Home labbing sounds like a complex endeavor requiring practical knowledge and plenty of devices. You need to have an array of devices ranging from desktops, screens, single-board computers, and smart/IoT devices. I always looked at it this way, unless I dived headfirst into the scene and discovered it was quite the opposite. You don't need a high-end ring for a simple homelab setup and automation; even an old but functional smartphone can help you start out.

When you're choosing a new SSD, you probably focus on the PCIe interface, transfer speeds, and price to make your decision. However, there are other important SSD specs to consider before you drop $100–$150 on an SSD. Perhaps the most important, and often overlooked, specification of these is DRAM. Being a dedicated cache memory that speeds up your SSD, DRAM can prove highly useful in certain scenarios. You should avoid DRAM-less SSDs if you have the budget for a DRAM SSD.

Windows 11 updates causing issues aren't a rare occurrence by any means; in fact, I'd be more surprised if they didn't happen. However, only a few can claim to be as weird as a strange HDD and SSD bug, which people say is affecting their drives but is proving tricky to reproduce, if it even exists. Well, if you've experienced something funny going on with your drives, Microsoft would very much like to hear about it so it can fix it.

Wherever you are in your PC building journey, there are always better or faster upgrades on the horizon. Someone rocking an RTX 5090 might be tempted to upgrade to a high-end OLED display, while another user might dream about a new GPU to replace their 5-year-old model. Upgrading to just a single powerful component can indeed transform your gaming experience, but only if the upgrade comes at the right time. If the rest of your PC isn't prepared for it, that flashy new upgrade can end up feeling inconsequential.

My productivity workflow used to be a mess. I’d have a Google Doc open for writing, a Google Slides deck for presentations, and a dozen random browser tabs for research. Switching between them to get relevant details was inefficient and frustrating. But then I discovered the power of using NotebookLM, Google Docs, and Slides together. By unifying my research, writing, and presentation tools, I have created a seamless system that has changed how I work.

Microsoft's PowerToys suite is home to many useful tools, and my favorites are usually the ones that help me organize my apps and windows, like FancyZones and Workspaces. However, there's quite a bit more in there for all kinds of users, and one of the more interesting ones is PowerRename.

The very purpose of your NAS is to share files between people and devices. A NAS can surely work as a central storage unit, but to make it live its full purpose, you will have to give it a way to talk to devices for file sharing and syncing. There is a simple and reliable way built into the systems we use daily for exactly that, and it’s called SMB. While the name may not sound glamorous, it’s been the backbone of file sharing for decades.

The Splinter Cell: Deathwatch animated series finally has a release date and a proper trailer, but Netflix already wants you to start thinking about what else it has coming down the pipeline.During this year’s Anime NYC convention, Netflix announced that Deathwatch is slated to debut on October 14th, and the series has added The Sandman‘s Kirby Howell-Baptiste to its cast. Howell-Baptiste will voice Zinnia McKenna, an agent working alongside Sam Fisher (Liev Schrieber) as they’re hunted by squads of trained killers. Though it’s brief, Deathwatch‘s new trailer gives you a pretty solid sense of the series’ slick and brutal action. You can also see that, tonally, the series is going to be a rather serious video game adaptation. But things are going to be a bit different for the next season of Netflix’s take on Devil May Cry.Due out some time in 2026, Devil May Cry‘s second season will see Dante (Johnny Yong Bosch) and Vergil (Robbie Daymond) reuniting for a battle to the death. In a teaser for the new season, the two brothers actually seem to be having a ball shooting and slashing at each other while humans and demons get caught in the crossfire. It will be interesting to see if the new season really ups its action set pieces when it returns.That seems to be the plan for Blue Eye Samurai‘s next season. Along with a scene from Blue Eye Samurai season 2 focused on Mizu (Maya Erskine) storming a stronghold, Netflix shared a behind-the-scenes featurette where series co-creators Amber Noizumi and Michael Green, and executive producer Jane Wu, tease some of what we can expect to see. It looks like Mizu’s quest for revenge will take her all the way to London and involve at least a couple of seemingly-dead characters making unexpected returns. Season 2 is still in production and doesn’t have a firm release date just yet. But you can see from the featurette that the creative team is cooking, especially when it comes to choreographing the show’s action sequences.Netflix also shared new trailers for the second half of Sakamoto Days‘ first season, which is currently streaming, and for the third season of Record of Ragnarok, which premiers this December. The big takeaway is that Netflix isn’t easing up on its animated projects. It might be a while before we actually get to see a lot of this new stuff, but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

Ask home lab veterans about their motives for self-hosting services, and you’ll hear a bunch of different answers. Some tinkerers despise the privacy-intrusive nature of modern cloud platforms and deploy their own FOSS to prevent big corporations from collecting personal information. Others switch to the self-hosting landscape to stop their monthly subscriptions from piling up. You’ll also find folks who prefer the limitless customization options offered by locally-hosted apps. Then there are tinkerers like me, who do it for all these reasons (and also for the added flex).

We've seen some great deals on monitors before, but this new discount on Samsung's 49-inch Odyssey G9 has to be one of the best, knocking a whopping $830 off the retail price for a very limited time. It features a 49-inch QD-OLED panel, 240Hz refresh rate, and .03ms response time. It's got everything you need and more, and at a fantastic price that can't be ignored.

With the surge of players flooding the online servers for Star Wars Battlefront 2 recently, there's been a lot of chatter about where the series could go next. Many Star Wars fans love what the Battlefront games have done for the franchise and hoped that Electronic Arts would revisit the series for a brand-new entry. But while that might not happen anytime soon, it hasn't stopped fans from thinking about what could be done in a brand-new Star Wars Battlefront title made today. Looking at different parts of the Star Wars galaxy could inspire key aspects to a new game, but developers will want to look towards other popular shooters for inspiration when making the next entry in the Star Wars Battlefront series.

Ever since I started looking for alternatives to OneDrive, Nextcloud has been the most recommended option by fellow writers at XDA. It's also fair because Nextcloud is indeed one of the best self-hosted file storage and sharing solutions out there. I also checked out OpenCloud and Seafile — both of which are good alternatives with lots of features. However, Nextcloud is surely the most popular among enthusiasts. While it works well for the most part, there are a couple of issues that may deter a few potential users. For starters, it's slightly harder to deploy since there's an elaborate setup process involved. Moreover, it offers a bunch of features that everyone may not use. I usually believe that more features are always good, but not at the expense of performance.