Once summer starts to come to a close, sports fans know that the upcoming season of NFL football is right around the corner. Every year, fans of America's toughest game make their plans to follow their favorite teams as they carve out a path to a championship. But the love of football doesn't necessarily start and end with the seasons, especially when various sports games can keep fans occupied in the time between seasons. For many people, the aura of American football is always floating in the air in some way. Many different sports games focused on football offer a variety of experiences that are fun to play, and let sports fans represent their favorite teams digitally.

From the time I stopped paying for cloud storage and migrated from OneDrive to Nextcloud, I've constantly been in search of alternatives to platforms like Google Drive, iCloud, etc. Apart from the cost, a big factor that pushed me to move all my data from cloud servers is privacy. Uploading files to cloud storage means that my data is stored on third-party servers, which always poses a risk — especially when uploading sensitive documents and files. With a self-hosted solution like Nextcloud or Seafile, both of these issues are automatically eliminated. That said, even Nextcloud can get rather clunky for some users, especially since it offers a bucket load of features apart from just file sharing.

At this point, it feels like anything with a screen that can't run Doom is an oddity. We've seen so many different devices running the classic FPS, that it's hard to keep track of them all. However, to my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has gotten Doom running on a power bank. You know, because they tend to lack screens.

Most people use Google’s AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, to research faster and get a better grasp of a topic. And that makes sense, since that’s exactly what it’s designed for.

Real-time strategy games are a big part of PC gaming, especially with franchises like Star Wars being tied so closely to video games. Being able to command legions of units to destroy enemies and complete objectives is a power fantasy that most gamers often find themselves enjoying. And when paired with an iconic universe with such beloved visuals and characters, it becomes the makings of a great gaming experience. Over the years, we've seen various Star Wars RTS games released on PC, with varying degrees of success and audience support that carried them long after they were initially released. For some players who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, these releases were a big part of playing RTS games on PC back then.

The Steam Deck is one of the most popular devices in the world of PC gaming right now, and ever since its launch back in 2022. The idea that you can have a handheld device that can play most modern PC games with good enough performance seems like it wouldn't have been feasible just a few short years ago, so it really feels like a revolution.

With Windows 10's end-of-life date fast approaching, people on the older operating system have a choice to make. They can either extend their Windows 10 support, go for an alternate OS, or upgrade to Windows 11. And while Microsoft will let you do any of those, it would rather like it if you decided to chuck out your old PC and shell out for a new one. Perhaps one of those new Copilot+ devices?

While some may argue that nobody can beat Steam, there's definitely interest in alternatives to the platform. I personally love Steam for its social features and free cloud-saving, but I'm also frustrated by the era of DRM games and the need to first log in to be able to play games that are already installed on my device.

We've known for a little while now that Microsoft will allow those of us still on Windows 10 to extend our security support for another year after the end-of-life date in October. However, until now, there hasn't really been a way to enrol in it. We knew what it'd take, but we had no way of telling Microsoft what path we'd like to take.

It's been over a year now since I first tried using Windows without the Start menu by trying out Flow Launcher, and that little experience quickly converted me into a fan of the app. Later, I found out that Microsoft has been building a similar feature into PowerToys with PowerToys Run, and even more recently, the company decided to replace that tool with Command Palette, an evolved version of it with even more promised capabilities.

Whether you're running a Wi-Fi 6 router at home or jumped straight to Wi-Fi 7, you're no doubt wondering which settings are best to use. The answer might surprise you somewhat, as your home will likely be classed as a low-density environment, which means a slightly simpler set of settings than if you had to optimize for an office building.

Home Assistant is an incredibly powerful piece of software, and it can do a lot more than just link up your hardware from various vendors into one dashboard. You can link practically anything you can think of, from the software running on your PC to games like Counter-Strike. One powerful integration is the IMAP integration, which allows you to link your Home Assistant instance to your email address, with the ability to process every incoming email as you see fit. I took this functionality and turned it into a personal email triage system, all using Home Assistant and a local LLM.