As someone deeply invested in the self-hosting hobby and space, Docker has become my go-to tool to keep up with interesting apps and services. The reasons are obvious. It makes it incredibly easy to get started with new services using stacks. Moreover, it makes it easy to remove old ones and rebuild your environment as your needs evolve. But while the rest of my Docker environment might keep evolving, there's one Docker container that stays a constant for me. That's Portainer. I run it on my Synology NAS, and it has become the anchor point to keep my self-hosted workflow organized. Portainer makes Docker simpler, safer and, honestly, predictable. All of that becomes surprisingly important when your NAS is running apps for work, backups and automation. Moreover, as someone who is generally short on time, the predictability of Portainer goes towards making sure that it is the one container that keeps running at all times on my home server.

Arizona's economy was once dominated by the "five C's": cotton, cattle, citrus, copper, and climate. But a new C has emerged that could grow to overshadow the rest: chips. New semiconductor manufacturing facilities are springing up across the greater Phoenix area, stretching across blocks of new roads with names like "Processor Parkway" and "Transistor Terrace." Just outside the facilities, developers anticipating an influx of workers are planning mixed-use residential and industrial zones like mini modern-day company towns. "It should be the sixth C," says Thomas Maynard, senior vice president of business development at the Greater Phoen …Read the full story at The Verge.

Once you dive into the world of PoE networks and devices, you're never going to look back. And it would be an understatement to say that we're fans of the tech at XDA. While there are many different benefits to having a PoE network, one of the reasons that always comes up is being able to eliminate cable clutter.

Making the jump from Windows to Linux is a pretty daunting task. There are some things you have to learn, and others to unlearn, and ideally, you should start off with a distro that's as close to the Windows experience as possible. That way, you can spend some time testing out the waters and checking out the nuances without having to fight the UI.

The late 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro was one of the last Intel-powered flagship Macs Apple released before everything shifted to Apple Silicon. Mine had drifted into semi-retirement because it felt bulky for daily writing, and it ran hotter and louder than newer machines. It still worked perfectly well, yet it no longer had a meaningful place in my workflow or a reason to stay powered on. That changed once I realized it could serve as a portable virtualization lab.

Most AI tools let you customize your user experience to an extent, and NotebookLM is no different. You can guide the way it speaks to you through prompts, but there’s a better way to do it. Earlier this year, NotebookLM got a Learning Guide feature which makes studying more interactive and forces you to think more about what you know. And along with this feature came the Custom mode - this is what enabled this entire experiment.

Although we talk a lot about homelab and network setups here at XDA, we know that it can be intimidating if it's your first time diving in. While building your own is going to be the best option, prebuilt models are going to provide a turnkey solution that's going to be less frustrating out of the gate.

Microsoft's handheld offerings are in a really embarrassing position right now. For third-party handhelds+, people are scrapping Windows 11 in favor of other operating systems, such as Steam and Bazzite, citing a better experience and in-game performance. For official Microsoft-branded handhelds...people still find that Linux does it better. Yes, Microsoft can't seem to catch a break, even on its home turf.

The Gemini app produced this image of a second shooter hidden in the bushes with the Book Depository in the background. | AI Image: The Verge via Google Gemini It was really easy getting Google's Gemini app to make an image of a second shooter at Dealey Plaza, the White House ablaze, and Mickey Mouse flying a plane into the Twin Towers. We asked and it complied. There were few filters or guardrails, another sign that the battle over generative AI content moderation and copyright enforcement is not even close to being over.Gemini, which powers the newly enhanced Nano Banana Pro image generator and editor, is ordinarily heavily filtered to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. While there's no official list of banned content, requests for sexually explicit or violent material, as well …Read the full story at The Verge.

Well, it turns out that Microsoft doesn't know why people dislike Windows' new direction. If you're just tuning in, the company announced that it's moving to make Windows an agentic operating system, which is when AI does most of the decision-making and heavy lifting. The company thought that people would love Copilot handling their PC for them, but the reality was a little jarring.

Arc Raiders is absolutely ruling the Steam charts right now, and its 700K+ concurrent PC players certainly don't seem like they have any plans of stopping. Now, the game has brilliantly emergent gameplay, accessible extraction-shooter mechanics, and a solid roadmap, but there's something else that it's becoming rapidly popular for — the wholesome player base.

While many of the headlines throughout the 2020s have been dominated by GPUs and their ongoing tribulations with stock, a new pricing catastrophe is currently hitting the PC hardware space, and it's the pricing of DRAM. DRAM is the ultra-fast dynamic memory that you find on things like system memory and VRAM in consumer PCs, but it's also used in higher-bandwidth configurations for data center applications. With the memory demands of AI ever-increasing, and the yield of high-speed DRAM being questionable, consumers like me are left questioning the upgrades and standalone builds we had planned for the future.