Local voice assistants have a lot of appeal in the world of secure smart homes, but they often come with limitations. If you’re using a tool like Home Assistant to manage your smart home, you can typically install add-ons for speech-to-text (like Whisper) and text-to-speech (like Piper) and configure a voice pipeline. Plus, you can integrate your own smart speakers to work with. Home Assistant also recently rolled out the Home Assistant Preview Edition, a work-in-progress $69 voice assistant that allows you to manage your connected devices with voice commands. It doesn’t quite have the expertise that Amazon’s Alexa has in handling commands, and as with all local voice assistants, you’ll have to control the responses.

Once again, it's Halloween, and over the past two weeks, I haven't run out of some great recommendations if horror games are your kind of experience. You could prefer co-op horror games, single-player, nerve-wracking experiences, or even if horror isn't your cup of tea, you could just stick to thrill-leaning games. Or you could just play one single game that offers all three of these in one neat offering.

If you've looked online for a microphone, there's a pretty good chance you've come across the Blue Yeti. The brand has been around for some time, and was bought out by Logitech just a few years back. The Yeti is a versatile microphone that's easy to use, which is why it's so popular. It has a retail price of $140, which is on the more expensive side, but you can now get a 46% discount from Woot, which drops it down to a more reasonable $76.

For many of us, a video player is just a video player, and we settle for whatever works — usually the faithful but often clunky VLC media player or the bare-bones native option. I was firmly in that camp for years, dissatisfied but too lazy to look for an alternative that truly fit the modern macOS environment.

Being a freelance writer working full-time from home, I put myself in charge of all data management — be it on the cloud or offline on hard drives and my NAS. While actual storage of data is one part of the story, what makes local storage on my NAS smart are the apps that derive so much value and convenience from my files. These apps are the ones that have made working from home so much more convenient without having access to the managed system that big corporations offer their employees.

Who doesn't want their PC performing at its best? On a gaming PC, the GPU determines most of your gaming experience. Chasing 100% GPU utilization seems like a reasonable goal. After all, you don't want to leave performance on the table. However, that doesn't mean you start panicking when your GPU utilization drops below 100%, desperately hunting for a CPU bottleneck or worrying about GPU overheating. GPU utilization is dynamic, and the factors that influence it are varied. In many cases, it might even be ideal to set a limit on your GPU performance — here's why.

No matter how things go topsy-turvy in Windows, you always have the trusted Task Manager to bail you out. However, what if the Task Manager itself starts bugging out? Well, it turns out the answer to a malfunctioning Task Manager is to apply a second Task Manager to it.

Google's NotebookLM is the only AI tool I use almost every single day, and not just because it's excellent at what it does (which it is). Its use cases go far beyond its core functions, which is exactly why I keep coming back. Beyond studying and work, I’ve used it for all sorts of weird (and, if I do say so myself, genius) experiments.

Windows or "Windoze", as people lovingly call it, is no stranger to weird problems that crop up one fine day without rhyme or reason. Perhaps one of the weirdest issues I have ever faced on my Windows PC has been my Ethernet speed randomly dropping from 200Mbps to 100Mbps. This unfortunate halving of my internet speeds has stumped me for 3 years, and I've tried multiple fixes to no avail. I had almost given up when a 9-year-old forum post finally gave me the solution — bizarrely, it was a quick SSD tweak that fixed everything.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hopefully, by now, you have your platter of scary media lined up and ready for the big night. However, if you're still on the hunt for something to play, how about a Resident Evil game? People have been really enjoying Resident Evil Village, and from now until November 11th, you can grab it for 75% off.

Lenovo's ThinkPad lineup has always been at the top of the enterprise laptop food chain and for good reason. While the X1 Carbon tends to be the ultimate in light and thin work laptops, the ThinkPad T-series is a favorite for IT departments for good reason. Lenovo's T-series laptops are more upgradeable and repairable than standard enterprise laptops, which makes them perfect for an IT fleet.

If Tiny11 has taught me anything, it's that I have a huge appreciation for people who can cut down an operating system to a portion of its original size. Granted, that usually involves lopping off some features (although one can argue that the services that do hit the cutting room floor aren't ones that people using the OS wanted in the first place), but the concept is there, and it's very cool to see.