When something feels off with our PCs, most of us go straight for the usual suspects. You open Task Manager, glance at the CPU and memory graphs, maybe fire up HWiNFO or MSI Afterburner, and start guessing from there. But what if the culprit isn’t obvious?

Anthropic is integrating its Claude AI assistant with Microsoft 365 services so it can surface content from Word documents, Teams messages, and Outlook emails in conversations with the chatbot. It’s part of a series of updates to Claude to make the chatbot more useful at work.Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without you needing to upload them manually. The Microsoft 365 connector is available now for all Claude Team and Enterprise plan users, but administrators need to enable the integration before end users can connect up their accounts.The Microsoft Outlook integration with Claude lets the chatbot access email threads and analyze communications to surface relevant context in its answers. Claude will also be able to search through chat conversations in Microsoft Teams, as well as access channel discussions and meeting summaries.Anthropic is also launching enterprise search in Claude, a new feature that makes it easier for the AI assistant to search across all of a company’s data sources. As many businesses use a variety of tools to manage HR processes, communications, and other parts of a business, data is often in many different apps and services. “Enterprise search is particularly valuable for onboarding new team members, answering strategic questions like analyzing patterns in customer feedback, and quickly identifying the right internal experts to consult on any topic,” says Anthropic.The Claude and Microsoft 365 integration works by using a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector, Anthropic’s open-source standard for connecting AI applications to other data sources and apps. Microsoft has been embracing MCP, promising to use it widely in Windows as it rewrites its operating system to turn computers into AI PCs that you talk to.Microsoft has also been increasingly relying on Anthropic AI models to improve its Microsoft 365 apps. Anthropic’s models are now helping power Copilot Researcher, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, and a new Office Agent that is able to produce Word and PowerPoint documents from Microsoft’s own Copilot chat interface. Microsoft is cozying up to Anthropic just as it’s investing more in its own AI models and trying to avoid putting all of its AI eggs in one complicated OpenAI-shaped basket.

You'd think the most impactful storage upgrade I ever made would be the transition from hard drives to an SSD. While switching to a SATA SSD for the first time was game-changing, and getting my first NVMe SSD was great, the increased speed and responsiveness became stale in a few months. Recently, when I replaced all of my PC's storage, the best decision I made was adding a 4TB hard drive to the mix. This expansion turned out to be the best upgrade I ever made to my PC's storage in years.

An early look at Instagram’s parental controls for teen AI use. After enthusiastically rolling AI chatbots out everywhere, Meta has announced new options for parents to get an idea of how teens are chatting with the digital characters and set some limits on use. The move comes as Meta works to rehabilitate its image after disturbing reports of its tools’ romantic interactions with minors and faces growing scrutiny over chatbots’ impact on kids.The new controls will let parents stop their children from speaking with AI chatbots entirely or block access to specific characters they don’t like, Instagram lead Adam Mosseri and Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a blog post announcing the changes on Friday. Meta’s AI assistant is a notable exception to this rule. The company says it will “remain available to offer helpful information and educational opportunities” with “age-appropriate protections in place.”Meta said parents will also be given some form of “insight” into how their kids are using AI, though it was light on details for what this might look like in practice. From Meta’s description, it looks like the “insights” will take the form of a high-level summary of “the topics their teens are chatting about with AI characters” and Meta’s AI assistant. The company says it hopes the information will empower parents to “have thoughtful conversations with their teens about AI interactions.” Mosseri and Wang said they “hope today’s updates bring parents some peace of mind that their teens can make the most of all the benefits AI offers.” Parents will have to wait a little longer to discover said peace of mind though: the controls won’t be available until “early next year.” Even then, they will be limited to Instagram and only for English-speaking users in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Meta said it plans to expand the controls across its platforms in the future and said it will “have more to share soon.”  This is one of the first major safety updates Meta has made to its AI chatbots since deploying them across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It comes on the heels of another major update pushed only this week that limits what content teen Instagram accounts can view, in line with what you’d see in a PG-13 movie. 

When putting together your next single-board computer project, you're probably tempted to get one of the newest SD cards with the fastest speeds. After all, a new Pi project deserves quality components. However, before you purchase that ultra-high-speed SD card, you may want to take a closer look at your Raspberry Pi's specs.

Every PC enthusiast has heard the phrase "silicon lottery" tossed around hardware circles, usually followed up by complaints of bad overclocking headroom, or tall tales of pushing far past voltage limits of a particular chip. But what exactly does it mean?

Recently, I've talked about a couple of solutions that let you run Windows apps on Linux, including WinApps and WinBoat for virtualization, and Wine for real-time translation. Solutions like WinBoat and WinApps are kind of like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, so you may think there's no reason to make something like WinBoat for Windows. But you'd be wrong.

Episodic video games aren't for everyone, are they? There's something beautifully cruel about them, because they hook you, get you involved and committed, and then... they make you wait. Sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it's months, and a surprising number of times, it becomes years. That "Next Episode Coming Soon" screen is hard to digest.

Obsidian is a wonderful tool for creating and publishing websites, especially with the $8-per-month Obsidian Publish subscription. That's a low cost to host a website, especially compared to other services like GoDaddy or Bluehost, which can charge $20 or more just for the domain, much less the hosting costs. Obsidian Publish also integrates Obsidian's best features into every site, such as hover previews, graph view, and more.

For years, my Raspberry Pi cluster powered nearly everything in my home lab. It began as an experiment in distributed computing, something I could tinker with and learn from. Each small board carried its share of the load, and I enjoyed seeing them work together. The soft hum of fans and the glow of LEDs made it feel like a miniature data center. Over time, however, the routine of maintaining multiple systems began to feel more like a burden than a hobby.

Most productivity apps ask you to choose your poison: Notion for docs, Asana for tasks, and Zapier for automation. You're paying $15 here, $25 there, and suddenly your "productivity" budget hits $100+ monthly.

YouTube is packed with valuable tutorial videos, but I've always wanted a way to organize them in my own private learning space, a kind of personal classroom. Somewhere that allows me to have more control over what I watch, how I watch it, and, more importantly, reduces distractions from the internet.