We dark mode users are a very particular folk. When we want a dark mode, we want a dark mode, devoid of any bright lights or anything white. If an app dares to boot into light mode, we screech and cry until we find the setting to turn on its dark mode. It's sort of like the digital version of the vampire, except we don't have any eye strain.

Microsoft added a bunch of new features, fixes, and improvements throughout this year. But now that we're only a few weeks away from the end of 2025, Teams users may not get anything major until next year. And the software giant has already started announcing its plan for Teams next year, with fixing its lag issues among the major priorities.

We've long known that the ISP-provided router is usually junk, and you're better off buying your own if possible. It's not just that they're built to the lowest specifications, and often overheat due to the limited space for both modem and router functionality. Or that they're usually limited in how many devices you can connect to your home network at once, which wasn't a problem once upon a time, but when even your toothbrush comes with Wi-Fi, it's an issue.

If you've been thinking about grabbing a new laptop, but don't want to spend a ton of money, these two laptops are going to be the best options to choose from. To be clear, they aren't going to be the most powerful, and they aren't going to be the latest models to hit the market.

We've all wanted to improve gaming performance at some point, and a lot of the advice we find online sounds convincing at first. I've followed some of those tips over the years, especially when I was still figuring out how different components affected real-world performance. The problem with some of the advice people keep repeating on forums is that it often oversimplifies how games actually behave on modern hardware. More often than not, you end up trying tweaks that fix nothing, or upgrading parts that weren't holding you back in the first place.

I don't know about you, but for me, snowball fights always sound more fun than they actually are. Sure, once the snow has settled and you make your first and second snowballs, it's a ton of fun. But then snow gets in your gloves, and everything gets a bit soggy, and your hands get kinda cold, and then you wanna stop and go inside again. Or maybe I'm just a spoilsport, who knows.

Last month on the dot, we saw Linux breach 3% of Steam's market share for the first time ever. Given how long Linux has been sitting at the bottom of the rankings without much progress, it was a huge occasion for open-source gamers. With SteamOS's Linux base acting as the beating heart of so many handhelds, combined with the PC gaming market turning to the almighty penguin to see what the fuss is about, it has been a good year for people who enjoy open-source apps.

I've been using Proxmox for about six months now, though I've been following the project for much longer. I had a bare-metal TrueNAS instance that I never got around to migrating away from, but I finally bit the bullet at the start of last summer and began the painstaking process of moving all my self-hosted services over. In that time, I discovered something somewhat unusual on the surface: deploying multiple Linux Containers (LXCs) to host Docker made significantly more sense than using a single virtual machine.

The tools I rely on every day might be tools you barely touch, and I'm sure it works the other way around too. That's the special thing about software: the tools we choose typically reflect how we think and work. But even then, there are a few outliers. For instance, when most people hear the word "AI," their mind just naturally defaults to ChatGPT. It's just the way it works!

I have little doubt that Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be one of the biggest video game successes of all time when it launches less than a year from now. Despite that, I'm not very happy or optimistic with the current state of Rockstar Games. Any game development cycle that takes 10+ years is bound to be connected to its fair share of problems, and Rockstar has certainly succumbed to that.

I’ve spent much of this year testing out new productivity and note-taking tools. And I’d say about half of them lived up to my expectations, such as AFFiNE. But with so many notes apps on my computer, things can get cluttered and scrambled very fast. It’s just not realistic to hop from app to app; you end up losing track of where all your files live, and in my case, also confuse some apps with others. So having one basic little stack of tools that I can rely on became essential for maintaining a consistent note-taking system. That’s why I settled on this plain text stack.

Not everyone needs a $2,500 laptop to play games while on the go. Sometimes you just want to get in some gaming sessions, and just have fun. If that's you, then I've found the perfect laptop that can get this done.