Fancy some platforming fun? N++ has been around for a while (I remember when it was just a browser game), and it's now celebrating its tenth anniversary on Steam with its TEN++ update. Fortunately, to celebrate the occasion, the game has gone on a pretty steep discount. So, if you're itching to play something but you're not feeling like shelling out the big bucks, you can score N++ on Steam for the low price of $3.74.

We have to say, we're fairly impressed with the direction mini PCs have taken over the past year, reaching higher and higher with each new release. GMKtec is a fairly well-known brand, offering powerful mini PCs built for more intensive tasks like gaming. Although there are different stages of what the brand offers, the Evo-X2 AI mini PC has to be one of its top models, delivering impressive power in a compact size.

With their lightweight nature and solid isolation provisions, containers are quite useful in home labs when you need to self-host applications without the extra performance overhead of virtual machines. As such, you’ll find plenty of tools designed to enhance your containerization tasks, and these range from barebones container runtimes to powerful orchestration platforms. Kubernetes is one of the most popular container orchestration platforms out there, though its enterprise-grade utilities make it rather overkill for the average home lab.

It's Spooktober again, and with Halloween just a couple of weeks out, now is the best time to get your horror game library growing again. Still, what's the point of a good horror game if you can't enjoy it with your friends? After all, the most dire of situations also become insanely hilarious if you've got some friends along, and there's just nothing more rewarding than exploring a haunted setting and hearing your friend scream out from the other end of the hall.

Network-Attached Storage servers are some of the most useful devices you can add to your setup, regardless of whether you’re a casual user on the hunt for a file-sharing server or a hardcore privacy enthusiast looking to get rid of intrusive cloud platforms. If you’re as much of a data hoarder as I am, you’ll love the superior file archival, centralized storage, and easy recovery options offered by NAS rigs.

If I had a nickel for every time I've reported on a pocket device with "Air" in the name in the last few months, I'd have two nickels. Fortunately, they're two very different devices, so if you're not interested in Apple's new offerings, perhaps the Ayaneo Pocket Air Mini is more suitable. It's a little handheld that specialises in running retro games, and despite its recommended retail price being pretty reasonable by itself, you can score an additional $20 off if you help back its crowdfunding campaign.

Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more “shareworthy.” The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone’s camera roll — not the media you’ve already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, upload your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud, and surface “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says. Users will be able to save or share the suggested edits and collages.If Facebook wanting to look at your unpublished photos sounds familiar, it might be because we wrote about an early test in June. At that time, the company claimed unposted, private photos were not being used to train Meta’s AI, but it declined to rule out whether it would do so in the future. Well, the future is now, and it sure sounds like Meta wants to train its AI on your photos — under certain conditions. In the Friday announcement of the feature, Meta says, “We don’t use media from your camera roll to improve AI at Meta, unless you choose to edit this media with our AI tools, or share.”The Verge asked Meta to confirm: Meta will use your camera roll to train its AI if you choose to use this feature, right? We also asked for clarification on when Meta begins using your unpublished photos to train its AI. Does it happen when you opt into the new feature? After you choose to edit something with the tool? Or only after you choose to share the resulting creation? Meta spokesperson Mari Melguizo sent us the following clarification: “This means the camera roll media uploaded by this feature to make suggestions won’t be used to improve AI at Meta. Only if you edit the suggestions with our AI tools or publish those suggestions to Facebook, improvements to AI at Meta may be made.” So, Meta will collect and store your photos in the cloud and Meta’s AI will get to look at them, but the company won’t use them to train their AI unless you take an additional action — at least for now, according to Meta. Today, the feature says it will “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis”; in June, Meta told us that it might hold onto some of that data for longer than 30 days. The company claims your media “won’t be used for ad targeting.”Last year, Meta acknowledged that it had already quietly trained its AI models on all public photos and text posted to Facebook and Instagram by adult users since 2007.Facebook’s blog today shows that users will be asked if they want to “allow cloud processing to get creative ideas made for you from your camera roll.” It’s not yet clear if that prompt will also warn users that the feature may train Meta’s AI on your photos. The company says the feature is meant to help users who enjoy snapping pics but want to improve their photos before posting, or who don’t have time to “create something special.” Facebook says it’ll roll out the feature in the coming months.

Before learning about containers, I used to dedicate a single virtual machine to every service I wanted to run, which is hugely inefficient. Compared to fully-fledged virtual machines, containers are lighter, more specialized, flexible, and easier to set up.

If you've been looking for a reliable and wireless keyboard and mouse that doesn't cost all that much, this set is going to be right up your alley. The Lenovo 300 combo comes with a full-sized keyboard with a ten-key and an ambidextrous mouse, which means it'll work with all kinds of setups. Of course, the price is what really draws the eye to this model, coming in at just $21 for a limited time. It's great for home, school, and work.

Have you noticed that Windows 11's dark mode isn't completely dark? Sure, it manages to catch most of the newer UI elements of the operating system, but the older elements that have been passed down from Windows generation to generation remain unaffected. This means you'll get the occasional flashbang every time you move files from one place to another, as the file transfer dialog box is not yet included in dark mode.

While I can fully get on board with the lightweight workloads that containerized services provide, I've always had a problem with the management tools on offer for Windows users. Docker Desktop is a bloated mess, and most of the dashboards I've used to make sense of what's going on in my home lab have more features than I want to learn. I don't need more than the Docker engine running, so I can use Docker Compose in my Terminal, and a way to see which containers I have on the go.

These days, when someone builds a new PC, the norm is to get a single large SSD to handle all of their storage needs — OS, games, documents, media collection, backups, and more. SSD prices aren't prohibitive anymore, so it makes sense to just buy a single fast drive and call it a day. However, I'd like to propose four alternatives to this layout. Even if you don't care about saving money, you might be interested in improving drive longevity, performance, and efficiency. Each of these options needs to be considered in addition to your primary SSD, which doesn't have to be larger than a 1TB or 2TB drive.