I love ePaper and E-Ink in all its forms, whether I'm reading eBooks, taking notes, or browsing the Internet for sparks of inspiration. I love seeing all the projects that people have used ePaper displays on, adding dashboards of various sizes that don't drain your electricity bill. I wish more options to use it for computing use existed, but that would require larger display sizes which get spendy really quickly.

Home Assistant is a wonderful way to link up all of your services into one neat software package, enabling smart home automation while also making it possible to do more than what was intended with the original devices. You can track your email, build your own sensors, and manage your servers all from one centralized place if you want, and that's the beauty of it. However, there are some integrations (known as "legacy" integrations) that can only be set up from the configuration file, rather than from the UI. Because Home Assistant has been around for a long time, "legacy" integrations are those that were designed for significantly earlier versions of the software.

Something I've always found confusing was the overwhelmingly harsh and constant criticism of Final Fantasy X. Despite so many good things to come from it, some role-playing game purists often downplay the importance and success of the game. One would even say there's a borderline hatred for Final Fantasy X in some cases, given how vicious some of the criticism can be.The game is the tenth mainline entry in the series that brought Final Fantasy into a new era, adopting fully voiced cutscenes and a new level of beautiful visuals. But even with all of that, Final Fantasy X still manages to be the center of disdain from some fans, often in comparison to many of the more popular games of the franchise. Whether some accept it or not, Final Fantasy X is actually a great sequel, and it doesn't deserve the unjustified hate it gets so often.

As someone who grew up during the 90s, I've played a lot of video games that were similar to the classic Doom from 1993. Id Software's hellish first-person shooter was so inspirational to so many games that it spawned an entire sub-genre. These games were dubbed Doom-like shooters, since they emulated a lot of the best aspects of the original Doom on MS-DOS. Simple controls, unique weapons, and stages were ripe with secrets to discover as you explored the area and eliminated enemies. It was a formula of gameplay that just worked out great and was incredibly fun to play.

My desktop is set up with a 32-inch 1440p display, and it suffices for most tasks, including work and play. I can get a lot done with the screen real estate because even with the space equally divided between four applications using FancyZones or split view on Windows, each individual window is still large enough for text and images to remain eligible. I still struggle to work on smaller laptop screens because they feel cluttered and dense when text is scaled to a readable level.

Ever wanted to explore space, but get the willies thinking about flying in a rocket? Celestia, a free and open-source space simulator, might be just the thing you're looking for. This lightweight software works across a variety of platforms, including macOS, Windows, Linux, and even on mobile devices, doesn't require much storage space, and has loads of powerful features that make it a great tool for spending a few hours exploring your local galactic cluster.

Anyone who edits photos or videos on their computer would tell you that the Logitech MX Master is one of the best mice out there. In fact, it's also ideal for folks focused on productivity when working on their computers. The primary reason for this is the multiple buttons on the mouse that are not only placed in convenient positions, but are also customizable. You can reassign keys to cut a video clip, add an effect, copy text, move back and forward in a browser, etc. While it's an excellent mouse in most respects, the biggest issue for some consumers is that it's designed specifically for right-handed individuals. So, if you predominantly use your left hand, the mouse isn't suitable.

A few months ago, I started on my self-hosting journey thanks to a mini PC, Proxmox, and TrueNAS, which I've documented in various ways here on XDA. This is a fairly unconventional setup, as the mini PC in question only has one HDD in it, meaning there's no redundancy and I have to rely on cloud backups to keep things fully safe.

Windows may not be the most polished and well-optimized operating system for multitasking, but only a tiny fraction of PC users are willing to look beyond and consider Linux and other more purpose-built operating systems. I'm one of those lazy souls, and as much as I love Microsoft, I truly believe Windows 11 isn't really keeping up with the times. If it were, we wouldn't need add-ons like PowerToys that featured FancyZones long before they were added to the hover menu for Windows 11's Maximize button as a feature called Snap Layouts. As such, third-party add-on software has become a mainstay for enabling productivity on Windows.

As much as I like to hate Microsoft's Copilot, I do think there was some potential initially for it to be good, especially with its Windows integration. Being able to control parts of your PC using AI was kind of cool, as you no longer had to manually navigate pages and settings to get where you wanted. But of course, as with all interesting ideas, Microsoft gave up on it and turned Copilot into just another AI assistant.

Several days after temporarily shutting down the Grok AI bot that was producing antisemitic posts and praising Hitler in response to user prompts, Elon Musk’s AI company tried to explain why that happened. In a series of posts on X, it said that “…we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”On the same day, Tesla announced a new 2025.26 update rolling out “shortly” to its electric cars, which adds the Grok assistant to vehicles equipped with AMD-powered infotainment systems, which have been available since mid-2021. According to Tesla, “Grok is currently in Beta & does not issue commands to your car – existing voice commands remain unchanged.” As Electrek notes, this should mean that whenever the update does reach customer-owned Teslas, it won’t be much different than using the bot as an app on a connected phone.This isn’t the first time the Grok bot has had these kinds of problems or similarly explained them. In February, it blamed a change made by an unnamed ex-OpenAI employee for the bot disregarding sources that accused Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. Then, in May, it began inserting allegations of white genocide in South Africa into posts about almost any topic. The company again blamed an “unauthorized modification,” and said it would start publishing Grok’s system prompts publicly.xAI claims that a change on Monday, July 7th, “triggered an unintended action” that added an older series of instructions to its system prompts telling it to be “maximally based,”  and “not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.” The prompts are separate from the ones we noted were added to the bot a day earlier, and both sets are different from the ones the company says are currently in operation for the new Grok 4 assistant. These are the prompts specifically cited as connected to the problems:“You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.”* Understand the tone, context and language of the post. Reflect that in your response.”* “Reply to the post just like a human, keep it engaging, dont repeat the information which is already present in the original post.”The xAI explanation says those lines caused the Grok AI bot to break from other instructions that are supposed to prevent these types of responses, and instead produce “unethical or controversial opinions to engage the user,” as well as “reinforce any previously user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech in the same X thread,” and prioritize sticking to earlier posts from the thread.

How did the Steam Summer Sale treat you? If you're anything like me, you'll not want to purchase any more games due to the sale-sized hole it left in your wallet. Fortunately, we've been blessed with a few games that have gone under a 100% discount recently.