I’ve bought plenty of upgrades for my home lab over the years, and these range from handy PCIe cards and extra memory (before the RAM apocalypse) for my primary workstation to spare nodes and remote backup hubs. That said, network devices have easily been some of the most expensive upgrades out of all my paraphernalia, even though my descent into the networking rabbit hole didn’t cost me a lot of money in the beginning. Both my PC and NAS already supported 2.5G functionality, so all I had to do was buy a switch capable of these speeds.

I’ve spent a long time now bouncing between free and open-source editors in an effort to replace Photoshop. I love a lot of them, and a handful have made their way permanently into my graphics toolkit. They definitely offer numerous advantages over Photoshop that remind me why I canceled my Adobe subscriptions in the first place - transparency, low to no price tag, communities, and often unique features. However, I still hit roadblocks now and then, and end up thinking “I get why people still pay for Photoshop.”

Sometimes I find myself browsing benchmarks for a new CPU because my current rig feels sluggish or because the fans are screaming. Just as I was considering an upgrade, I decided to actually take a look inside my machine, and one afternoon with a can of compressed air and a screwdriver gave me back 15% of my performance.

Backups are one of those things everyone knows they should do, but most people get wrong. The tools are either too complicated or too expensive. Cloud services want monthly subscriptions just to store your data on their servers. Time Machine works fine until the day you actually need to restore something and realize the backup got corrupted months ago. Manual backups never happen consistently because you forget, get busy, or both.

Just weeks after raising the price of its RAM modules, Framework has announced that it's also increasing the price of its desktop PC in response to the global memory shortage. The Framework Desktop with 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 chip now starts at $1,139, instead of $1,099."We held off on it for as long as we could, but we had to update our Framework Desktop pricing today to account for the massive increase in LPDDR5x pricing from our suppliers," Framework says in a post on X. "As before, we're only adjusting prices enough to cover the increases in cost."Framework Desktops with higher RAM configurations and a Ryzen AI Max P …Read the full story at The Verge.

We've talked about just how vital a docking station can be when it comes to improving your current setup. And while there are plenty of great options, we think this one from Anker is going to offer something that you've never seen before.

Just under three months ago, Zorin OS 18 was released to the public. It's a Linux-based operating system that has a primary focus on making Windows users as comfortable as possible. This includes adding OneDrive functionality and even allowing users to change their desktop GUI to mirror that of Windows 10 or 11.

Picking up a good quality, high-end monitor can set you back hundreds of dollars. After spending $800 on a primary screen, you might feel the need to match it for your second one, leading to a $1,600 bill just for Discord and Spotify. In reality, your eyes don't need 4K resolution or a 240Hz refresh rate to read an Excel sheet or watch a Slack channel.

A UK employment tribunal rejected a request from fired Rockstar Games employees to receive interim pay while waiting for a full hearing about their dismissal, according to Bloomberg and IGN. After Rockstar fired 34 employees last year - 31 from the UK and three from Canada - the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) accused the company of "union busting." Rockstar claims that the fired employees were leaking company information in a Discord channel.The hearing took place over two days last week. "Despite being refused interim relief today, we've come out of last week's hearing more confident than ever that a full and substanti …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta's Reality Labs team is expected to lose around 10 percent of its staff, with layoffs concentrated on the division's metaverse employees, as reported by The New York Times. The layoffs are apparently a side effect of Meta's AI ambitions, which are pulling focus away from its virtual reality division. According to the Times, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, called a meeting for Wednesday that he "urged staff to attend in person," saying it will be the "most important" meeting of the year. Bosworth oversees the Reality Labs division, which employs about 15,000 people. Unfortunately, layoffs to Meta's VR team may not come …Read the full story at The Verge.

When it comes to building a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), there's always the potential to choose the wrong RAID type. This shouldn't cause any issues with storing data, but it could leave you with fewer protections or a higher risk of data loss. For running larger drives, and I'm talking 20 TB or above, RAID 5 could be viewed as a viable choice, but I'm here to warn you about using this type and to instead go for RAIDZ-2.

Just after last Christmas, we saw that one of the co-founders of the Good Old Games (GOG) platform, Michael Michał Kiciński, had bought back their own creation from CD Projekt Red. It meant a return of GOG back to its original vision, but then came the next, arguably more difficult decision: how do you survive under Steam's shadow?