What do you think LLM models would have looked like if they were around in the 90s? What if you could pick up an AI assistant on a floppy disk, pop it into your computer, and ask it things? While it's always fun to think about these what-ifs, making them a reality is a lot harder. Fortunately, some people are just really, really determined to get ChatGPT running on a 32-year-old PC.

The longer I’ve used NotebookLM, the more obvious one thing has become: while it's great on its own, pairing it with other productivity tools takes the whole experience to the next level. Over the last few months, I've used NotebookLM alongside practically every tool you could think of: Notion, Apple Notes, VS Code, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity — and the list goes on.

Most people reach for AI when they need slides fast — ChatGPT for bullet points, Gamma for auto-generated decks, or Canva's AI templates for quick polish. But that approach treats presentations like a formatting problem, not a thinking problem. The real struggle isn't making slides look good. It's organizing ideas so they actually land.

Native Union’s Weighter managing one of up to three cables. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Warning: I'm going to make an attempt to justify a $40 paperweight for cable management. I'm not sure how I ended up in this position, or who hurt me. All I can say is that I'm not proud of myself, so please, take pity.I've been using Native Union's 3-cable Weighter for about a week. It sits on my kitchen table, which also serves as my impromptu workspace on most days. It looks nice when I happen to notice it, and I can be assured that each time I return with my MacBook Pro in hand, I'll find the MagSafe connector right where I left it.Before Weighter, I'd just let the cable fall to the ground, requiring a middle-aged bend and audible gr …Read the full story at The Verge.

You might have invested a significant portion of your budget into your power supply (as you should), but your setup is incomplete without a UPS. A quality PSU is essential for routing clean and stable power to your PC, but a UPS sits between your PSU and the mains. It's not just a power backup for your system, but a means of protecting both your PC and PSU from power surges, brownouts, and fluctuations. Even if power-related incidents are rare in your neighborhood, you shouldn't risk the safety of your PC. A decent UPS will be far more valuable than a cheap surge protector that doesn't protect anything at all.

If you spend enough time around hardware enthusiasts or lurking in PC building forums, you start to hear the same rituals when it comes to RAM: set your XMP or EXPO profile, tighten your timings if you're feeling brave, and make peace with whatever speed your motherboard can handle. I thought I understood all there is to it. After all, memory tuning is supposed to be one of the more straightforward parts of a build. Then, I stumbled across a BIOS setting that took me by surprise.

Proxmox’s powerful virtualization prowess, support for LXCs (and OCI images with VE 9.1), and clustering provisions are only a part of what makes it a terrific home lab platform. Technically, ESXi may have a more fleshed-out collection of first-party tools, but Proxmox is slowly working its way up with official and community-created offerings. You’ve got Proxmox Backup Server to create space-efficient snapshots of your virtual guests, while the Mail Gateway lets you add an extra layer of protection to your self-hosted email server.

Self-hosting has many benefits, but you also have to prioritize which services you want to spend your time on. This is because self-hosting involves troubleshooting, unexpected downtime, and more maintenance than most consumer cloud services.

NVMe drives are fast, but sometimes they're not. If you have one, you might think it only slows down when temperatures are high, as CPUs and GPUs do. But SSDs are a bit more complex, and they can slow down for many reasons. Thus, you might find your drive slowing down even if temperatures are normal.

You know, sometimes I wish I didn't have to write out the formula in Excel. Sometimes I wish I could just tell my computer, "Hey, I really want to achieve this and that, can you just figure out how to do that and make the formula for me, please?" It would save a ton of headaches trying to figure out why my logic doesn't work.

Every time I look at the state of portable gaming, I'm reminded of how complicated the "gaming laptop" route has become. Manufacturers want to feature the most enviable selection of mobile GPUs, a decently powerful CPU to complement its performance, a large heat sink and thermal design that adds to the bulk, and to top it off, a 4-pound charging brick for you to carry around in your carry-on.

120 words per minute. That's a stat I brag about to anyone who hasn't heard it from me already. Even my idea of taking breaks between work consists of playing rounds of Tetris or just going on over to Monkeytype to try and get my WPM up. So when I heard about a typing battle royale game at this year's Steam Next Fest, it had my full attention. Thankfully, it succeeded in keeping my attention after my first look.