Once I got comfortable with self-hosted services, I decided to set up a home lab to play around with different apps and tools related to servers, networking, virtualization, etc. While the process was slightly intimidating initially, accompanying documentation with most services made it simple to figure things out every time something went wrong. However, things started to get confusing when the volume of tools and services increased, because it only meant more documentation, notes, processes, and steps to set them up. Don't even get me started on the terminal commands and troubleshooting methods to fix issues. I wanted something to consolidate everything in one place and simplify it for me. This was around the same time I first decided to try NotebookLM to improve my productivity.

I remember crying to my parents to buy me an Xbox 360 because I couldn't wait to play Halo 3 on it, and when I was finally finished with the campaign, I realized I had nothing to do. Xbox Live cost more than a month's pocket money, and I didn't want to tell my folks that the console required more money for me to be able to play online. At the same time, my friend went with Team Blue, picking a costlier PlayStation 3, and thus becoming the de facto king in the extended friend group.

What's better than discovering a well-rated indie game you didn't know existed until today? Having that same title go on the biggest sale it has ever been on. If you, too, love the concept of excellent, cheap, and niche titles, then boy do I have the game for you. Arco on Steam has gone on sale for 50% off, and if you've never heard of it before, it has a ton of positive reviews to back it up.

Home Assistant is an incredibly powerful piece of software, and it can do a lot more than just link up your hardware from various vendors into one dashboard. You can link practically anything you can think of, from the software running on your PC to games like Counter-Strike. One powerful integration is the IMAP integration, which allows you to link your Home Assistant instance to your email address, with the ability to process every incoming email as you see fit. I took this functionality and turned it into a personal email triage system, all using Home Assistant and a local LLM.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 95, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, new gadget season is starting, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I am listening to independent radio (shoutout to Seattle's KEXP), reading about the life of children's author Richard Scarry, learning about the long development of Hollow Knight: Silksong and "silkposting," watching the trailer for the next season of The Great British Baking Show, perusing the Kottke.org Rolodex, learning about summer sunset times, and enjoying seeing Masahiro Sakurai again.I also …Read the full story at The Verge.

A protest in Netherlands. This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on deep-sea mining and critical minerals, follow Justine Calma. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedThis is not how I thought things would go down when I started covering deep-sea mining. I knew that impatience and greed could have unforeseen consequences for life that depends on healthy oceans, including humans. I just didn't foresee Donald Trump coming back to blow up international negotiations meant to make sure no single government screws up a resource so vital to …Read the full story at The Verge.

While some may argue that nobody can beat Steam, there's definitely interest in alternatives to the platform. I personally love Steam for its social features and free cloud-saving, but I'm also frustrated by the era of DRM games and the need to first log in to be able to play games that are already installed on my device.

Growing up and watching the portrayal of hackers and sysadmins in popular media, I thought everything was done in a Terminal window, and I wanted that when I got my own computers. Using Termix for remote access got me most of the way, but I got to thinking about other things that could be done in the Terminal. One thing led to another, and I found YouTube TUI, which looked perfect for my needs.

Modern AMD and Intel processors are fantastic feats of engineering, packing billions of transistors inside a tiny package. Over the decades, we've seen improvements made to the number of physical cores available for processing instructions, increased clock speeds to allow the central processing unit (CPU) to handle more instructions per cycle, and more efficient architectures to get as much performance per watt as possible. Most recent CPUs from AMD and Intel will automatically and dynamically boost depending on power and thermal constraints.

It’s small, it’s relatively quiet, it has a handy sleep mode with remote wake-up, and the front tiles are even rotatable. The Framework Desktop is a great fit for a living room. I've long dreamed of doing all my gaming on PC - a single platform that's easily upgradeable and lets me play my overstuffed Steam library wherever and however I like. The Steam Deck is a fantastic handheld, but for my living room, I want something more powerful that works as well on my TV as it does at a desk. Believe me, I've tried. Gaming laptops are noisy and awkward, desktops are too chunky, and Windows is annoying to navigate without a keyboard and mouse. I had hoped that Valve's Steam Machine experiment was my ticket, but it crashed and burned long ago. Nothing's ever been as easy as a PlayStation 5.But I'm newly optimistic. I've sp …Read the full story at The Verge.

From the time I stopped paying for cloud storage and migrated from OneDrive to Nextcloud, I've constantly been in search of alternatives to platforms like Google Drive, iCloud, etc. Apart from the cost, a big factor that pushed me to move all my data from cloud servers is privacy. Uploading files to cloud storage means that my data is stored on third-party servers, which always poses a risk — especially when uploading sensitive documents and files. With a self-hosted solution like Nextcloud or Seafile, both of these issues are automatically eliminated. That said, even Nextcloud can get rather clunky for some users, especially since it offers a bucket load of features apart from just file sharing.

Gaming on any of the three main home console platforms these days has become a lot more complicated. Each of the three console platform makers, which include Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox, has their own subscription services to go with their platform to play online with. But alongside that, each one also has its own mobile app that can be tied to an account for the platform you play games on. If you have an Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus account, you can access the Xbox and PlayStation apps to engage with different parts of the services. The same goes for Nintendo, which can be connected to a Nintendo account that you access through your Nintendo Switch 2 and the Nintendo eShop. All three of them have various things that get players to continuously interact with their platform in different ways.