I installed Home Assistant as a convenient hub. I use it for morning and night routines, manage smart lights and smart TVs, and automate small parts of my home. Since I like tinkering, I didn’t mind spending hours setting up and tweaking Home Assistant to suit my needs. Though it felt like a time-intensive hobby that only made sense to me, I’m glad I got into it. The Home Assistant managed to interest my family in everyday usage. It also taught me that I can build a smart home on a budget.

There have been some great discounts on Samsung monitors lately. And while this might not be an Odyssey G9 OLED, it's still a fantastic monitor for someone looking for an ultrawide with a lot of performance that also doesn't cost a lot.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the country will take action against X following reports that the platform's Grok AI chatbot is generating sexualized deepfakes of adults and minors, as reported earlier by The Telegraph and Sky News."It's disgusting," Starmer says during an interview with Greatest Hits Radio. "X need[s] to get their act together and get this material down. And we will take action on this because it's simply not tolerable." @ghrnews EXCLUSIVE: Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer tells us he "will take action" on "disgraceful and disgusting" reports around child abuse imagery on Elon Musk's Grok AI. It's as the Internet W …Read the full story at The Verge.

So, you were excited to buy one of the best CPUs in the world. It came with a huge price tag, but you convinced yourself that you'd actually utilize all that extra performance. Maybe you bought it as a "just in case" investment, hoping to use all those cores someday. Maybe you expected more cores to net you more FPS in your favorite games. You might even have bought a Ryzen X3D CPU hoping to outshine every other chip on the market. However, the best laid plans often go awry, especially when you overspend on something that you never end up using. Here are three telltale signs that you wasted money on that expensive CPU.

Synology was once the top recommendation when it came to Network-Attached Storage systems. However, that all started to change once the company started making small changes here and there, with some even being labeled as "anti-consumer".

When you set up a NAS, you naturally expect to grow it in size over the coming years by adding more drives, attaching an expansion unit, or upgrading to a bigger NAS. However, downsizing the NAS after using it for a few years isn’t that common — although I did manage to do it. I didn’t decide to downsize my NAS because I ran out of space or wanted to save money. The real reason for this downsizing operation was to make the NAS much more efficient than it already was. It was doing too much, and I wanted it to do only the things it was actually meant for and good at.

At CES 2026, Intel revealed its Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chip series, touting the line's efficiency and revamped, more powerful GPU architecture.

With Ubuntu, Debian, and other popular distributions shipping with stable desktop environments, the Linux ecosystem is more approachable than ever. But as much as I love the GUI enhancements to my favorite distros, I rely on the all-powerful Linux terminal a lot during my coding tasks and virtualization experiments. As such, I also keep my Linux virtual machines and bare-metal setups equipped with a couple of CLI tools, even when the system in question has a proper graphical interface.

The Pioneer Sphera can be installed into a single-DIN space in your dash. I fully believe that once someone hears Dolby Atmos music in their car, they won't want anything else. The sonic envelopment turns your car cabin into an immersive, engaging experience. Every time I hear a demo - be it in a Rivian, Cadillac, or Mercedes - it leaves me energized and excited. But up to this point, Dolby Atmos has only been available in luxury vehicles that have a whole array of speakers. Pioneer is changing that with the Sphera, an aftermarket in-dash receiver with a 10.1-inch capacitive screen that enables Dolby Atmos playback in Apple CarPlay. And it works with as few as four speakers installed in your car, creating the At …Read the full story at The Verge.

USB-C is becoming a universal standard, and it's great that we won the war for a universal connector. But in turn, we've lost the battle for universal compatibility. Right now, you probably have five identical-looking cables on your desk; one charges your laptop at 240W but transfers data at USB 2.0 speeds, another handles 80 Gb/s data transfer but can't power a monitor and, lastly, you have the mystery cable that came with your electric toothbrush.

Raspberry Pi Connect is the shiny new way to access your Pi from outside your home network, but it is not the only option and not always the best fit. Maybe you want something that never depends on someone else’s cloud, or you just need a simple way to share your desktop on the local network.

Internet debates can get intense no matter the topic, and talking about operating systems is no different. There will always be people defending either Windows 11 or Linux (maybe even macOS), and sometimes it may sound like people hate one or the other.