The Stream Deck Plus is on sale for $159.99. If you’re looking for a simple way to streamline your workflow, the Elgato Stream Deck Plus is a handy productivity tool for automating everyday tasks. Right now, it’s on sale for $159.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and B&H Photo, which is its best price to date.Like the standard Stream Deck, the Stream Deck Plus comes with eight programmable keys you can use to automate tasks, such as muting yourself on a video call or turning off smart lights. The Plus, however, adds more customizability with four rotary dials that let you make fine adjustments, like changing the volume for a specific app.Elgato Stream Deck PlusWhere to Buy: $199.99 $159.99 at Amazon (black) $199.99 $159.99 at Best Buy $199.99 $159.99 at B&H PhotoThe dials are especially useful for controlling music. With a single dial, you skip forward or backward through a Spotify playlist, then press it to pause or play. On a standard Stream Deck, you’d need multiple buttons to do the same thing. Elgato also includes “Dial Stacks,” which let each dial handle multiple functions you can cycle through. A slim touchscreen above the dials shows what each control is currently assigned to and lets you swipe between different pages within a profile. And while the touchscreen itself can’t trigger plug-ins like the regular buttons, Elgato’s since released software updates  that let you assign up to three standard button or plugin actions to each dial, making the Stream Deck Plus far more useful than it was at launch.

I’ve written about AFFiNE a lot here at XDA because it’s genuinely one of the best PKM tools I’ve come across. However, I’d only ever used it locally on my PC. I’m still new to self-hosting, and actually used NotebookLM to help me learn the ropes. Ever since, I’ve been willing to experiment more with running my own servers, and since I use AFFiNE often, it was one of the first tools I wanted to switch to a self-hosted setup.

Back in my day, if you wanted to watch something with a friend remotely, you both had to load it up on your PCs and then do a "3-2-1 play" countdown to ensure you were both seeing the same thing at the same time. Fortunately, tech companies have since respected that people ideally want the app to do the syncing for them, and as such, there are plenty of ways to watch things with your friends with minimal hassle.

For most of my life as a PC user, I've lived by one very specific belief system, as I'm sure millions of others have, too: if it ain't broke, don't touch it. Now, this sounds responsible enough, until you realize it's actually just procrastination wearing a suit and tie. Because PCs don't ever break politely, or by giving you a two-week notice. They implode at 2AM, right when you have work to finish and your brain is already halfway melted.

It's the triple-A company's dream scenario: a game where you can increase your FPS by purchasing more of the game's DLC. Those who refuse to pay up get worse performance than those who do, and everyone opens their wallets to get their game working smoothly. I can hear the shareholders salivating now.

Will 2026 be the ever-elusive "Year of Linux?" While fans of the open-source operating system have hoped that previous years would be The One, things are actually looking pretty rosy for 2026's odds. After all, we're seeing record-breaking user counts on Steam and over one million Windows users downloading a specific distro in three months.

Running a home lab and any amount of services will almost guarantee that you'll make mistakes. Some of them will be relatively minor and annoying, but others can take down your entire setup. The frustrating part is that many of these problems aren't caused by bad hardware or lack of knowledge, but some poor habits that can creep in over years of running a home lab. Looking back at the year my home lab had in 2025, there are a few mistakes I made often enough that I've definitely learned my lesson now.

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google in paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia's vast collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary on Thursday.The partnerships are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an initiative launched in 2021 that gives large companies access to a premium version of Wikipedia's API for a fee. Lane Becker, the Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of earned revenue, tells The Verge that the program offers a version of Wikipedia "tuned" for commercial use and AI companies. "We take feature …Read the full story at The Verge.

Anyone who's used a computer before knows how messy the downloads folder can get. Everything you've ever downloaded just lands there by default, and we rarely have the patience to be proactive and organize things in a way that makes sense for you. So, things just tend to pile up with no rhyme or reason. And if you download ZIP files, you might extract them and then you have a mix of files and folders in there, it's far from ideal.

Password managers are a tool that you commit to for the long term. Nobody wants to deal with switching their password vaults between different services. In my case, I opted in to LastPass back when it was the popular choice and it's been doing the job quietly enough for me. It stored passwords, synced everywhere without interruptions. That's precisely what you want and expect from software that guards pretty much your entire digital identity.

Windows 8 was perhaps the most controversial release from Microsoft in recent decades. Some praised its UI, while others rejected a tiled-based interface on a desktop OS. The software giant did try to address some of the criticism with the release of Windows 8.1, but it didn't land very well, either.

Alienware makes some of the best monitors out right now, but they can be pretty pricey. So, if you're not looking to spend a lot, but still want something good, it might be a good idea to go with an older model from the brand.