NotebookLM is the one AI tool that's been a consistent part of my stack for a long, long time. And unlike the classic AI chatbot experience most people picture, NotebookLM works differently enough that your prompting skills come into play in their own particular way. After tinkering with it for a long time (and especially in recent days, as the tool has quietly started behaving a little differently), I landed on one sentence I now add to the end of my NotebookLM prompts.

Social media has gotten increasingly annoying over the years. With AI in the picture now, it's even worse. My social feeds are filled with slop I never really asked for. My Instagram is filled with AI fruits having breakups, TikTok is filled with AI voices reading Reddit threads over Subway Surfers, and X is filled with all of it at once. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok, I can easily scroll to the next since the content that largely frustrates me is in video form, which takes a second to identify and a flick to escape. The cost of a bad recommendation is essentially about half a second.

Sure is a lot of porcelein in there. | Image: Kieran Hebden Just why?ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸̢̛̼̞̭͋ͅ)̸͚̰͛̔̾̀̿͒͂:̴͓̞̑̌̂̆̊͋̀:̸͎̟̯̂̓̌　҉　　　　　͡　͞　͞　͞　҉● ࿀ ●  ࿀  ●　　　҉⃝ 　　　⃝͢ ͞　　　͘　͞⃝̕ ͢　　　　̛　⃝ 　　　̸　̡　　͢⃝̧ 　͡　͡　　̀　̧　̢⃝͜ 　 　҉　　͞　͞　⃝͞ 　͞　͡⃝  ⃝҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉҈҉ :̶̢͙͙͕̠̩͆(̷̮͍͚̫͚͂̍)̵̳̗̊(　̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥What am I supposed to do with this? It's un-Googleable. Unpronounceable.It doesn't even render the same way on various platforms. It looks one way on YouTube Music. Another on Apple Music. And yet another on Bandcamp. Even the artist name ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ is an unpronounceable series of glyphs that would make Prince shake his head.So, from here on out, I'm just going to refer to ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ …Read the full story at The Verge.

I have been using Ollama to run local LLMs for the longest time now, and I don’t have a lot to complain about. It gets the job done, and I don’t have to tweak a lot of things. Recently, Docker announced its own model runner, which offers many of the same features you get with Ollama. It can pull, run, manage, and serve local AI models through Docker Desktop or Docker Engine. It supports GGUF models through llama.cpp, Safetensors models through vLLM, hardware acceleration on supported systems, and models from Docker Hub, Hugging Face, or other OCI registries. I have been using it instead of Ollama for almost a week now, but I can’t say I am sticking to it.

Your old PC or phone can sometimes feel like a burden lying around at home, but there are great ways to put it to good use. Whether it's an impromptu home lab or a simple dashboard for your smart home, there's quite a bit you can do with it. And that includes gaming, even if modern games are too resource-intensive to handle.

With Linux 7.2's release coming in about a month, people have been hard at work testing it and fixing issues. As it turns out, the Asus ROG Ally X is experiencing some weird audio issues with headphones and microphones. Fortunately, someone has uploaded fixes to the fourth release candidate, so it shouldn't be long until it's fixed for good.

When the Steam Machine's price was announced, the gaming scene had a collective groan as everyone's fears that it'd breach the four-figure mark came true. However, that seemingly didn't stop people buying one, as Boiling Steam has estimated that around 12,000 to 15,000 units are selling per week.

Proxmox may have killer virtualization tools, but it’s the companion services designed by the genius developers and talented community members that really make it ideal for tinkerers. Proxmox Backup Server is by far the most popular among these tools, and considering its storage-efficient snapshots, remote sync support, and extra recovery features, it deserves all the love it gets.

Most people install the best ISP for their home and carry on, but I ended up running two side by side on purpose. Not because the speed was low, or the ISP was unreliable — that wasn't the problem. It was to fix something else entirely — my homelab’s dependency on the internet. And my dual-WAN gateway handled both connections at once, deciding for itself which one carried what. Both ISPs had zero awareness of each other — no coordination, no shared config. The gateway decided the sessions and where the traffic went. The biggest benefit of the setup wasn't better speed; it was eliminating a single point of failure and better uptime for my homelab.

We, and many Linux veterans, often recommend Linux Mint as the best distro for newcomers. However, it seems not everyone holds it in such high regard, as one GNOME Calendar developer has called it a "hostile downstream" for not co-operating with them.

Obsidian is the first app I open each morning at the start of my work day. Not Word, not Notes, not even my email client. When I first discovered Obsidian, I didn't know much about it; it was just an app for taking notes, and I was toying with it because I was curious. I had no idea then that it would become my central command center for my workflow, with everything — to-do lists, stray ideas, daily logs, and more — all going into it.

I've been a Figma diehard for years and only got the paid plan this year, and it's what got me thinking about the other design tools I've used to varying degrees, and whether their subscriptions are actually worth reaching for. I had access to Illustrator a while back through Adobe's Creative Cloud All Apps plan, but dropped that sub over a year ago now. And I've floated around Canva on the free plan forever, until curiosity got the better of me recently, and I finally paid for a month.