NotebookLM went absolutely viral earlier this year and has already become so many people's favorite learning tool. You can use it to turn your notes into a fun and entertaining video or podcast, and now everyone has seen the viral clips of AI hosts bantering, and it's fun for 10 minutes, but does it actually help you get your work done?

For years, Samsung has made products that try to camouflage what they are by displaying works of art. The Frame TV is the most famous example, but the company also released the Music Frame, a speaker disguised as a picture frame, at last year's CES. Now, instead of hiding a speaker with a piece of art, Samsung worked with designer Erwan Bouroullec to make a speaker into a piece of art.According to Samsung, the Music Studio line of speakers, debuting at CES 2026, draw inspiration from the "timeless dot concept" found throughout music and art. As a musician, the Music Studio 5 reminds me of a fermata, the symbol meant to hold a note or silen …Read the full story at The Verge.

When you treat a Raspberry Pi 5 as a serious home server, the board itself is only the starting point. The difference between a cute experiment and something you can trust with your data comes down to the supporting cast. The right storage, cooling, power, networking, and mounting can turn this little board into a box you forget about because it simply keeps working. These accessories make that kind of reliability possible.

Media-serving apps capable of streaming TV shows, videos, images, documents, and other formats straight to client devices are extremely popular in the self-hosting ecosystem – and for good reason. Besides sparing your wallet from regular subscription fees, these FOSS tools let you manage archived media without intruding on your privacy or displaying annoying ads on their UIs.

I've upgraded my home network in a fairly slapdash manner over the years, and as such, I wasn't entirely sure whether any networking hiccups while watching Netflix were the ISP's fault, the streaming service's, or something inside my walls. I hadn't been documenting my home lab shenanigans with NetBox or similar tools, and had started suspecting one or two of those VMs were causing trouble.

As someone who has lost important data to carelessness, I value backups a lot. Data loss can strike at any time, from a failing hard drive or accidental deletion to ransomware attacks, so having reliable backups is crucial for a good night’s sleep. But if you rely on manual backups, you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Oh crap, did I back that up?” The solution is to automate your backups and let the robots do the heavy lifting.

You know, it wasn't that long ago when we saw RTX 50 GPUs go for extremely high prices. However, as the hardware market shifts to purchasing RAM and SSDs, the GPU market has been allowed to cool off a little bit. We eventually saw RTX 50 devices drop to the recommended retail price, and now, we're seeing excellent deals on gaming laptops that we wouldn't dream of seeing a few months ago. So, if you want to score $700 off an RTX 5070 Ti laptop, now's your chance.

One thing I didn't realise when getting into the SBC community is how much overlap there is with the train enthusiasts. I got my first taste when I reported on when someone made an incredible 3D live map of Manhattan's subway trains using a Raspberry Pi, and since then, I've seen little train-inspired projects pop up here and there.

In this new era of console… inclusivity? driven by Sony and mostly Microsoft bringing their exclusives to other platforms, it's getting harder to highlight games that make a singular console shine. Indeed, the top-performing games year after year on both PlayStation and Xbox are multiplatform releases, and often the best games of the year, like 2025 GOTY winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, similarly launch on most everything. (Once again, like in all things, Nintendo is the exception.)But while lists like this will probably disappear as we get deeper into the era of everything being an Xbox, Sony still seems committed to high-quality exclu …Read the full story at The Verge.

There are a few different ways to get software downloaded on your Linux distro, but if you're looking for a way to grab an app without installing it on your system and without any prerequisites, Flathub is the way to go. It's especially useful if you're on an immutable distro, because you can just grab whatever apps you want without needing to layer anything.

The Star Wars franchise has been in a weird place for a number of years following the release of the sequel trilogy of films. That same awkwardness has affected video games that are based on the Star Wars galaxy, even with a few big hits standing out. For many fans, Star Wars Outlaws was one of those games that was emblematic of everything going on for the franchise at the time. And despite its ambitiousness for doing things previous Star Wars games had yet to accomplish, it stumbled hard into a negative reception from everyone.

A new graphics card used to be one of the simplest PC upgrades. It was affordable, transformative, and devoid of unsaid terms and conditions. The latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD might seem like massive upgrades to someone using an obsolete graphics card, but things get complicated when you compare them to their predecessors. Companies now reserve true generational gains for flagship SKUs, rely too much on software gimmicks, and increasingly price out the average consumer every generation. On top of that, they don't have the decency to offer enough VRAM, even on their high-end offerings. Modern GPUs might be marvels of technology, but they stopped being straightforward upgrades long ago.