It finally happened. Arc Raiders — the one extraction shooter where proximity chat was mostly used for friendly greetings, shout-outs, apologies, and the occasional team up — has now been invaded by something so unbelievably stupid that even typing this makes my blood pressure rise. It's a streamer war.

I've never been one for sticking with one PC or even one operating system, so that means I've gone through my fair share of bootable USB drives. It's a pain having single-use USBs for individual Linux distributions, but I've found that I had to do things like that for many years, as the constant rewriting was wearing out my USB sticks in short order.

Hey, I got my SIM card. Where's the Trump Phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, we're testing the service on Trump Mobile's MVNO. Here's how that went.As I sat down at the bookstore cafe with a cortado and an oat bar, I panicked just a little bit when I turned on my phone's hotspot. What if my hotspot network gave me away? Would it say ALLISON'S TRUMP PHONE? Would someone smart sitting next to me, sipping matcha, catch sight of it? What would they think of me?That's not what happened, of course. The default ne …Read the full story at The Verge.

For several years now, ray-tracing has been viewed as an unnecessary graphics feature that's more responsible for tanking your PC's performance rather than providing a better gaming experience. And to a degree, gamers are right about that. Running a game with ray-tracing enabled will absolutely come at a high performance cost, depending on the quality of ray-tracing and how prevalent ray-traced lighting is in the game itself.

When it comes to putting a spare Raspberry Pi to good use, there's always the option of turning it into a retro console. It's quick, it's easy, and once you're done, you can play your fave classics as a reward. In fact, we've seen so many of them that we wrote an article specifically listing Raspberry Pi projects that aren't consoles.

For years, my home server has served as an ultra-powerful NAS drive. For a machine as powerful as it is, my home server really only gets used for hosting my Plex library and for backing up photos to reduce my reliance on Google Photos. And while those use cases are perfectly good uses of the hardware, it’s pretty obvious that my server has been going underutilized.

This has been the most exciting time to be a Half-Life fan in several years. In the wake of the announcement of the Steam Machine, new Steam controller, and Steam Frame, speculation is rampant about a new Half-Life possibly being imminent. Some well-informed leakers are hinting that this is the case, so fans have been sitting on edge the past few weeks waiting for Valve to reveal something.

While some may call owning a travel router paranoia, others simply see it as good security. A travel router is more than just for security though, and can be a great way to extend internet access from one device to many, be it when you're on a plane, in a hotel, or just using public Wi-Fi. Well, as it turns out, you can turn an ESP32 into a travel router, or even just an isolated network, and that's exactly what I did.

The loop of recreating a bootable USB drive for every reinstall or troubleshooting became unbearable for me. I switched to a Ventoy drive a long time back, and it's saved me so much time. Before that change, I had to download a fresh copy of the ISO file and then use Rufus to create a bootable drive. Having a Ventoy drive eliminates the need to recreate a bootable drive for every live USB. I need to install Ventoy on the USB drive once, and then I can add ISO files at my leisure.

Sometimes I come to a brilliant idea before falling asleep, only to realize that it’s not so brilliant in the morning. This is one of those ideas. On a whim — and out of curiosity more than anything — I decided to rip out my perfectly functional RTX 3060 Ti graphics card from my main desktop to see whether I can sustain myself for a week using the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770 (released in 2021). Why subject myself to a torturous seven days, you ask? I don’t really know either, but boy am I glad I put it back.

The Raspberry Pi Zero was my first-ever Single-Board Computer, and it’s responsible for beginning my obsession with DIY projects and distro-hopping. However, the Raspberry Pi landscape has evolved quite a bit since then – and I don’t mean just the hardware. Back then, the Raspberry Pi OS was called Raspbian, and although DietPi, Debian, and other distros were still in circulation, Armbian was one of the most common names in the SBC landscape.

For the longest time, Adobe's software dominated the creative space. And it still kind of does - few options come close in terms of power and industry adoption. But many users, including myself, have become frustrated with the high subscription fees (and the sneaky cancellation terms). I’ve tried dozens of free graphics alternatives at this point; a select few come close and even surpass Adobe’s offerings in some areas. But, if we’re being real, paid apps usually win on polish, stability, and long-term development support. That’s why Affinity Photo used to be a top Photoshop competitor.