I love projects that combine e-ink displays with DIY chips. You usually find them cropping up around the smart home and productivity niches, as the low refresh rate of the e-ink display is suitable for picture frames, calendars, and displays. However, why settle for a regular UI when you can make it look as cool as possible?

If you open almost any app right now, there’s usually some kind of AI baked into it by default, and it’s not always easy to find the opt-out function. I’m pretty deep into AI tools and use them almost every day, but note-taking is one place where I don’t think it’s always necessary. And more importantly, I like having the option to use AI on my own terms. So when I keep being met with buttons that light up with the AI sparkle icon everywhere I turn, I’m more likely to close the app and go elsewhere, especially if it’s just to note something down.

With home servers being as popular as they are, a while back I invested in a mini PC for a new build out for my home office. I wanted to solve a few specific issues, like keeping scattered files sorted, arranging scanned documents better, and, most importantly, having a unified place to keep all my passwords. While they're not necessarily the biggest problems individually, trying to solve these problems individually, multiple times a day, certainly slows things down to a crawl.

I remember a time when setting aside 10–20% of your SSD felt less like a suggestion and was more of a survival tactic. It's the one piece of advice I gave everyone in school and in college, ending with an "if you know, you know" shrug. This was a suggestion I followed after reading about it buried deep in forums, and it was passed around like sacred knowledge among early SSD adopters trying to make an expensive and fragile storage option a little more reliable.

If you're limited on space, this 43-inch monitor might just be the thing. Not only can it handle your daily work, but it can also become the center of your entertainment hub. The best part is that it's not all that expensive right now, coming in with a steep discount that knocks $140 off its usual retail price of $500. So, if you've been thinking about buying something new and need a monitor that can do it all, Samsung's M7 4K smart monitor is going to be the one.

LLMs have finally settled in after many years of turbulent but rapid progress. Now, AI companies are focusing on allowing an AI to take control of your PC so it can perform tasks for you. We've seen Microsoft try something similar with Copilot, and we've seen the rise of AI browsers that take the reins and do all the browsing, research, and shopping for you.

If you're looking to go all out on a new gaming monitor, the Asus ROG PG32UCDP is going to be the way to go. Not only are you getting a bright and impressive OLED panel, but the performance numbers are also through the roof, with up to a 480Hz refresh rate and 0.03ms response time.

In December, the Federal Communications Commission banned all future drones made in foreign countries from being imported into the United States, unless or until their maker gets an exemption. Now, the FCC has done the exact same for consumer networking gear, citing "an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons."If you already have a Wi-Fi or wired router, you can keep on using it - and companies that have already gotten FCC radio authorization for a specific foreign-made product can continue to import that product.But since the vast majority - if not all - consumer rou …Read the full story at The Verge.

As the US tries to bring its tech manufacturing onto its own soil, the country has also deployed a strong stance against importing hardware from other countries. We first saw this when the tariffs hit soon after Trump's inauguration, with the prices for hardware produced overseas skyrocketing in advance. Now, the US government has taken a step further and banned any new consumer routers built outside of America from receiving the FCC authorization required to be sold in the US, but your current hardware is safe.

The XIAO range of ESP32 chips recently got a new addition, with the ESP32-C5 entering the fray. It's the first to support dual-band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi 6, along with Bluetooth 5 LE, Zigbee, and Thread. It's a very "typical" XIAO ESP32 chip in the sense that it's compact, has integrated battery management, and supports low power operation. Seeed Studio sent me one for review, alongside a selection of Grove sensors and an expansion board, so I built my own personal desk buddy just to see what it's capable of.

It feels like it's several years overdue at this point, but Apple's long-rumored Apple TV 4K refresh could be released very soon, according to a recent report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a reliable source of leaks.

Even with 32GB of RAM and a high-end CPU, your Start menu might still have a half-second delay, and overall your PC could feel quite sluggish. The culprit is Windows 11 using a surprising amount of resources just to stand by for AI prompts and background indexing. By flipping these six lesser-known switches, we can strip away the 2026 chafe and return Windows to its most responsive state.