Home Assistant is a must-have software for smart home automation accessible from a browser. But it's frustrating that the Home Assistant companion app is only available for mobile and tablet devices. I sorely missed using Home Assistant to monitor and manage my PC. Through the official community, I stumbled upon HASS.Agent, a lightweight program for Windows that works as a Home Assistant companion. After installing and using it for the past few weeks, it has become a must-have program for Home Assistant users like me.

Tailscale has a ton of features that I never knew about when I started using it, and while I love them all, Tailscale Funnel is my favorite. It fixes a very real annoyance I have with my home lab, although it's definitely a 'me' issue rather than anything else. I dislike dealing with networking, as it seems that every time I get something working, it stops functioning the next time I try using it again. And that's a problem when I'm testing out new containerized services, because I have to manually enter an IP address and remember which port to use.

Have you given PowerToys a try before? If you haven't, you're really missing out on this excellent, free suite of tools. They add a whole ton of features to Windows, to the point where I'd argue that anybody who's a Windows power user should definitely give it a try, at the very least.

I'm not much of a productivity guy. I'm plenty productive, don't get me wrong, but I don't care much about the endless pile of open-source software and specialty hardware packaged and sold to productivity gurus looking to optimize every last moment spent on work. That creates more work for me. However, there's one productivity tool that I've quickly learned I can't live without — a text expander.

Last year, Justin Sun was facing a federal investigation into his crypto empire, to the point that he avoided entering the US. Now, his company is going to be publicly listed on the American stock markets – and reportedly with the assistance of Eric Trump.Tron, Sun’s digital assets platform, announced on Monday that it plans to go public in the U.S. via a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment, a Nasdaq-listed company that previously designed merchandise for theme parks before pivoting to crypto. At the same time, Trump’s sons announced the launch of Trump Mobile, an MVNO that will also sell a $499 gold Android phone. On the company’s site, SRM states that it has worked with Walt Disney World, SeaWorld, and Sesame Place. SRM says it has raised $100 million from a private investor to buy the Tron tokens (TRX), with plans to issue shares and warrants valuing the deal at up to $210 million.The deal was brokered by Dominari Securities, a New York-based boutique investment bank operating out of Trump Tower, whose board includes both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president’s sons. Shortly after Trump’s election, Sun became an advisor and investor in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, and promptly bought $75 million of their memecoin, $TRUMP, when the token launched in January. By the end of February, the SEC had officially paused its investigation into Sun’s businesses. Sun continued to invest in Trumpworld entities, both in crypto and elsewhere: in May, he won a private dinner with the president by buying $16 million worth of $TRUMP in a contest.According to an unnamed source cited by the Financial Times, Eric Trump, who oversees the Trump Organization’s private sector holdings, is expected to take a position at the company, which will be renamed Tron, Inc.

June 2023 was going to be the first time in my life when I would build my first-ever gaming PC. No, this doesn't mean I didn't have gaming PCs before. This would just be the first time that I'd pay for everything and build everything from scratch — no more borrowing parts from friends and brothers, and no more convincing my dad that an RTX 2070 Super would help me ace my final-semester exams.

As the mercury rises and the days reach the longest they'll be in all of 2025, it's time to start thinking about all the hardware you'll be bringing with you while you're out in the sun. If you're in the need for a new pair of buds or a smart watch, OnePlus has some hardware for you. The company has revealed the OnePlus Buds 4 and the OnePlus Watch 3 43mm, and you'll be able to get your hands on them pretty soon.

The Acmer P3 2-in-1 laser engraver is a desktop machine that combines a 10W blue diode laser with a 2W infrared laser, making it one of the more versatile hobbyist units available today. With this dual-laser setup, you can cleanly cut materials such as wood, acrylic, and cardboard while also engraving with fine precision on metals and other surfaces that are typically out of reach for diode-only systems. Its fully enclosed design, built-in camera, and safety features make it approachable for beginners and capable enough for serious makers.

Nvidia has released a lot of hardware over the past decade, but seldom little of it has been met with enthusiasm — at least among consumer releases. Maybe that's a consequence of being a market leader, or just the scapegoat for a GPU market that can never seem to gain a solid footing. But new Nvidia hardware launches are usually met with more criticism than excitement. The long-rumored but still unconfirmed N1X could change that.

I've known about Resizable BAR for years, but never bothered with it until now. One of the things stopping me was the fact that my main SSD was formatted in the MBR standard instead of GPT. To use ReBAR, I needed a GPT-formatted drive; otherwise, I couldn't use UEFI, and therefore, Resizable BAR. I recently updated my motherboard BIOS and finally decided to check if Resizable BAR would be worth it.

I've been big on the Home Assistant train for a while now, and I've been slowly migrating all of my cloud-based services, where I can, to self-hosted alternatives. I started with basic controls for my smart lights, advancing further and further until I had a full-fledged setup capable of replacing all that I could. I'm practically there now, and I couldn't be happier. While my Google Home Hub is still hooked up for now, I use Home Assistant's "Okay Nabu" a lot more these days than "Hey Google".

I continually seek ways to enhance the Windows experience and improve performance, which helps streamline my workflow. With a more responsive PC, I can improve my productivity. Windows can be a slog at times, and luckily, there are tweaks you can make in the Registry to improve performance. Whether I have a fresh installation of Windows 11 or I am working on someone's computer, I use the Registry tweaks to instantly make the Windows experience faster. I want to emphasize that disabling animation and visual effects alone will drastically improve the responsiveness of the OS and apps you are running.