It's the massive, Godzilla-sized elephant in the room — Unreal Engine 5. Apparently the end all be all for nearly every AAA game in the space today, Unreal Engine 5 came to us in 2020 as a savior with tons of promises. No more worries about lighting, geometry, or polygons — just create the games and let your imaginations run wild, while the Engine handles everything on the tech side of things.

We love our DIY Halloween decorations here at XDA. In fact, our resident SBC enthusiast, Jeff Butts, discussed how to make a haunted house using a Raspberry Pi. However, there is one thing that all of the projects we cover have in common: they're only spooky in the silly sense. They may be fun little ghosts or portraits that look at you, but at the end of the day, they're harmless and a ton of fun.

Self-hosting services and apps through Docker is a great way to save money, learn something new, and take full control of all your data. You can host your own media streaming service, back up and store all your mobile devices, run your own large language models (LLMs), and much more. The issue is that although these are run in an isolated fashion, there's a good chance your local area network (LAN) is one giant single layer, supporting all devices and Docker containers. This could cause problems, especially when using Wi-Fi.

After using CRT, TN, and IPS monitors for over 25 years, I upgraded to an OLED display this month. The Alienware AW3423DWF feels like a significant step up from my LG 27GL850 — 27" to 34", flat 16:9 to curved ultrawide, and IPS to OLED. Gaming has been a rewarding experience, and the extra screen real estate is useful for work as well. However, I haven't discarded my IPS monitor yet. Owing to the few downsides of OLED displays and the multiple ways I can still use my old monitor, I'm keeping it around.

Building or upgrading a PC can be one of the most rewarding projects for a tech enthusiast. Still, it comes with plenty of fiddly details that can quickly become frustrating. 3D printing offers a clever way to streamline and organize those little tasks. These small prints don’t replace the main hardware, but they solve minor problems that every builder inevitably encounters.

The ESP32 has emerged as a favorite tinkering device in the maker and hobbyist world thanks to its low cost, built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and strong community support. One particular strength it has is its expandability, including its use as a driver for simple displays. With an ESP32, you can turn any old cheap screen into a custom display for whatever data you want to show, and with open software, you can build displays suited to your needs.

If you have a Nintendo or a Microsoft controller nearby, go ahead and grab it and give it a good, solid look. Notice the face buttons, the ones with letters on them? You'll see that they're labelled A, B, X, and Y. They've been that way for decades, and it's to the point where we don't really wonder why it's like that. But...why is it like that? Wouldn't A, B, C, and D make more sense?

Though I tend to handwrite most of my notes using my Apple Pencil, iPad and Goodnotes 6, I prefer typing out notes for some courses. While I've tried a lot of note-taking apps like Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, and even relatively basic apps like Apple Notes, I've never really been able to adjust to any of them.

Before I was assigned this story, I hadn't tuned into a TV channel in over 10 years. My video consumption shifted firmly to platforms like YouTube during my college days. From study guides to silly animal clips, being able to always find content that aligns with my interests online had gradually pulled me away from the remote.

Wu-Tang’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin Disgraced pharma bro, convicted felon, and perennial challenger for America’s Most Hateable Man, Martin Shkreli will have to face a lawsuit for making copies of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. US District Judge Pamela Chen issued a decision on Thursday that dismissed some claims by the album’s current owners, PleasrDAO, but will allow the suit alleging “misappropriation of trade secrets” to continue.Trade secrets might seem like an odd way to describe the most exclusive album ever made, but Chen says in her decision that:“Trade secrets include all forms and types of business information” so long as the criteria described above pertaining to “reasonable measures” to maintain secrecy and the “independent economic value” from that secrecy are met.Continuing to say that there was, “no serious debate that the value of the Album… was largely based on its secret and exclusive nature.”In August, Shkreli was forced to hand over any copies of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, after PleasrDAO (a sort of crypto art collective) sued him for improperly retaining copies of the album and diminishing its value. The group even alleges that Shkreli planned to release his copies which PleasrDAO paid roughly $4 million for in a government auction. According to the filing by PleasrDAO Shkreli admitted in livestreams that he had made copies of the album and accused him of playing it for his followers. He even supposedly taunted a member of the DAO, replying to a photo of the album with “LOL i have the mp3s you moron.” One thing seems clear, jail time and being forced to hand over one of his most valuable possessions hasn’t made Shkreli any more reserved.View Link

If you've ever tried the Windows night light, you'll know that you can set it to a specific schedule. That way, you can have it go at full blast during the day, then slowly dim to a more comfortable shade at night. After all, our monitors can mimic the same blue light we see during the day, so having that light enter our eyes at night only disrupts our circadian cycle.

I've talked before about how I wish I could use Linux as a daily driver on my computer, but there are several blockers to me doing so that have prevented me from being able to make the switch. However, I recently built a rather overpowered Proxmox-based machine, and I've been migrating some of my older services while adding new ones to it. Among those services is a full-fledged Ubuntu Server install, with 400 GB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and about half of the Intel Core i7-14700K's cores assigned to it. With the magic of remote desktop technology, I can use it as if it were a native machine.