There are so many smart home sensors available that it can sometimes prove difficult to choose the right ones for the job. The issue with choosing a "wrong" sensor if you could be stuck with one that frequently calls home to some far-away server, locks you into a closed ecosystem, requires cloud connectivity, and perhaps won't last as long as competitor alternatives. Though they aren't necessarily always expensive, the costs can quickly accumulate, so we must get it right the first time.

Right now, Valve fans have three burning questions on their mind: when will the Steam Machine release, how much will it be, and when are we finally getting our mitts on the white whale of gaming, Half-Life 3? Well, if industry insiders are to be believed, Valve is planning to answer all three of these questions in one fell swoop. Whispers are claiming that Valve plans to make Half-Life 3 part of the release package for the Steam Machine, but things have been a little too hairy on the hardware front for the company to make a move.

The reign of Raspberry Pis as a home server has ended. The majority of hobbyists enjoy using Pis to self-host apps, IoT projects, host media libraries, develop, and run network utilities. That charm still exists, but it's high time to stop pushing Pi’s limits for home server tasks. Its hardware limitations get exposed when you try to juggle a bunch of projects simultaneously.

I recently went through a major self-hosting session and downloaded the most talked-about, high-expectation tools in the community. However, it quickly turned into frustration. Within minutes, or at best, a single day of testing, several of these high-touted applications failed to deliver on core promises due to clunky UIs, resource consumption, or unnecessary complexity.

Using Whisper plugin in Obsidian to turn audio into notes works well, but handling recordings with multiple speakers is still a challenge. When recording meetings, lectures, or discussions, I often need to re-listen and manually figure out who said what. The plugin in Obsidian works mostly for lectures or single-speaker audio, but I wanted transcription notes that were easier to read and know who spoke what. Sure, Google Meet and Teams do offer built-in transcription. But they don't work at live events where you get to record only audio.

NotebookLM has been on everyone’s radar this year, and it’s easy to see why. It’s probably the best tool out there right now for researching and learning thanks to its insanely good synthesizing capabilities. It’s so pivotal to many of our workflows; I even use it alongside my design apps, as well as to take care of boring everyday tasks.

'Buyer's remorse' is a feeling that many PC builders and enthusiasts are all too familiar with, and it's no wonder that many gamers make upgrade decisions they later come to regret. With hundreds of components to pick from, dozens of new standards, and the entire internet shouting conflicting and contradictory advice on popular online forums, even experienced builders fall into patterns that waste money and marginally improve performance.

When someone asks you the time, how precise are you? I'm usually someone who gives the full time, like "six twenty-two." However, I know some people who will go with the easier "about twenty past" or even "near enough to half-past." And as much as I like saying the exact time down to the minute, there's something very human about giving a 'fuzzy' answer instead.

The Game Awards this year was filled with many big announcements, including a few that were based in a galaxy far, far away. While rumors and whispers about new Star Wars games being at the show were lingering around online, nobody knew for certain what would be announced, if anything at all. But luckily for Star Wars fans who tuned in, they got a big surprise that many were not expecting. Not only are we heading back to the Old Republic, but for an all-new adventure that is a spiritual successor to one of the best Star Wars games ever made.

Now that we've had a lot of time to play around with AI-generated code, people are asking themselves: does letting an LLM program for you improve productivity? Right now, it seems like a strange mix of "Yes" and "No." While it does allow people with zero programming skills to create an app with ease, the code itself isn't always the best it can be. While vibe coding is perfect to see how a program could behave, it's not ideal for actually shipping the product.

Say what you want about Windows 11, but it’s still one of the most popular operating systems on the planet. According to Statcounter, Windows users accounted for around 70 percent of the global desktop OS market share in November 2025. Of that slice, around 53 percent are on Windows 11. As bloated (and at times frustrating) as it may be, Windows 11’s ubiquity means most people will have to work with it to some degree at some point, so we might as well make it behave. Here are five settings that are helpful for not only speeding up your workflow, but also making it a little more comfortable, too.

Windows File Explorer as we know it today has been around for decades, and while Microsoft has made an effort to modernize it with subtle UI tweaks, it still feels like the same old tool underneath. That can be a pro or a con, depending on your point of view, but to me, File Explorer leaves a lot to be desired. It works, but it gets in my way a bit more than I'd like.