It's been a long time since I started using a NAS at home, and until recently, my needs were handled by a succession of Synology devices. The operating system felt like a desktop environment, so the learning curve felt lower, and once I upgraded to a better CPU, could handle self-hosted apps with ease. But then, features I relied on in DSM, Synology's OS, started to disappear, others changed names, and the company moved towards locking its hardware down further.

While building is usually the way to go if you want to really get hands on with your PC, buying something pre-built isn't such a bad idea either, especially if you're looking to get something right out of the box that just works. Plus, you get the added benefit of having all the parts and labor covered under warranty, just in case something does go wrong.

One of my laptops now serves as a dedicated Ubuntu machine, acting as a perfect test device for testing apps and self-hosted services. But there's a severe lack of disk backup and system image creation apps in the operating system. You can understand my frustration with copying each file from a directory to an external disk, which is not feasible for large copy operations. However, it's no longer a problem for me, as I use Clonezilla to create full system backups, saving me time.

Modern motherboards usually come with a mix of USB 2.0, USB 3.2, and USB4 ports, but many people don't think twice about which ones they use for their peripherals, even if they know those ports vary in bandwidth. The truth is, some ports offer better latency for input devices like your keyboard and mouse, whereas others deliver more power for external drives.

Halloween season is a great time to revisit games in the horror genre to get into the spirit of the holiday. It's the best time during autumn, when some of the darkest and creepiest beings become the focus of every form of entertainment. Whether you're a fan of survival horror games or any title with monsters and ghouls that show up to the party, there are tons of great games to play during Halloween. But it's not always a good idea to play some games with the lights off, sitting in the dark of your house with the screen on. Anyone that is easily frightened by horror-related experiences would be terrified by how some games go out of their way to scare players.

We all love a good horror game, don't we? They've always left us genuinely rattled, making us pause mid-hallway just to breathe, open the inventory just to be able to take a break from the monstrosities that keep on coming. Things have changed lately, however. I've found that even while huddled in the dark with my headphones cranked, I'm... fine. Started, sure. Impressed, often. But scared? Not quite.

Microsoft just announced the next Halo game. As rumors suggested, it's a remake of the game that started it all for the franchise. Titled Halo: Campaign Evolved, it's an Unreal Engine 5 recreation of the campaign from Halo: Combat Evolved, which was the first game in the series and a launch title for the original Xbox.

Trump is demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make way for a gilded grand ballroom. The president says taxpayers won’t be footing the $300 million bill and that private donors, himself included, will pick up the tab. Big Tech will be paying for a lot of it, if the list of donors released by the White House Thursday is anything to go by (though it does not say how much each contributed). Featured are some of the country’s biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Google-owned YouTube has already agreed to pay more than $20 million to the project as part of a controversial settlement to end a lawsuit Trump filed in 2021 and the companies are big donors to Trump’s “nonprofits.” Crypto is well represented, too, with donations from Ripple, Tether America, Coinbase, and both Winklevoss twins (Cameron and Tyler feature separately). Defense and telecom giants like Lockheed Martin, Comcast, T-Mobile, and Palantir also appear.

Want to flex your Wordle habit beyond just keeping your streak? The New York Times has added badges to recognize certain achievements in Wordle, Spelling Bee, and Connections.“Have you achieved the infamous Wordle in 1? What about the Perfect Connections Puzzle? How many Pangrams are under your Spelling Bee belt? Badges are rewards you can earn through gameplay that let you look back on the moments that made your NYT Games journey special,” according to the NYT. In the app, you can even see your badges in “your very own trophy case.”The NYT says there will also be “seasonal events and special challenges,” like badges that celebrate “special holidays or special puzzles,” and if you have an NYT Games subscription, you’ll be able to access some exclusive badges.Right now, the badges are “currently” only available for Wordle, Spelling Bee, and Connections, but you can “look forward to more Badges coming across NYT Games.”

Laptops have afforded us a level of flexibility in our work that could only be dreamed of a few decades ago. At any point, you can be working on a laptop, whether you're riding a train or sitting at a library, and just close your laptop to continue working on it later.

I've wanted to come clean for years, because I lumped productivity apps into the same category as corporate team-building exercises. They were a well-intentioned, over-engineered hassle that got in the way of actual work. Mind maps were the worst offenders, and I thought of them as glorified flowcharts consultants throw on whiteboards to justify their $500-per-hour fee. Sure, I used small flowcharts as an extension of analog note-taking in college, but it still felt like a convoluted, arts-and-crafts way to visualize a simple bulleted list.

Thanks to its incredible versatility and massive extension ecosystem, VS Code has been the undisputed champion of code editors. But lately, that convenience has felt heavy with sluggish performance and unusual resource consumption. That’s why I have decided to move on from the comfort zone and switch to a new open-source competitor that promises to redefine my coding setup: Zed.