If you're a big ESP32 fan, you really owe it to yourself to check out the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD). It's a small display that uses an ESP32 as its processor, and it's, well, cheap. The name does a lot of the heavy lifting, honestly.

Browse home lab forums for a few minutes, and you’re bound to come across dozens of tips to boost your Network-Attached Storage server’s capabilities. Many of these, like enabling SMB multichannel and using an SSD as the boot drive, actually make a lot of sense, and can improve your storage server’s performance. But you’re just as likely to encounter advice on enabling random services – some of which can cause more harm than good.

Android Auto apps are few and far between, but over the years, Google seems to have successfully persuaded a sizable section of developers to integrate Android Auto (AA) support. This includes major-league apps like WhatsApp and Spotify, plus all those bits from the Google suite that make driving a breeze, such as Maps, Waze, Google News, and more recently, Gemini.

If you've been on the fence about picking up an OLED monitor, maybe this is the one that'll change your mind. The Asus ROG Strix XG27AQWMG is a 27-inch, 1440p Tandem W-OLED monitor with a 280 Hz refresh rate and variable refresh rate (VRR). And it's strictly stunning.

Whenever your Jellyfin or Plex stream buffers, you blame the network. To fix that, run an Ethernet cable from your home server to the router (or a network switch, if you have one). Wiring your media server with an Ethernet cable is the right call. Most people justify it for the wrong reasons.

A lot of people treat cloud storage and local storage as interchangeable. There are two different ways to hold files, one of which comes with a monthly bill and the other requires effort to set up and maintain. That way of thinking quickly crumbles the first time you use a NAS as your primary working environment. Nobody realizes how slow cloud storage is until they have a modern NAS to compare it to. Once you experience them both side by side in your daily workflow, these two storage methods feel anything but similar.

I used Obsidian for months without running a cleanup. After a while, I ended up with folders, files, and plugins I hardly ever used. Most of what I added felt like it was only there for decoration. Eventually, looking at my setup became painful with all that mess, and that's when I snapped. I had put it off long enough and decided to save what was important and wipe whatever was left. When I was done, it looked so clean and organized, and that’s when I regretted not doing it sooner.

Stream Decks are really nice to have for your PC. They were originally designed to help streamers manage their live content, giving them a plethora of buttons they can map to specific actions on-stream. That way, they're not fumbling with hotkeys and shortcuts on the spur of the moment; they just hit the button that corresponds with the action they want to do. The buttons even have little displays in them that the streamer can customize for easy recognition on the fly.

Given how many features AI labs drop every single day, I don't blame you if they've started blurring together. I write about AI for a living, and even I struggle to keep up with everything companies announce at times.

You might've noticed a pretty huge shift in the way the average user uses AI between 2022 and now. I'm not really talking about using it for more advanced workflows and relying on it more. That was bound to happen. In late 2022, we got our first real look into what AI was when OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly, and now practically every tool is just an AI tool in disguise. That part of the story has been told over and over again. The shift I'm highlighting here, though, is this: if you use AI for anything more than the occasional search-replacement question, you're almost certainly paying for it now. In fact, you might be paying for two or three different tools, because each one has carved out a specific thing it's best at.

I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to retro gaming. Sure, emulators are more easily accessible (and I don't have to worry about hardware giving out on me), but nothing matches the experience of sliding up the power switch on a Super Nintendo and watching it bloom to life on a good CRT. Here's the thing, though: the CRT is typically the weak point of a retro setup. While those things are a dime a dozen, they are absolutely not all created equally.

In an ideal world, Linux would support every piece of tech that has ever been released for all of eternity. There's just one problem: people have to maintain that code, and there's the very real chance that nobody is actually benefiting from it. The result is a lot of manpower spent on ensuring that a piece of legacy hardware continues working with Linux, with zero guarantee that anyone actually uses it.