It's safe to say that I didn't know better when I bought my first NAS. While it was a few years ago, like most people, I ended up buying dedicated NAS drives because it felt like the obvious thing to do. I mean, it does say NAS on the hard drive, so I suppose they were better for the task at hand. These drives are designed for always-on operation, multi-drive setups, and are supposed to offer long-term reliability. And all of that seems like the safest route when you're trusting a box full of drives with all your photos, media library backups, and more.

It's a conflicting time to be a tech enthusiast, or even just to need a new laptop for work. Stratospheric pricing has made it tricky to recommend anything with onboard memory or SSD storage, and terms like "budget" and "good value" all carry caveats about how they relate to the overall market. Until today. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x Gen 11 is a fantastic value, with a snappy processor, good screen options and a premium feel.

One of the coolest ways people use SBCs and microcontrollers is to breathe new life into old technology. We've seen plenty of cases where someone took something outdated (or even broken) and gave it a second life using a modern-day chip. But not all of them are as cool as using a Game Boy Advance as a controller for the Nintendo Switch using the original Link Cable as the cord, which is exactly what one ingenious tinkerer achieved with their own hardware.

When you’re building a reliable Network-Attached Storage server, you’ll typically use the SATA slots, drive bays, and M.2 ports to pair it with hard drives and SSDs. However, modern NAS units tend to pack a bunch of USB ports alongside the display and Ethernet interfaces – and I’m not talking about simple USB 2.0 connections designed to hook keyboards and mice for troubleshooting weird errors, either. I’ve got nearly a dozen NAS units in my arsenal, and each of them possesses a handful of USB 3.0 connections, with some including USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 sockets alongside USB Type-C 40Gbps.

If you're on the fence about using an open-source operating system, you can do a lot worse than try out Linux Mint. It's easy to set up, its UI is very familiar to people who are used to Windows, and it runs just fine on older, weaker hardware. And while some people (such as myself) move on to other Linux distros, others find a lifelong home with Mint.

Windows OS cleaners earned a bad name for themselves when they tried acting like a one-stop shop. The tools tried to remove unused registry entries directly, included deceptive marketing tactics that forced you to install other software for monetary gains, and wandered far away from their core task. CCleaner is a fantastic example of a tool that was very popular but slowly adopted all the above wrong traits, combined with security mishaps, that make it an untrustworthy app today.

Plex quickly became a powerhouse with the rise of the network-attached storage (NAS) and self-hosting communities. As more looked to cancel streaming service subscriptions and host their own purchased media, Plex was positioned to take the market by storm, providing a reliable and intuitive way to catalog, store, and stream all content, be it TV shows, movies, or music.

Waymo is the undisputed leader in the robotaxi space, operating a fleet of over 3,000 driverless cars in at least 10 cities across the US. A number of companies, including Tesla, Zoox, Avride, and Motional, are racing to catch up with the Alphabet-owned firm. But what if being No. 2 was actually better?Nuro, the delivery robot company created by veterans of Google's self-driving car project, thinks it has a decent shot at occupying the slot. After pivoting from delivery to robotaxis in 2024, Nuro struck a deal with Uber and Lucid to deploy tens of thousands of robotaxis all across the US - netting itself hundreds of millions of dollars in …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI mischief, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedHacking the first generation of AI chatbots was a laughably simple affair. You didn't need any technical know-how, backdoor access, or even a basic understanding of what a large language model was. You didn't need to code. To get an AI system that had cost billions to build to abandon its safety instructions, sometimes all you had to do was ask.These attacks, known as jailbreaks, had the quality …Read the full story at The Verge.

I absolutely love working from the Terminal, whether that's for local tasks or for remote work via SSH. I prefer it even when there's a web UI to use, whether it's a remote server, NAS, or an SSH-reachable application; it just feels cleaner to me, and I don't have to interrupt my flow by tabbing to a browser window. Using an SSH key pair makes the remote access part easier, but there is one problem that's always annoyed me.

When I first got my RTX 4090 in 2022, I assumed that my 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X would still be more than enough for gaming. After all, this CPU wasn't even two years old when the 4090 launched. So I saw no reason to rush and get an 8-core CPU like the 5800X3D just because it's faster. And for the first year or so, the assumption felt correct. I was primarily gaming on my 4K/160Hz monitor, while occasionally switching to my 1440p ultrawide OLED to enjoy open-world AAA titles.

The Lenovo Slim 7x Gen 11 hasn't changed too much since the first one was introduced in 2024 (yes, it's the second Slim 7x but it's called Gen 11 to align with the rest of the Yoga 7 series), but it's a little lighter and a lot better. Critically, it has Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite processor under the hood, a massive improvement for the laptop that was among the first devices to launch in May 2024.