Proton Suite has been the default recommendation for anyone serious about digital privacy. It’s a polished, all-in-one powerhouse, but it comes with a recurring price tag that adds up and an ecosystem that can feel a bit too centralized. I decided to see if I could achieve the same level of encryption and peace of mind without the monthly subscription.

PC hardware has never been faster for gaming. Current-gen CPUs are pushing higher clocks and relying on larger L3 caches, GPUs are brute-forcing ridiculous frame rates at higher resolutions, and Gen 5 SSDs advertise speeds that most games don't even know what to do with. It's almost like you have everything you need for a buttery-smooth gaming experience, especially if you're using a high-refresh-rate monitor, but that's not always the case even today. You can have a high-end rig and still feel like something’s holding it back.

A Raspberry Pi can feel like a little miracle, capable of everything from blocking ads to running smart home automations and retro games. It is still just a tiny computer, though, and it has real limits that are easy to forget once ideas start flowing. If you avoid a few common mistakes, the Pi stays fast, stable, and pleasant to work with rather than becoming a flaky box you constantly need to fix. Think of this as a checklist of what not to do, so your next project has a much better chance of just working.

The start of the year is typically a great time to snag deals on health and fitness gear, including trackers and wireless earbuds, and this week was no exception. We found plenty on sale and highlighted the best picks below. Not all of the deals are related to New Year’s resolutions, though; there are also a number of other worthwhile deals worth checking out. Despite the Consumer Electronics Show wrapping up earlier this week, we’re already seeing deals roll in, for example. And if your main goal is to unwind this weekend, we’ve spotted solid deals on Blu-rays to help you relax. Below, you’ll find all of our favorite deals from this week. Of fitness trackers on sale right now,  the deal on the Amazfit Active 2 is ideal, especially if you’re on a budget. It’s currently on sale for just $84.99 ($15 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is just $5 shy of its lowest price to date.​​We think the Active 2 is one of the best fitness tracker you can currently buy, namely because it offers a feature set you don’t typically don’t find at this price point. It covers most of the health and fitness features people need and then some, with continuous heart rate and blood oxygen tracking, in addition to menstrual cycle tracking. You also get offline maps with turn-by-turn navigation and up to nine days of battery life — far longer than most smartwatches. It looks stylish, too, thanks to its stainless steel case and 2,000-nit OLED display that makes it seem more expensive than it is.Read our full Amazfit Active 2 review.Amazfit Active 2Where to Buy: $99.99 $84.99 at Amazon $99.99 $84.99 at Best Buy $99.99 $84.99 at TargetDespite being introduced at CES 2026 just this week, Anker’s latest 45W Nano Charger is already on sale ahead of its release on January 20th. Right now, you can pick up the wall charger through Anker’s online storefront for $29.99 ($10 off) when you use promo code WS24D5XT3DV9 at checkout. What makes the latest Nano Charger stand out from previous models its built-in display, which shows real-time charging details like power flow, charge level, and temperature at a glance. If you have an iPhone 15 or newer — or an iPad Pro released in 2020 or later — it can also adjust charging based on the device’s power needs. What’s more, it delivers up to 45W of power in a compact design with folding prongs that rotate 180 degrees, allowing you to squeeze it into smaller spaces.Anker Nano Charger (45W, Smart Display, 180° Foldable)Where to Buy: $39.99 $29.99 at Anker (with code WS24D5XT3DV9)If it’s cold outside and you’d rather stay in, you can currently snag three 4K UHD Blu-ray discs for $33 through January 19th at Amazon — or $11 per movie. Over 150 titles are on sale, ranging from newer films like Superman and Wicked to older hits like Inception, The Thing, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Scarface, with the discount applying at checkout. Just keep in mind that you’ll need a 4K Blu-ray player — like Panasonic’s UB820-K or DP-UB420-K — or a disc-based Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 to watch them.SupermanWhere to Buy: $25.97 at Amazon (4K Ultra HD + Digital)WickedWhere to Buy: $21.94 at Amazon (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray+ Digital)The Thing (1982)Where to Buy: $14.99 at Amazon (4K UHD)Three more of this week’s best dealsThe last-gen Shokz OpenRun Pro are still available at a new low price at Amazon and Best Buy, where you can buy them for $109.95 ($50 off). The open-ear buds wrap around your ears, allowing you to still hear surrounding sounds on busy streets while running or cycling. They also feature an IP55 rating for sweat and water resistance and weigh a mere 29 grams, making them more comfortable for long workouts than your traditional pair of in-ear buds.Deals on Donkey Kong Bananza are rare, but this week both Walmart and Amazon are selling the physical version for $62.99 ($8 off), which matches the game’s all-time low. The colorful 3D platformer is arguably the best Nintendo Switch 2 titles thus far, and though it does feature some unexpected political undertones, they certainly don’t deter from the game’s creative, playful experience. Read our review.You can buy Google’s latest Nest Learning Thermostat starting at $219.89 ($60 off) at Walmart. The fourth-gen smart thermostat is capable of learning your routine and automatically adjusts your heating and cooling schedule, so you can set it and forget it. It also features a large, well-designed display that offers a bevy of info at a glance, including the time, weather, temperature, and even an outdoor air quality index score. Plus, it supports the newer Matter protocol and comes with a remote temperature sensor, which lets you focus on heating and cooling specific rooms. Read our review.

Sharing files between devices is easy thanks to cloud services, but becomes more difficult when you want an offline-first privacy-focused solution that also supports devices across different platforms.

Just like CPUs, modern GPUs can dynamically adjust their clock speeds based on temperature, power, and workload, which is why they can squeeze as much performance as they can without you having to manually fine-tune it. When you think about it, that sounds ideal, because you can just leave everything running at stock and let the boost algorithm do its thing. Higher clocks when there's enough thermal or power headroom, and slightly lower clocks when it starts to run a bit hot, while still maintaining advertised performance either way.

When you start to hear how Linux might be better than Windows 11 in areas like customization, privacy, and resource efficiency, you can’t help but think about switching. But if you’ve been a Windows user for years and are ready to make the switch, you might be surprised that Linux often takes a bit more setup up front than Windows. If you want the best possible experience, you should conduct some research beforehand.

A giant version of Lockin’s wirelessly charged V7 smart lock was a showstopper on the CES show floor. I picked Aqara's Smart Lock U400 and Roborock's Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor. It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren't about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs. This is what I expected the launch of the interoperability protocol Matter would bring. Once companies could stop spending time and money on working on integrating with half a dozen platforms, they could fo …Read the full story at The Verge.

The FCC approved SpaceX's plan to launch an additional 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites on Friday. That brings the total number of satellites the company will have in orbit to around 15,000 worldwide. As part of the approval, the government is also waiving previous requirements that prevented overlapping coverage and enhanced capacity.SpaceX originally sought approval for 30,000 satellites, but for now, the FCC is only greenlighting 15,000. The company will be on a deadline, too. The government says 50 percent of the Gen2 satellites must be launched and operational by December 1st of 2028, with the rest to follow by December of 2031. But the …Read the full story at The Verge.

Running a full Linux desktop on a Windows or macOS-based machine usually requires dual-booting, a virtual machine on your PC, or a remote desktop connection to a system that's actually running it. But what if I told you there was a way to run Linux so that you can access a full operating system and desktop from just your web browser? That's the promise of containers like LinuxServer's Webtop, and after using it, it's hard not to see why this approach is so compelling.

In 2023, what was then still called Twitter, open-sourced at least portions of the code that decided what it served up in your feed. But that GitHub repository is hopelessly out of date, with the vast majority of the files appearing to be from the initial upload three years ago. Elon Musk says that in seven days, he will open-source X's new algorithm and finally give people a peek behind the curtain and possibly a technical explanation as to why your feed is 90 percent rage bait.Elon has always made promises to open-source parts of X, and has followed through to at least some degree, including Grok-1 in 2024. But xAI is now on Grok-3, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

Running an LLM locally is a pain you probably don’t want to deal with unless you have a real use case. I tried self-hosting OpenAI’s Whisper model on my laptop, and while the tool itself worked well, getting it up and running took a long time. You usually have to stitch together multiple tools just to get started, downloading model files from different sources, setting up Python environments, installing frameworks like PyTorch or Transformers, configuring GPU drivers, and then fixing whatever breaks next.