Windows 11 is packed with useful tools that are hidden out of sight, and Windows Sandbox is a perfect example. It's a handy feature that needs to first be manually enabled in system settings, so a lot of people are unaware of its existence or never take the time to figure out what it can offer them. If you're running Windows 11 Pro and haven't yet enabled Windows Sandbox, you're missing out on a wonderful feature that'll enhance the security of your system.

I advocate setting up effective backup tools for everyone. It makes a lot of sense if you value your personal data. But, I hate to admit that I myself have procrastinated about backing up portions of my digital life. My photos and videos living on my NAS, get backed up to another NAS, sure. But my documents, and working files, not so much. I've been looking for something simple, free, capable of running on my Mac and NAS that would simplify the process dramatically. That's where Kopia comes in.

I went into Gerbera with a simple goal: to make my media library visible on every UPnP device in the house without turning the setup into a weekend project. It delivered on that promise fast, especially when I ran it in Docker and treated it like a small, single-purpose appliance. Within minutes, it was showing up everywhere I expected, and it played nicely with Infuse on my iPhone and Apple TV. Still, once the novelty wore off, I kept noticing how much I rely on Jellyfin’s polish to make movie night feel effortless.

There is a weird mismatch between who has an expensive Adobe subscription and who actually needs one. Most people on the All Apps plan never touch half of what they’re paying for - this used to be me as well. And even among Premiere Pro subscribers, though most people use it professionally, a surprising number don’t need the pro features Adobe offers.

We've covered plenty of cool ESP32 gaming projects in the past, including a recent one where someone made a cool augmented reality project with one. But usually these projects use something else alongside the ESP32 to get the full experience. What if we had a game that used nothing but the ESP32? Well, someone has created a cool pseudo-3D racing game that runs entirely off the chip, and you can give it a try for yourself.

There are quite a few things you need to go over to justify a CPU upgrade. The architecture, the base clock frequency, the IPC, and perhaps most significantly, the economics. The consumer hardware industry has found itself in the middle of one of the worst inflation cycles in history, thanks to the ever-increasing demand from the AI sector, and that's why every upgrade is being rethought.

Gamers are always trying to squeeze out the most performance from their hardware, especially in competitive titles. Every frame and every extra millisecond of latency can make the difference, and even in titles where it's not as serious, nobody is going to complain about extra FPS. DLSS is great at providing extra frames at the slight cost of visual fidelity, and for most games, this is a net positive, but it's not necessarily the "future" of PC gaming. It's already here, and it's good. The real future of gaming is asynchronous reprojection, a technology that promises much lower latency and a smooth experience regardless of framerate.

When Windows 11 was released in the preview channels, I was among the early adopters. The iteration in its early days looked promising, particularly the modern UI, though compatibility with older hardware was a concern. Frankly, I liked the centrally-aligned taskbar, the updated Settings app, and even the new File Explorer, and I made my peace with the revamped Start Menu. As for hardware limitations, I soon found out that installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware was as easy, and there was no major downside to it, as long as the system wasn't super old.

This isn’t one for the squeamish. | Image: Metrograph Pictures Let me just say that I highly recommend you go into Possession blind. Don't watch a trailer. Don't even finish reading this. Go watch it now over on Shudder, Criterion, or Metrograph. It's also available through Kanopy or Hoopla if your library provides access. Then come back so we can talk about it in the comments. Though this probably isn't one for the squeamish.Warning: Spoilers ahead.Possession is the sort of film that, even if you've had the whole plot spoiled for you, can be difficult to follow. After watching it twice, listening to three different podcasts, and reading multiple articles about it, I'm still not 100 percent sure wha …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of the existential questions when self-hosting services is how to make it easier to connect to them without having to remember individual ports and IP addresses. You could use tunnels to proxy individual services, or remote access tools like Tailscale, but one of the most elegant solutions is to use a reverse proxy. Think of this as a phone directory for your apps, letting you use your own domain name and subdomains to access them, with traffic routed to the right place.

I always get excited when I bring home a new smart home speaker or another smart device. Turning on lights or music using your voice feels magical and is also a neat party trick. Voice control truly feels like the future. Configuring a morning routine with my smart speaker to watch it trigger the automations sounds fun.

Building a PC might feel second nature after you've gone through multiple builds, but we've all been first-timers at some point. Building your first PC can be a bit stressful. It may take longer than necessary as you second-guess yourself at every step. You may remember yourself backtracking more than once to fix something you did wrong. You may even have been unaware of some things that seem obvious to you today. From installing RAM and SSDs to changing BIOS settings, it's natural not to be on top of things during your first time. Practice makes perfect, and the stuff that seemed confusing at first becomes obvious by the time you're building your second PC. So, let's go through 6 things that you probably didn't know about during your first build.