If your home network feels sluggish, unreliable, and constantly bombarded by digital noise, you are not alone. After all, we spend fortunes on fast internet and mesh Wi-Fi, yet our experience is constantly affected by pop-ups, trackers, and unwanted requests.

When it comes to building a NAS, choosing the OS is almost as important as selecting the underlying hardware. Between the sheer number of file systems, network share options, backup utilities, and other server-oriented features, each operating system has its own perks and quirks that you have to consider before committing to one.

So there's a good mantra in the technology world where you always have to ensure that the backup plan designed to save your hide will actually save your hide. There are a few data-related horror stories where people reached for the backup when things went into meltdown mode on the primary drive, only to discover that the backup had also broken somewhere along the way.

The colder days are creeping in, and what better way to take advantage of the plummeting temperatures than a bit of snowboarding? Unfortunately, there isn't a single snowy mountain even remotely close to where I live, so the best I can do that doesn't cost an arm and a leg is to play a video game instead. Which isn't ideal, but saves on the aches and pains the day after.

Here are just a few of the services impacted by the outage. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has taken down online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, and more. The AWS status checker is reporting that multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region are “impacted” by operational issues, though outages also affected services in other regions globally. As of 6:35AM ET, Amazon says that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now” and that it is working towards a full resolution. The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said in an update published at 3:51AM ET.Users on Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and in my own experience, I found that routines like pre-set alarms are not functioning. The AWS issue also appeared to be impacting platforms running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonalds app. The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be full restored.“Perplexity is down right now,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”⚠️ An outage affecting several services on the internet is also impacting Fortnite log-ins. We're investigating this now, and will update you when we have more details.— Fortnite Status (@FortniteStatus) October 20, 2025In a 5:27AM ET update, Amazon says “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests.”AWS outages in the US-East-1 region have created widespread disruptions in 2023, 2021, and 2020, forcing multiple websites and platforms offline for several hours before regular service was restored.Update, October 20th: added status updates from Amazon.

Since 2020, ray-tracing has been heralded as the next big thing in gaming technology. Gone were the talks about poly-count and animations, and ray-tracing was on a pedestal as the be-all and end-all of gaming. Five years later, there are still just a handful of PCs and consoles that can truly use ray-traced lighting features in their games, without absolutely tanking their frame rates. Five years later, RT isn't dead, but it's no longer the must-have checkbox feature that it once was. In fact, some of the most technically impressive and smoother-running AAA games of the past year have one thing in common: they don't use it.

Would you feel brave enough to set up a system where people could send you random messages anonymously? What if each message were printed off on a cute little receipt printer? If that sounds like something you'd want to do, then you're braver than I. You're also, apparently, in good company, as a Raspberry Pi tinkerer called Andrew Schmelyun has done just that. And if you don't have the guts like I do, you can at least send him a nice message on his printer.

A compute stick is about as compact as a PC can get. These mini computers bearing the resemblance of a USB drive have slipped under the radar in recent years, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. Weighing just a couple of ounces and running full desktop operating systems, they still have some pleasantly surprising use cases when it comes to productivity and home entertainment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing platform, is currently down. And while the previous sentence might make it sound like it’s just Amazon services experiencing issues, the outage is taking down a huge chunk of the internet. AWS is the backbone for many apps and websites. While it doesn't control the internet, it hosts and powers countless apps people use daily. This includes Asana, Snapchat, Roblox, Perplexity, Canva, Duolingo, Coinbase, Fortnite, McDonalds, Venmo, Apple TV, and many more.

When I was in school, having the right software was a real headache. Back then, powerful writing or graphics programs were expensive and totally out of reach for most students. There just weren't many good, free options. I either had to spend a lot on pricey licenses or settle for clumsy, basic tools that waste your time.

X is testing a change to the way it handles links on iOS so that the buttons to like, reply, and repost will always be visible. Normally, when you click a link on X the page opens up and completely covers the original post. Apparently, this leads to fewer people clicking like or otherwise engaging with the content. A good chunk of people probably just don’t return to Twitter at all after following an external link. So the company is collapsing the original post to the bottom, instead of letting the web browser take over the whole screen, and pushing further towards Elon Musk’s vision of X as an “everything app” that you never have to leave.We're testing a new link experience, starting on iOS — to make it easier for your followers to engage with your post while browsing links.For creators, a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach. This is because the web browser covers the post and… pic.twitter.com/oWraLpPwji— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) October 19, 2025It’s a common complaint that posts with links on X don’t perform well. The post announcing this new feature seems to suggest that the reason is because of the way the interface leads you away from X, and thus lowers engagement. Elon also said in a post on X that there would be changes to how the recommendation system works, which could result in increased reach for posts with links. He claims that the company is four to six weeks away from “deletion of all heuristics,” meaning likes and replies will have less of an impact. Instead, he says that, “Grok will literally read every post and watch every video (100M+ per day) to match users with content they’re most likely to find interesting.” The shift to an AI-based understanding of the actual content of a post, instead of a more rules-based algorithm, has been a clear goal for X for some time. These changes could lead to increased reach even for accounts with very few followers. 

If you've spent a serious amount of time managing servers, SSH is basically an essential tool. You know the drill. SSH into your home server, Pi, or NAS, poke around the file system with essential commands, open some files via vim, or transfer files across. It's a familiar routine for anyone working with servers, but at no point is it elegant and simple. That's where Termix steps in. This self-hosted, Docker-based app turns your browser into a platform for logging into your server over SSH, and even file management. You don't just get terminal access, you get a full file manager inside your web dashboard.