There are plenty of free note-taking apps out there, but you'll often find a trade-off between privacy and convenience. Cloud syncing often comes at the cost of security or with limited devices on a free plan.

ZFS has earned its reputation the hard way. It's one of the few filesystems that genuinely delivers on promises like end-to-end data integrity, self-healing, snapshots that don't feel like a hack, and storage management that actually scales as your system grows. Once you've lived with ZFS, it's hard to go back to traditional RAID and ext4 without feeling like you've lost safety nets you didn't realize you were relying on. ZFS can detect and correct errors that a simple RAID or ext4 setup would never catch, and features like instant snapshots and copy-on-write design make tasks like backups and rollbacks easy to make a habit.

Chromebooks don't tend to live particularly long lives, at least in the eyes of Google. Once they age out of the update window, they slowly begin to migrate to a drawer or e-waste pile somewhere. That's really unfortunate, and it doesn't have to be this way.

It took Microsoft some time, but Windows 10 introduced a major feature called virtual desktops, which allows you to create different virtual workspaces for different apps. At the time, many pointed out that this was something Linux had had for a while, but the thing is, Linux handles things very differently.

3D printing often feels like the perfect answer to everyday annoyances. If something does not quite work in your space, you can design or download a fix and have it ready in a few hours. I have used my printer for plenty of genuinely helpful projects, from cable guides to storage bins. These prints, however, taught me that not every clever idea survives the long-term wear and tear of a real home.

If you were expecting 2025 to be the year we finally got Star Trek replicators in our kitchens, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we aren't quite there yet. 2025 wasn't a landmark year for novel breakthroughs in 3D printing technology, at least for tabletop printers and hobbyists. Instead, this year was defined by refinement. We saw metal printing get a "brain" that fixes mistakes before they happen, and the use of AI for something other than generating images and essays, in slicer software. Tool-changer CNC machinery stepped down from its pedestal of elite industry-only clientele to serve a few hobbyists with deep pockets, through projects from Snapmaker and EufyMake.

It has been a really harsh year for building a PC, hasn't it? Near the start, we saw astronomical prices for Nvidia's newest RTX 50 series, as scalpers bought up GPUs and resold them for a killing. Then, right as the RTX 50 prices began to get sane, we saw RAM and SSD prices spike massively as AI companies began buying them in bulk. We even saw Crucial duck out of the consumer market to better serve business demand.

Cloud gaming is on the rise, somehow. A report from Cloud Dosage states that cloud gaming revenue is set to surge 173% globally by 2030, estimated to hit nearly $29 billion, but this is a shocking sentiment for myself and many other gamers who don't know a single person who uses a cloud gaming service.

During its first seven months on the market, the quality of Nintendo Switch 2 game ports has varied wildly. On the negative side of things, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's port has massive input delay, while Madden NFL 26 on Switch 2 is riddled with bugs and performance issues. Some of the more impressive ports have been of Bloober Team's horror games, Cronos - The New Dawn and Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition.

A web browser is much more than just another app, and for most users, it shapes the entire PC user experience. It's your primary interface for work, entertainment, and everything that comes in between. Yet, despite being the most utilized piece of software on modern systems, the browser is rarely scrutinized when performance starts to feel a little off. Stuttering gets blamed on the CPU, rising RAM usage gets written off as "Windows being Windows", and crashes and shutdown often nudge people towards unnecessary hardware upgrades.

Did you know that, until very recently, Google's website supported the Sega Dreamcast's browser? Unfortunately, by the time you've read these words, it's too late to dig the Dreamcast out of the attic, dust it down, and see for yourself, as the search engine giant has finally cut support for anyone still browsing the internet using Sega's final entry into the console market.

Waymo driverless car is not able to detect traffic lights after a major power outage in San Francisco, California, | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images A power outage struck San Francisco on Saturday that blacked out about 130,000 customers at its peak, according to Pacific Gas and Electric Company, but also caused another problem: stranded Waymo vehicles. Posts all over social media showed the company's autonomous SUVs sitting still in the streets and causing traffic jams.Some people posted videos of Teslas using their FSD feature to navigate the same streets, and Elon Musk tweeted that "Tesla Robotaxis were unaffected by the SF power outage."Power out in SF and the @Waymo's are causing a MASSIVE jam in North Beach 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fuvhprlyma- Iago Maciel (@_iagomaciel) December 2 …Read the full story at The Verge.