When our phones stop working as well as they used to and we can't keep them as our primary devices anymore, there's a tendency to just throw them in the trash or trade them in for a new one. But there are plenty of things you can do with an old phone that's not great anymore, and one of those things is turning it into a security camera — something we've talked about on XDA before.

Steven Garcia, as told to Gaby Del Valle:I was in the middle of a frozen lake when I got the notification from the Minnesota Star Tribune that there had been a shooting. I was on assignment at a pond hockey event, and someone who was supposed to play later that evening said he probably wouldn't be able to make it - they knew there would be protests and demonstrations happening. I arrived a little over three hours later. Federal officers had already cleared the scene - the FBI had been there investigating - so the only law enforcement present were state and local officials: the Minneapolis Police Department, their SWAT team, the Hennepin …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you have a server at home, there’s a very good chance it has a GPU, whether it's an old gaming card or a low-power card just used as a display output. Regardless of which kind of discrete card it is, there's a good chance it's actually doing very little.

There are plenty of cool ESP32 products out there, and they all achieve something different. However, some of them have a simple job: take something simple and make it look really amazing. For example, why not take a peek into what a Wi-Fi connection is doing and show its traffic as a beautiful light show?

A Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) is a means to split up a physical network into multiple logical networks. Think of it like using a single cable and router to create multiple virtual versions that each can create isolated parts of the network. By default, data is sent network-wide, whereas VLANs effectively create lanes for data to travel to specific clients. It's a far more affordable (and easier) way to create multiple networks for different devices.

January has really not been Microsoft's perfect start to 2026. Besides a big Microsoft 365 outage, the company has had to release not one, but two out-of-band (OOB) updates for Windows 11. Usually, OOB updates are reserved for emergencies that can't wait until the patch cycle comes around again, so two in one month is pretty worrying.

Microsoft keeps rolling out new Windows features, and I keep finding ways to disable a lot of them. Sure, not every feature is a miss: Windows Sandbox and Windows Subsystem for Linux were two game-changing features that I enabled immediately upon release. But a lot of updates are seen as unwelcome changes that power users simply don’t want on their system.

The FBI went to Microsoft last year with a warrant, asking them to hand over keys to unlock encrypted data stored on three laptops as part of an investigation into potential fraud involving the COVID unemployment assistance program in Guam - and Microsoft complied. Typically, companies resist handing over encryption keys to authorities. Most famously, Apple refused to grant the FBI access to a phone used by the San Bernardino shooters in 2016. The FBI eventually found a third-party to hack their way into the phone, but ultimately withdrew its case. Most of the major tech companies, including Google and Facebook backed Apple in its battle w …Read the full story at The Verge.

In just a few months, we've seen a few Linux dev teams go for a Wayland-first approach. Most of them are scrapping X11 altogether, such as the Budgie desktop environment and GNOME 50. And while there's nothing stopping people from installing X11 manually, it does feel like the FOSS community is moving away from it as a default.

When our once-snappy PC starts to lag, we have the sudden urge to browse for new RAM and SSD upgrades. But before you reach for your wallet, Microsoft has quietly released a game-changer that might save you a trip to the store.

If you’re even remotely into computing, you’ve definitely heard the age-old tenet about creating regular backups of essential data. After all, few things are worse than losing important files when your paraphernalia kicks the bucket out of nowhere. As you go deeper into the tinkering rabbit hole, a backup workflow becomes practically indispensable for your everyday machines, self-hosted tools, and virtual guests.

HexOS has been doing the rounds recently thanks to a spate of updates which have brought it ever closer to it's 1.0 milestone. The first "Powered by TrueNAS" operating system, HexOS is essentially a wrapper for TrueNAS with a friendlier user interface and a focus on typical users. TrueNAS is aimed at more technical users, whereas HexOS aims to put it in the same conversation as Unraid or OpenMediaVault.