With storage prices as high as they are right now, I've been looking harder at where I can save money in my home server and NAS setup. It's a search that has led me down a couple of avenues, including one that actually makes a lot of sense. Used enterprise SSDs are one place where you can save a significant sum of money without much of a concern about the state of usage. Look hard enough, and you can get a high-capacity SATA or NVMe drive for considerably less than new consumer models, and for the kind of workloads I run, a used drive can still have plenty of life left in it.

Out of all of the internet arguments you see online on a daily basis, how many have you seen become famous? It seems odd for a digital scrap to reach the annals of history, but one debate on a Usenet site did just that. Back in 1992, the creator of the Minix OS, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, made a post claiming that Linux was obsolete and would soon die out, and while it obviously didn't quite pan out like that, Minix also managed to make its home in modern-day computing.

Gigabit is what most homes start with, and for the vast majority of home networks, that's more than enough. But then, you buy a new PC that has 2.5GbE capability, so you upgrade the switch and router to match. Then you get more devices that can handle multi-gig, and it turns into a constant temptation to level up to the illustrious 10GbE. 10-gig isn't for everyone, but if you want to upgrade a few of the load-bearing devices in your home, 10GbE cards are constantly being pulled from decommissioned enterprise servers and can be bought for a fraction of their original cost, and it's one of the best ways to upgrade your speeds.

Microsoft is about to make one of Windows 11's core security features a lot harder to ignore. The next Patch Tuesday update, rolling out on October 13, 2026, will automatically enable memory integrity on more eligible Windows PCs. If you've poked around Windows Security before, this may not sound like news. After all, memory integrity has been around for years, and Microsoft already enables it by default on clean Windows 11 installations if your PC meets its requirements.

Demonstrators hold a banner against Flock security cameras during a protest outside the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. Photographer: Cornell Watson/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Bloomberg via Getty Images From Florida to Washington state, local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn't necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately - or that the information they've gathered will be deleted anytime soon.Even as state and local governments decide to rein in their surveillance capabilities, uncertainty remains about what Flock can and will do with data that has already been collected. Each jurisdiction's contract is different, but many of them let Flock retain data long af …Read the full story at The Verge.

For years now, I've treated 4K as the finish line, but it has proven elusive. A better encode leaves me wanting a higher bitrate, and then I want the sharpest upscaler, and it ends with me yearning for an OLED TV rotting in my wishlist. There's always been another improvement to chase, and rightly so. After all, these upgrades do matter, and they feel meaningful."

Storage Sense is one of those Windows features that you just turn on and forget about. I mean, that's kind of the whole point. Once you enable it, Windows automatically gets rid of temporary files and other unwanted junk in the background, so you don't have to worry about manually cleaning up your drive with a third-party cleaner. I enabled this feature when I first updated to Windows 11 and never looked back until recently, when I realized it wasn't actually doing anything.

Steam's refund policy is pretty strict, but fair. To get a refund, you must request it within 14 days of purchase and have under two hours of playtime. If either condition isn't met, Valve will often reject the refund request, except in special circumstances.

The memory crisis has stung the dedicated graphics market, making already expensive GPUs a lot more expensive for consumers. Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs launched within an MSRP range from $299 for an entry-level card to $1,999 for the flagship. Street prices right now, however, tell another story, because somehow, the entry-level card is near $470 and the flagship regularly crosses the $5,000 territory, with the entire lineup carrying a massive premium on the launch price.

The Game Boy era would have been even cooler if they could hook up to the internet; alas, we had to make do with performing Pokémon trades using a local link cable with our friends. Fortunately, with modern-day technology, we can retroactively give the Game Boy Advance a lifeline to our routers, and one person has found a great way to achieve that goal.

There's an iconic scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo dodges bullets as the camera pans around him. Recreating the scene as it appeared in the movie using nothing more than a Raspberry Pi is likely impossible, but we can achieve something similar. Such is the case with this Raspberry Pi camera, which snaps photos using four lenses at the same time; when you merge the four photos into one GIF, it looks like the scene is 'wobbling'.

VS Code surprises me with a handy feature every few months. Last month, it was Remote SSH, and more recently, I discovered a speech recognition model hiding inside VS Code. I had been using speech recognition tools, Wispr Flow in particular, for almost a year, but I ditched it recently because the transcription quality had gone to the dogs. There’s also always a privacy angle with these tools because you’re trusting them with literally everything you say. They can also take a look at your screen because they have accessibility permissions. It was really hard for me to trust a private, cloud-based tool with that kind of information.