The holiday season is a great time for getting together with family and sharing the joy of being all in one place. It's also a great time for new game releases, especially as everyone is getting each other gifts. You can't have the holiday season without gaming at this point. But before Christmas rolls in, to take over everything, Thanksgiving will bring families together for great food and fun interactions.

Man, I clocked a lot of hours into Dawn of War. I think the game is the reason why I collect Warhammer miniatures to this day. It had a real knack for bringing those gray, plastic soldiers to life, where they can scrap with one another and give us glimpses into how they operate. I always played as the Orks. They're definitely the most fun.

NotebookLM is really powerful on its own, but pairing it with your productivity apps makes it even more useful, in my opinion. I even use it alongside my graphics apps to boost my design skills. So lately, I started using it with one of my top note-taking apps, Joplin. It’s a weirdly solid combo, even though these two apps are from completely different planets and don’t have any official integrations.

Ever since I got into Linux six months ago, I've fallen in love with KDE Plasma. I've added it to pretty much every distro I've tried: Fedora with Plasma, EndeavourOS with Plasma (a default, but still), Arch Linux with Plasma, and one time, just the plain KDE Plasma OS. For me, KDE Plasma is the BBQ sauce of Linux desktop environments: you can slap it on anything and it'll taste great.

If you run a home server, you inevitably fall into one of two camps. You're either like me, falling squarely in the set and forget it category, where you install and then never get around to managing updates. And then there's the crowd that will install a dedicated app like Watchtower, giving it permissions to restart anything it wants and hoping that a breaking change doesn't bring down your entire home server overnight. This group generally tends to avoid automation. Understandably so. Things break. Moreover, we like the idea of manually checking GitHub releases, checking for update logs, pulling images one by one, and restarting containers only when we're sure that nothing is about to stop working.

When I report on gamers noticing an increase in their system's performance, it's usually because a new piece of tech has arrived that lets them render their games better. However, this time around, things are a little different. The latest Nvidia hotfix driver has improved people's in-game performance by up to 65%, but I wouldn't say it was an FPS boost, per se. In fact, it'd probably be more accurate to call it an FPS "reclamation," weirdly enough.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 106, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, Happy Thanksgiving Week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about prediction markets and Hilary Duff and Matt Belloni and yeast, clearing space for a Steam Machine, playing News Tower thanks to Stephen Totilo's recommendation, checking to make sure I remember all the Wicked lyrics (I do, don't worry) before seeing For Good, giving up on my fantasy football team, and recording season two of Version History. It's a fun one.I also have for you a ne …Read the full story at The Verge.

NBC News's David Ingram analyzed a month's worth of Elon Musk's X posts (our condolences). While what he was able to glean wasn't too surprising, it was still interesting to see the numbers all laid out. Between September 17th and October 17th, he posted 1,716 times, averaging a little over 55 posts a day. 49 percent of those were about politics, usually fringe. He seems particularly hung up on the race of people on TV and in movies, including going after child actors.Other things Elon likes to talk about? Crime, Tesla - oh, and of course, himself. Over the 30 days, Elon posted about himself 109 times. He often even reposts his own stan ac …Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon’s Alexa Routines are sufficient for most people who want to set up and forget, including yours truly. Initially, it is fun to use voice commands or conditional triggers to turn off a light or an appliance. However, as your usage patterns evolve, you’ll gradually start noticing the limitations in the logic of these smart routines. That was my “lightbulb” moment when I tried Home Assistant for the first time.

Solid-state drives have become the default storage choice for modern PCs for their lightning-fast performance, but despite their speed and resilience, they're not invincible. Even the most reliable SSDs still rely on delicate flash memory cells that gradually wear out with use, making longevity a real concern for anyone running read and write intensive software.

If you've ever used your TV as a computer monitor, you know that it's not the best idea in the world. The optimization that's done to the panel for TVs compared to that for close-use monitors often means hard-to-read text, and that's before considering how large the average smart TV is these days. Plus, you're usually limited to HDMI, with USB-C or DisplayPort often absent.

If you're someone who's finally switching from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD, that's great news. You're making one of the best upgrades you'll ever make to your PC. However, you might be confused between SATA and NVMe SSDs on the market. While virtually any SSD will be significantly faster than your old hard drive, buying an NVMe drive will be better for your PC in multiple ways. The newer storage interface not only leverages your other hardware a lot better, but the enhanced performance can actually benefit some real-world workloads. The price isn't a differentiator between SATA and NVMe SSDs anymore, so there's no reason to pick the older format over the newer one.