Mesh networking is amazing. It allows you to use multiple nodes to create a wide-reaching wireless network for all devices to get online. Compared to just one router with wireless capabilities, a mesh network can improve your Wi-Fi signal strength tenfold, depending on the location and building. I know wired networking is king in the home local area network (LAN) world, but I wasn't expecting it to be that much better than an existing mesh setup.

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes that getting kids into its ecosystem "leads to brand trust and loyalty over their lifetime," as reported earlier by NBC News. The heavily-redacted documents, which surfaced earlier this week, are linked to a massive lawsuit filed by several school districts, families, and state attorneys general, accusing Google, Meta, ByteDance, and Snap of creating "addictive and dangerous" products that have harmed young users' mental health. (Snap settled earl …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is not an Nvidia Arm laptop, but the old image seemed thematically appropriate. Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It's not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore. There are finally competent Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops running Windows, and - as soon as this spring - Nvidia will finally power Windows consumer laptops with Arm chips all by itself.They won't have an Nvidia graphics chip next to an Intel CPU, but rather an Nvidia N1 system-on-chip at the helm - and overnight, a Lenovo leak revealed that the company has built six laptops on the upcoming N1 and N1X processors, including a 15-inch gaming machine. …Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ve been experimenting with graphics tools for years, and over time, you realize you don’t actually need a massive all-in-one suite. Half of the time, I just need something quick and precise to do one simple task, such as getting the HEX values for a color palette or resizing an image. That’s why I’ve started building a “mini” toolkit of open-source graphics apps that let me take care of smaller tasks without slowing me down. They’re not just freebies; they’re very lean and reliable, and in some cases, surprisingly powerful.

Printers are already finicky enough to work with, so the last thing you want is for your software to have its own gripes, too. Unfortunately, as much as I love KDE Plasma, it does have some quirks with printing that make the process a little more annoying than it has to be.

I resisted setting up automation for my home lab for the longest time, partly because I wanted to manually do the process repeatedly, so that it would sink in to help with learning. That meant I skipped out on handy CLI tools for one-line fixes, but I was focusing on the wrong aspect of setup. If I had to go back again, I'd learn automation tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Packer from the start, because the paradigm shift of seeing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) takes longer if you're already mired in a particular way of working.

The Loch Capsule in a tiny house that lacks space for a built-in dishwasher. A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can't live without. It's one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one. And now that the kids are grown, it's the appliance I thought I'd miss most in my nomadic vanlife pursuits.Loch sent me its $459.99 / €459.99 countertop Capsule dishwasher to review in a tiny home on a remote beach and inside a van on a two-month roadtrip. It's an excellent product that washes and dries two place settings quickly at bacteria-killing temperatures up to 75 degrees Celsius (167F) in as little as 20 minutes. It'll even kill bacteria and neutralize viruses on your gadgets with a …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm old enough to remember when TVs weighed half a ton (figuratively) and weren't always in color, and while I love nerding out about OLED and the various permutations of quantum dots that seem to be the next gen of display tech, one thing has soured my TV experience. Okay, two things, because 3D TVs were terrible, but I'm specifically talking about the hostile user experience on almost every smart TV you can buy.

A year ago, it seemed like smart glasses were really poised to take over the market. However, it's now the start of 2026 and not much has really changed. People still aren't picking these things up despite them advancing in technology and offering more and more reasons to ditch a traditional monitor.

It's always an exciting time when you're looking to upgrade the hardware for your PC. And while big ticket items like graphics cards and CPUs usually come first, a new gaming monitor can be just as important.

Since the Intel NUC, I've seen an ever-increasing share of people opt for an all-in-one computer or a mini PC with an assortment of peripherals they prefer. The use cases range from office work to heavy, intensive AI model refinement, and mini PCs today seem adept at handling it all. However, if the mini ITX form factor is any yardstick, a disproportionate increase in pricing typically accompanies a reduction in the PC component size. That's mostly because these small computers and their components aren't exactly flying off the shelves, and it takes considerable engineering effort to shrink mid-tower performance down to palm-sized machines.

As PC gamers, we're almost always planning upgrades, tracking component prices, and thinking about the best time to upgrade. Some of us might not intend to upgrade for years, but others with older hardware might have made up their minds. It is then a question of finding the chosen parts at reasonable prices. Personally, I decide to upgrade my PC when my build is old enough, there's no new launch on the horizon, and prices are stable. Sadly, this trifecta actually existed around six months ago, but I was too distracted to take advantage. Since then, the prices of RAM, storage, and graphics cards have broken the stratosphere. We all missed the bus, and there's no telling how long our upgrade dreams need to wait.