Self-hosting has many benefits, but you also have to prioritize which services you want to spend your time on. This is because self-hosting involves troubleshooting, unexpected downtime, and more maintenance than most consumer cloud services.

120 words per minute. That's a stat I brag about to anyone who hasn't heard it from me already. Even my idea of taking breaks between work consists of playing rounds of Tetris or just going on over to Monkeytype to try and get my WPM up. So when I heard about a typing battle royale game at this year's Steam Next Fest, it had my full attention. Thankfully, it succeeded in keeping my attention after my first look.

Most people reach for AI when they need slides fast — ChatGPT for bullet points, Gamma for auto-generated decks, or Canva's AI templates for quick polish. But that approach treats presentations like a formatting problem, not a thinking problem. The real struggle isn't making slides look good. It's organizing ideas so they actually land.

Every time I look at the state of portable gaming, I'm reminded of how complicated the "gaming laptop" route has become. Manufacturers want to feature the most enviable selection of mobile GPUs, a decently powerful CPU to complement its performance, a large heat sink and thermal design that adds to the bulk, and to top it off, a 4-pound charging brick for you to carry around in your carry-on.

Proxmox’s powerful virtualization prowess, support for LXCs (and OCI images with VE 9.1), and clustering provisions are only a part of what makes it a terrific home lab platform. Technically, ESXi may have a more fleshed-out collection of first-party tools, but Proxmox is slowly working its way up with official and community-created offerings. You’ve got Proxmox Backup Server to create space-efficient snapshots of your virtual guests, while the Mail Gateway lets you add an extra layer of protection to your self-hosted email server.

There are plenty of great laptops on the market right now, and most you don't even need to pay top dollar for because of all the great sales that are going on during the holidays. If you've been looking to pick up a gaming laptop for a good price, the MSI Katana is going to be one to check out.

We all have our own preferences when it comes to hardware, but occasionally, a product will hit a sweet spot that makes it a good choice for most people. If you're looking for a new monitor, for the time being, that product is going to be the HP Omen 34.

If you spend enough time around hardware enthusiasts or lurking in PC building forums, you start to hear the same rituals when it comes to RAM: set your XMP or EXPO profile, tighten your timings if you're feeling brave, and make peace with whatever speed your motherboard can handle. I thought I understood all there is to it. After all, memory tuning is supposed to be one of the more straightforward parts of a build. Then, I stumbled across a BIOS setting that took me by surprise.

At first, I treated Perplexity like a nicer and smarter version of Google, but it has snuck into my digital life permanently at this point. I even find myself reaching for it more than my good ol’ Brave browser at times, mainly because it personalizes the results based on whatever prompt I give it. It’s become pivotal to some of my design workflows and even helped me set up my first local LLM. It also pairs really well with note-taking apps like Microsoft Loop and Obsidian.

Reactions to Metroid Prime 4: Beyond have been mixed among Nintendo fans. Some people really love what the game brings to the series, while others have taken issue with the writing and dialogue of the characters that appear in the story. When the game was being previewed by media outlets, there was a harsh reaction I saw online to some of the new characters that interact with Samus Aran during the game. But it may not be those new characters themselves that are the issue, and instead, may be a byproduct of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond trying to remain faithful to the earlier entries in the series.

NVMe drives are fast, but sometimes they're not. If you have one, you might think it only slows down when temperatures are high, as CPUs and GPUs do. But SSDs are a bit more complex, and they can slow down for many reasons. Thus, you might find your drive slowing down even if temperatures are normal.

The plug-and-play style of smart home devices is convenient but expensive. ESPHome is monumental in helping you save costs and build your own smart devices to pair with Home Assistant. All you need is an ESP32 microcontroller board and a bunch of sensors — no soldering or traditional code writing required.