Although a PoE home network can be convenient, it's not always the cheapest way to go. The good news is that since we're in the holiday shopping season, we're now seeing heavy discounts on PoE hardware, making it easier to get started. Some of the more popular options to go with relate to home security. And if you've been thinking about grabbing something to monitor your home, we think this PoE video doorbell by Reolink is going to be a fantastic option. Not only is it sleek and durable, but it's also feature-packed as well. Plus, it's on sale right now, coming in at just $77.

Monitor specs can often be very misleading, regardless of the panel type you're looking at. It's easy to assume that a monitor with impressive numbers on the box will automatically deliver a great experience, but that's not really the case most of the time. A lot of these specs only reflect ideal conditions that you rarely ever encounter once you start gaming, working, or web browsing. Manufacturers highlight the most flattering numbers possible because they know most buyers won't dig deeper to understand what those numbers truly represent.

I've spent the better part of a decade optimizing my productivity systems. I've tested Notion databases with so many different views to count and customized Obsidian for a client until it looked like a spaceship control panel. And somewhere in all that optimization, I realized I'd built myself a prison made of features. The revelation came on a Tuesday afternoon when I spent twenty minutes trying to remember which custom property in Notion I'd used to track project urgency. Was it "Priority" or "Importance"? Did I use numbers or emojis?

Early on, NAS felt like this mysterious gadget that is made for tinkerers who want to build everything themselves. I assumed it to be too complex to set up and quite expensive to maintain. It felt like a solution looking for a problem. However, after setting up my own NAS at home and living with it through all these years, that notion of mine has flipped on its head. It was a gradual conversion, but a lot of the things that I believed did actually change. And that’s where the actual learning began because almost everything I thought I knew about NAS was wrong.

The more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein emails released earlier this month by the House Oversight Committee have been enough to prompt more investigations into the convicted child sex offender and the people around him, like former Harvard president and OpenAI board member Larry Summers. Now, Luke Igel and Riley Walz have reformatted the source documents into a more familiar format for anyone looking into them by copying the Gmail inbox on a website called “Jmail.”Walz, who has previously authored stunts like a website that unearths long-forgotten iPhone clips on YouTube and a fake Manhattan steakhouse, said they used Google’s Gemini AI to do optical character recognition on the source documents, making them more readable and searchable than the originals. You can type in a word like “Trump” or “SEO” and see exactly what discussions were happening in the emails released so far, and a one-click shortcut that goes from the Jmail site to copies of the source documents on the government’s website, so you can verify the text yourself.Fun project to do with Riley the other night! https://t.co/XZ5qqytw4w— Luke Igel (@lukeigel) November 21, 2025In the weeks since these files were released, the president has signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which says the Attorney General must “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” within 30 days. That doesn’t mean all of the remaining files will be released, as CNN points out. The law’s language allows information that might “jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution” could be temporarily exempt, but whatever is released could end up sorted into this more easily-scanned version pretty quickly.

The Game Awards 2025 are right around the corner, and we all know how this goes now, don't we? Come December 11, we'll all scream about snubs, gasp at surprise winners, and argue on Reddit megathreads about who deserved what. But at the end of the day, that's not why we show up.

I’ve been using Perplexity a lot lately. For one, I’ve swapped out ChatGPT for Perplexity for studying and research, which was a smart move given how much better it is. But Perplexity is not just a search engine; it can act almost like a brain extension…if you set it up and prompt it correctly.

Google and the Justice Department had their last chance to make their case before Judge Leonie Brinkema Friday before she decides whether Google needs to be broken up to remedy its ad tech monopoly.Brinkema expects to issue her ruling next year, but understands that “time is of the essence,” as Reuters reported. While the DOJ wants the court to force Google to sell its AdX exchange, and leave open the option to force a sale of its publisher ad server, Google argued that only behavioral changes were necessary to remedy the issues the court found with its business. Brinkema previously ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in two ad tech markets and illegally tied together two of its tools. She was keenly aware that Google will likely appeal the case and noted the DOJ’s remedies “most likely would not be as easily enforceable while an appeal is pending,” Reuters reported. On the other hand, she said, behavioral changes could happen quickly, The New York Times reported.Timing was a crucial factor in another judge’s recent decision to rule against the government’s case accusing Meta of being an illegal monopolist. When the case was filed in 2020, TikTok was a far smaller rival than it was when the case went to trial earlier this year. Of course, that’s part of the reason the DOJ filed the Google ad tech case in the Eastern District of Virginia in the first place — otherwise known as the “Rocket Docket.”

Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling “smart features” like spell checking.But Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson tells The Verge that “these reports are misleading – we have not changed anyone’s settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.”You may want to double-check your settings anyway, as one Verge staffer also says they had opted out of some of the Smart Features, but had been opted back in to having them on. In January, Google updated its smart feature personalization settings so that you could turn off the features for Google Workspace and for other Google products (like Maps and Wallet) independently of each other. In addition to things like spell checking, having Gmail’s smart features turned on enables features like tracking orders or easily adding flights from Gmail to your calendar. Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training.

If I had to put a number to it, I probably test out half a dozen new apps and services on my home server every week. Some of them become a part of my workflow, most don't. But from the years of trying out new open-source apps and self-hosted services, I've had a very clear realization that usually it's the simplest tools that are the best. Most software today tries to be too much at once, and solve too many problems without being perfect at any. Whereas when I'm seeking an open-source solution, I'm trying to solve a singular problem. That's the appeal of 8mb.local. It's a self-hosted video compressor app that does one job with a singular focus and speed. The premise is extremely straightforward.

While PoE can be very convenient, it's not always the cheapest option when it comes to hardware. Luckily, with Black Friday coming up, we're starting to see some awesome sales on some of our favorite PoE tech for home and office. With that said, if you've been thinking about building your own PoE surveillance system, we've found just the right hardware from Reolink, which is now on sale, providing plenty of different options.

What's a Pi-hole setup without some kind of cool display, showing off all the essential stats in an easy-to-read way? After all, you want to see things getting blocked in real time, right? Not just to make sure everything is working correctly, but so you can sit back and smirk as you watch all the requests you've blocked go splat against your digital wall.