I've run a Jellyfin server for several months now. It's been a huge help in cutting down on streaming costs, especially for comfort shows I fall asleep to. After all, who wants to pay a subscription just to watch Friends? Optimizing and maintaining the server has been a learning experience, but the great thing about Jellyfin is that anyone, even a complete beginner, can start a server and learn the ins and outs of it over time. That said, there are a few lessons I learned the hard way that I wish I had known before I set the server up. The time I spent figuring out the cause of the problems could have been better spent watching multiple movies.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out soon. Although Rockstar Games had to delay its release a few times, the game is going to cause massive waves across the gaming industry. But as excited as everyone is for when GTA 6 finally arrives on consoles and PC, there's something that everyone will eventually have to think about. What happens next after GTA 6 is finally out? The next game that Rockstar begins to develop is going to be a big deal, and just as a follow-up to the latest entry in the Grand Theft Auto series.

In the longstanding duopoly between AMD and NVIDIA, Intel GPUs emerged as a breath of fresh air in the mid-range segment with their Battlemage graphics card lineup. The Arc series of GPUs garnered attention from the press, tech reviewers and enthusiasts alike and were well-received by the tech community at large, indicating that while Team Blue still trails in market share, it is clear that they are catching up fast when it comes to their silicon.

Girls like pink and peach, right? That Sky Sports felt the need to launch a TikTok channel specifically marketed towards women and billed as its “lil sis” was questionable enough. But once people got a taste of the content on Halo, it was clear the company had absolutely no idea what it was doing. Halo didn’t focus on women’s sports, nor did it seem to be doing a good job of elevating female voices in a male-dominated business. Instead, it slapped pink sparkly letters on videos, talked about “hot girl walks,” matcha, and posted shipping memes. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was swift and strong. The Barbification of its sports coverage was called infantilizing, patronizing, sexist, and misogynistic. After just three days, Sky deleted all of Halo’s posts and announced it would be ceasing activity on the account.Head of audience development and social media at Sky Sports, Andy Gill, posted on LinkedIn that he, “couldn’t be prouder and more excited about this launch. Proud, because this has been driven by the women in our team…” However, it seems hard to believe, considering the outcry from female sports fans, that Halo’s development was actually driven by the women at the company.View Link

In the realm of extraction shooters, Arc Raiders has come on to the scene, made its way to the very top spot, and been declared the greatest extraction shooter ever made, all in the span of a fortnight (pun not intended). There's a lot of chaos and tension that comes with the looter-shooter genre, and yet somehow, Arc Raiders has birthed one of the most wholesome, cooperative, and friendliest online communities in gaming right now.

Putting smart home devices on their own VLAN sounds like a pretty straightforward task on paper. You isolate your IoT gadgets, and as a result, you tighten security and keep your main network free of noise. In practice, it’s a lot messier and more complicated than that.

For the longest time, whenever I wanted to lower CPU temperatures, the first thing that usually came to my mind was upgrading the cooler, adding more case fans, or even replacing the thermal paste with a higher-quality one. I never stopped to consider whether the CPU itself was drawing more voltage than it actually needed. It took me a while to realize modern CPUs run hot out of the box simply because manufacturers set conservative voltage settings to ensure stability across chips with different levels of silicon quality.

I've never invested in home network upgrades that require a new router, PCIe NIC, or mesh system. My ISP's router isn't exactly the best, but it does an okay job of covering the entire apartment. The only thing I've added to my ISP-provided fiber setup is a cheap mini UPS for the router. Long power cuts are very rare in my area, but brief cuts lasting a few minutes still happen a handful of times every month. The fiber connection itself stays online, but the router needs power before the central backup power kicks in. This makes the $20 router UPS one of the best upgrades I've ever made to my home network.

Running into issues with my Windows PC gets tiring fast. By the time I'm staring at the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), it's already too late. Looking up a cryptic STOP code might point me in the right direction, but it doesn't help catch the problem before it becomes catastrophic. Even when the system doesn't crash completely, I'm left with a weird glitch and the unenviable task of sifting through Event Viewer logs. While this is a great place to catch culprits, it also logs everything my system does, and there are plenty of debugging and security suites out there that cost a pretty penny because they know where to look for those needles in the haystack when my PC is already so far gone that I've got no other choice but to look for this root cause.

The cover goes as hard as the album does. There's something irresistible about music that sounds as if it's coming apart at the seams. The Black Dresses are masters of barely contained chaos. All of their records feel as if they're in danger of collapsing into pure noise at any moment. But never have they so expertly woven the various threads of their sound - glitchy percussion, pummeling guitars, irresistible pop hooks - together as they do on Forever in Your Heart.The Canadian duo of Ada Rook and Devi McCallion crafts something undeniably catchy from abrasive electronics, metallic percussion, death-metal screams, and off-key warbling. The opening track, "PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you get into self-hosting, you'll start to realize that remembering different ports and IP addresses for your services and home lab can get frustrating. For many, the solution is to set up a self-hosted dashboard to easily sort and manage shortcuts to these services. But this requires additional configuration and troubleshooting. Plus, if you're self-hosting on a device with limited resources, you may what to limit how many additional services you add.

I've always enjoyed being on the cutting-edge of PC peripherals. The main genre of games I enjoy, combined with my work, means I get exposed to a lot of the latest stuff. Inevitably, I get sucked into buying a new peripheral with some new "must-have" quality or feature, and to be honest, very few have ended up staying on my desk for good. These 5 features aren't bad or lack usefulness, I just don't find myself using them at all anymore.