For a long time, my Obsidian vault has been my entire digital life. I have been using it as my primary journaling app and my digital brain. It holds hundreds of articles, research notes, and drafts. It has boosted my productivity in many ways, but I absolutely hated the endless searching. I felt like I wasn't getting the most out of all that accumulated knowledge.

For two decades, search has meant the same thing: type a query, scan a list of blue links, open five tabs, and synthesize the answer yourself. Google refined the algorithm, but the format stayed frozen in 1998. Then Perplexity arrived amongst the wave of AI tools with a different proposition: what if search engines actually answered questions instead of just pointing you toward answers?

The story began when I was looking for a new app to mirror phone notifications to my desktop. I used to rely on PushBullet, but its Chrome extension stopped seeing support, and Google eventually disabled it entirely.

They say experience is the best teacher, but when it comes to PC building, experience can be expensive. I’ve fried boards, blocked PCIe slots, and skimped out on cheap parts that would end up killing entire rigs. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then. If you’re new to PC building, consider this your warning label: learn from my mistakes before you make them yourself.

Have you given the Like a Dragon series a try before? When the early titles were translated into English, their Japanese titles, Ryū ga Gotoku (which means "like a dragon"), were localised to "Yakuza." However, because the newer games don't really relate to the Yakuza anymore, the English team decided to re-adopt the original Japanese name. Now it's called Like a Dragon, but make no mistake; this is still the same series as Yakuza.

One of the biggest focuses of President Trump's term is bringing more production onto US turf. People have had differing opinions on whether or not this was a good idea, but Trump himself didn't leave much wiggle room. With tariffs having a huge effect on outsourcing hardware from other countries, the President's message was clear: move production over to the US, or pay up.

For years, productivity software has forced an impossible choice: commit to rigid databases like Notion or embrace freeform chaos in tools like Obsidian. Tana's supertag system dissolves this tradeoff entirely, proving that the future of productivity belongs to outliners with metadatav—vtools that let you write freely and add structure retroactively.

A good USB-C dock is an essential tool to have on hand, like OTG USB drives and a travel adapter for power. With one cable, I can extend my laptop or mini PC's limited I/O tenfold, without sacrificing speed or latency in the connection in wrangling dual monitors, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, and a dozen other gadgets. Moreover, these docks mostly offer power delivery to the host device too. Yet, with all this high-bandwidth wizardry, every single one I've used treats audio as an afterthought, and it’s driving me nuts.

While PowerToys is an amazing suite full of handy features, it's generally a good idea to have said features disabled at first. After all, you don't want to bombard users with every single feature that PowerToys has. Fortunately, the great minds behind PowerToys agree with me, mainly because if the features turned themselves on, you'll end up seeing weird new stuff appear every time the suite updates.

I'm in the process of switching my smart home over to Power-over-Ethernet, and I've noticed that one of the network wiring tips that should be a given was missed off the list. It should be a given when you're handling power delivery over thin wires, and it is technically covered by the "Category" cable specifications, but it deserves a highlight of its own.

This year's milestone update for Windows 11 is out now, but it's not particularly exciting. In fact, I believe that the most significant change version 25H2 introduced was the removal of some legacy features. Still, it's an important update to grab, if only to keep your OS up to date.

Many things have changed for the Star Wars franchise over the past decade, with new games taking place in a galaxy far, far away. The buyout of Lucasfilm to Disney was the catalyst for major changes to the franchise, including much of the Expanded Universe being ousted in favor of newer stories being made officially canon. This included new video games that were developed and released following the buyout, which became part of the new Disney-Lucasfilm era canon, some of which were made by Electronic Arts. To many fans, these games included what most consider to be the best new character created within the new era, with a story that is among the best to come from any Star Wars game before or since.