While most motherboards have pre-installed M.2 heatsinks these days, users without one should not rush to buy one. SSD heatsinks weren't always as common as they are today. People were using their Gen3 and Gen4 NVMe drives without heatsinks for years before marketing and motherboard designs changed everyone's minds. Conventional wisdom about SSD heatsinks still revolves around thermal throttling instead of drive longevity, overblowing a problem most users don't have. Unless you have a PCIe 5.0 SSD in your system running especially hot, you will be just fine without a heatsink. All you need is a PC with decent airflow and a drive that's not being choked by adjacent components.

I've tried my fair share of note-taking and planning tools, but I tend to lean on a whiteboard for brainstorming. Unfortunately, whiteboards take up space. Space which I don't have in my study. But lately, I've been looking for solutions to build a digital whiteboard. Yes, I'm aware of Excalidraw integrations for Obsidian. However, I wanted something simpler and standalone since most of my whiteboarding is ephemeral and not something I need to hold on to for the long term.

Raspberry Pi’s marketing is doing what marketing always does: it wants you looking forward, not looking around. Raspberry Pi 5 is the flagship product and offers numerous fundamental improvements. But “newest” is not the same as “best buy,” especially when you’re building a home lab box meant to run quietly for months at a time. For many people, the Raspberry Pi 4 still falls into the practical, low-friction zone.

For the past year and a half, I've been doing most of the legwork for my partner after having built her a gaming PC of her own. A lot of the time, introducing her to games she should've grown up playing includes getting them to run and smoothing over the rough edges. The process has only made one thing clearer to me: PC gaming and console gaming are fundamentally different worlds.

Since Windows 11's release back in 2021, Microsoft has committed to an annual feature update cadence, meaning PCs running Windows 11 get one "big" feature update every year, usually around late September to mid-October. These updates have been labeled as version 22H2, 23H2, and so on, due to them releasing in the second half of the year.

Before you assume I've finally snapped based on the headline, hear me out. At some point, while trapped in a Wi-Fi dead-zone, I had what can only be described as a questionable idea to "boost" my router's signal, inspired by a rather convincing YouTube short that I looked up minutes later.

With the current RAM crisis going on right now, it can be hard to pick up stellar hardware for less. However, if you know where to look, you'll occasionally see devices go on sale for much less than they usually go for, even in times like this. They may not be as current as some may like, but they're still very much capable of handling 2026's tasks.

I don't think I've ever met someone who got into making a home server and started out with a full-tower ATX case or a NAS enclosure. It always begins with repurposed desktops, old laptops about to be taken to pasture, or leftover office machines. However, what almost always happens is that those home servers begin accumulating responsibility. One drive becomes three, and three becomes six. Suddenly, this box in the corner isn't just the "Plex box" anymore, and it begins holding backups, personal data, family photos, documents, and things you'd genuinely be upset if you lost.

Teams users continue to complain about performance issues on several social media platforms and forums, but Microsoft's collaboration tool remains one of the most popular apps for teamwork. Microsoft made several attempts to speed up Teams in the past, with the latest one being introduced as recently as last month, but the software giant hasn't claimed that it has addressed all the issues users complained about previously.

When you picture a virtual reality headset user, you're probably not picturing someone like Sherry Dickson. At 69, the snowy-haired, retired elementary school teacher hops into her Meta Quest headset five days a week, for roughly 60 to 90 minutes at a time. She's not attending live concerts or watching immersive films. Dickson, a fitness buff since Jane Fonda workout videos in the '80s, largely uses her headset for one reason - to play Supernatural, a VR fitness game with a huge, loyal fan base and a tight-knit community. Supernatural isn't dead, but it might as well be. A few weeks ago, Meta shut down three VR studios as part of broader l …Read the full story at The Verge.

Obsidian's Bases feature is still relatively new, but there are already loads of plugins available that enhance the experience. I've written about a few of them before, but if I had to pick a single Bases plugin to use above all others, the choice would be easy: Lovely Bases. This plugin transforms Bases from a simple database-like feature into a much more visually oriented experience. For creative work, it's an amazing tool. I've used it to create galleries of all my reference images for my fiction, but that's just one example.

Raspberry Pi devices get their fair share of criticism, but one of their biggest strengths is that they cost only a fraction of a conventional server or a desktop. The pricing is one of the main reasons why many users who don't need heavy workloads prefer building a Pi cluster to buying conventional hardware.