Are you tired of massive, resource-hogging integrated development environments that slow down your machine? You don’t have to sacrifice power for performance. A relatively unknown IDE called Geany proves that you can have the best of both worlds.

Building out my own home automation network was an incredibly rewarding project. It provides high levels of customization and control over how I and everyone else within the home interact with all our smart home tech, be it a bulb or space heater. An issue we can quickly run into with smart home gear, however, is a reliance on proprietary hardware — namely, smart home hubs. It’s understandable why hubs exist. Companies want a way to make their hardware approachable to everyone, even people who don’t consider themselves tech-savvy.

Sometimes, a game developer becomes so adept at a specific genre that you have to take note when they make something new. For instance, I don't think I'll ever let a roguelike developed by the Hades team, Supergiant Games, fly under my radar ever again.

We know that Amazon is having a huge sale next month, but this price is just too good to pass up if you've been thinking about buying a new monitor. The Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 features a massive 57-inch screen and an $800 discount from Amazon. It's one of the lowest prices we've seen for this ultrawide monitor, making it a great time to pick one up.

The Raspberry Pi 5 represents a significant leap forward compared to previous models, featuring faster CPUs, more capable GPUs, and support for PCIe devices that unlock a new world of possibilities. While you can certainly use it for the same lightweight projects you might have run on a Pi 4, that would be underselling its potential. The Pi 5 shines brightest when you throw heavier workloads at it, the kind that would have brought older Pis to their knees. These projects show off just how much muscle the Pi 5 has and why it’s no longer just a hobbyist’s toy.

Whether you're a home labber looking to connect self-hosted services with a storage server or a casual user trying to pair your NAS with a Windows machine, you’ve definitely heard of SMB. Besides NFS, it’s one of the most popular network protocols for transferring large amounts of data on a home network. But unlike its rival, SMB is easy to set up, works well on the big three OS families, and doesn’t require a lot of mental calculus when creating permissions.

During the September 2025 Nintendo Direct presentation, Nintendo revealed they were bringing the full library of Virtual Boy games to Switch Online classics. But they weren't just putting the games onto the service for Nintendo Switch 2 owners, but also bringing a Virtual Boy accessory to stores for everyone to buy and use with the Switch 2. This was a big shock to everyone, as it was completely unexpected. To many Nintendo fans, the Virtua Boy was a console that was a failure in the company's legacy, but was ambitious enough to try something very different at the time. And while it's not the best piece of hardware that Nintendo has released, it makes many gamers feel nostalgic.

Sometimes, in a weird little twist, a Windows update will remove things as well as add new ones. We recently observed this when we reviewed the details for Windows 11's 25H2 update, which ultimately appeared to remove more features than it added.

Besides containers, virtual machines lie at the center of every home lab. But unlike their containerized counterparts, VMs offer superior isolation and virtualization provisions, making them better for demanding projects. In fact, I tend to use virtual machines for many apps that can technically be deployed on containers or bare-metal setups, including Nextcloud, Home Assistant, and Docker setups.

Updating your motherboard BIOS isn’t something most people think about–and given the risks of a failed update, it’s easy to see why many people avoid it. If it fails, the motherboard gets “bricked,” where your BIOS is corrupted and the PC won’t boot into Windows. Firstly, recovering from a failed BIOS update is relatively easy for most modern motherboards.

Do you remember the first time you used the web search feature in the Windows Start menu? I do; I entered what I wanted to search for, hit Enter, saw that it opened my query as a Bing search in Microsoft Edge, realised I couldn't change that regardless of how I set up my default browser, then promptly never used it again. Okay, that's a half-truth; I did use it, but only when I'd go to launch an app, misspell it, and end up asking Windows to open up Edge and search for it via Bing. Thanks, Windows.

If you want a monitor that delivers on price, performance, and quality — Samsung's G95C model is going to be it. Not only do you get a massive 49-inch panel that delivers an immersive experience, but you also get impressive performance as well. But for a limited time, you can grab this monitor for its best price yet, at just $680. That's a steep discount that knocks $320 off its usual retail price.