Most people think of a mini PC, a recent processor, or even a dedicated graphics card when building a media server or a homelab server. I was in the same boat. I was thinking of building a mini-PC based on Intel’s Twin Lake power-efficient CPUs, upgrading from my old Synology NAS. But before pulling the trigger, I took a detour and decided to use an old laptop that was supposed to be recycled soon.

Few devices have done more to popularize self-hosting than the Raspberry Pi. Affordable, efficient, and backed by one of the largest communities around, it’s become the default recommendation for lightweight home server projects like Pi-hole and Home Assistant.

The Steam Machine finally shipped, the reviews are in, and the verdict on its silicon is blunter than Valve would like. Independent testing puts its GPU somewhere around a Radeon RX 6600, an Intel Arc B570, and an RTX 3060. These are all respectable cards if you had purchased them during their respective eras, but Valve is charging a premium for it. You receive more than just a normal PC for your money, but in terms of a pure price-to-performance ratio, you can do a lot better by just buying a cheap pre-built.

It's not too uncommon for a little-known game on Steam to be shot into popularity due to someone discovering it, but none are quite so weird as the story of Crashphalt. The game has seen a 1683% player count boost in recent months, but only because people are downloading it so they can play a totally different game online with their friends.

Portable monitors used to be one of those things that would cost an arm and a leg, but wouldn't really provide the ideal experience one was looking for. Don't get me wrong, it was great when you needed another display on the go, but there were just too many compromises for the price. It just didn't provide enough value.

X Money, a core part of Elon Musk's mission to turn X into an "everything app," is rolling out starting today, 9to5Mac reports. The payment platform offers a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments similar to Venmo, along with a metal Visa card users can emblazon with their X username. Other perks include Apple Wallet support and free money transfers on X. It also advertises "up to" a 6 percent APY, but only Premium Plus subscribers are eligible for it - standard Premium subscribers have to deposit a certain amount of money to get a "boosted" 6 percent APY. X Money was previously limited to an invite-only beta, but will now be available t …Read the full story at The Verge.

It feels redundant to say that the gaming industry has been deteriorating over the last few years.

Some of my favorite Raspberry Pi projects use the Pepper's Ghost illusion. It's a cheap and easy way to create a hologram that looks like it's materialising out of thin air. However, I think this project that makes the illusion dance to your Spotify playlist is probably my favorite implementation of the tech yet.

Windows 11 added Snap Layouts and made it easy to organize open windows to some extent. You can hover your cursor over the maximize button, click on any of the suggested layouts, and then snap all the open app windows. This approach works for basic users, but if you compare it to an i3-style tiling manager present on some Linux distributions, the difference is stark. Snap Layouts feels like an immensely toned-down version of tiling managers, and I decided to switch to a dedicated one.

The Razer Huntsman V3 Pro features doubleshot PBT keycaps. Gaming keyboards have evolved over the years to add RGB LEDs, extra knobs, and buttons with screens, but one feature has remained fairly consistent: the mechanical switch. That’s slowly changing, with brands introducing adjustable optical switches that are more customizable and have a faster response time. Razer’s Huntsman V3 Pro TKL is a compact, wired option on sale at Amazon for $124.99 (usually $159.99).Razer Huntsman V3 Pro TKLWhere to Buy: $159.99 $124.99 at AmazonOptical switches constantly read the height of each key, opening up a wealth of new features that traditional mechanical switches don’t support. For example, you can set the activation height for different keys, down to 0.1mm for the lightest touch, or up to 4mm for keys you don’t want to accidentally press at the wrong time, and they can reset without reaching the top height for faster repeated presses. Like some other keyboards with optical switches, you can use a function Razer calls “Snap Tap” to prioritize specific key inputs over each other, letting you rock back and forth between your strafing keys in a shooter, for example. The feature is turned off by default, and is banned in some games like Counter-Strike 2, but can be switched on at the keyboard level or in the Razer Synapse app.

Competition is more important than ever because if companies like Anthropic get free rein, they won’t hesitate to exploit consumers. We are already seeing that with Claude, whose subscription is almost useless if you are on the $20 plan. Claude applies both five-hour session limits and weekly caps, and longer conversations and extended thinking consume your allowance even faster. Forget using subagents regularly, because they will burn through the limit in no time.

Antigravity got most of its early attention as a coding tool. It's Google's answer to Cursor and Windsurf, built on VS Code, aimed at developers who want agents doing the heavy lifting across their editor and terminal instead of typing every line themselves. This is a pretty easy sell if you're a developer. But there's a whole other read on what this tool actually is once you strip that framing away, because file access and terminal access aren't developer-only features. They're just the mechanism, which is useful in a lot of contexts that have nothing to do with shipping code.