delay, while Madden NFL 26 on Switch 2 is riddled with bugs and performance issues. Some of the more impressive ports have been of Bloober Team's horror games, Cronos - The New Dawn and Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition.

A web browser is much more than just another app, and for most users, it shapes the entire PC user experience. It's your primary interface for work, entertainment, and everything that comes in between. Yet, despite being the most utilized piece of software on modern systems, the browser is rarely scrutinized when performance starts to feel a little off. Stuttering gets blamed on the CPU, rising RAM usage gets written off as "Windows being Windows", and crashes and shutdown often nudge people towards unnecessary hardware upgrades.

Email is one of those things that most people use daily without much thought about how, where, or why those messages get to where they're supposed to be. Even though I know Gmail is scanning my inbox to serve me ads, and that email delivery is insecure and complicated, I put that to the back of my mind and soldier on, because the alternative is much, much worse.

Typically, when you hear “cloud storage service,” the same few names come to mind. Google Drive. OneDrive. iCloud. Maybe Dropbox. If you're on the open-source side of things, you might also think of Nextcloud and Syncthing. Nonetheless, it’s clear that a few big names have dominated the space for years.

It took Microsoft some time, but Windows 10 introduced a major feature called virtual desktops, which allows you to create different virtual workspaces for different apps. At the time, many pointed out that this was something Linux had had for a while, but the thing is, Linux handles things very differently.

Having covered various aspects of Windows over the past few years, I always advise against third-party driver update tools. I have tried several of these out of curiosity, and not once did I feel that they offered any real benefit. Once, a third-party driver updater even broke my perfectly fine PC by making changes to the Registry Editor. That's when I realized that driver update tools are more of a scam designed to prey on naïve and unsuspecting users, much like most performance optimization apps and Internet speed booster software.

Waymo driverless car is not able to detect traffic lights after a major power outage in San Francisco, California, | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images A power outage struck San Francisco on Saturday that blacked out about 130,000 customers at its peak, according to Pacific Gas and Electric Company, but also caused another problem: stranded Waymo vehicles. Posts all over social media showed the company's autonomous SUVs sitting still in the streets and causing traffic jams.Some people posted videos of Teslas using their FSD feature to navigate the same streets, and Elon Musk tweeted that "Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage."Power out in SF and the @Waymo's are causing a MASSIVE jam in North Beach 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma- Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 2 …Read the full story at The Verge.