It’s easy to assume a home server wouldn't necessarily need a GPU. After all, most of the time it sits headless in a closet or rack. But when the day comes that you do need one, you’ll be glad you kept a cheap card plugged in. Over time, I’ve found that a cheap, even pre-owned GPU isn’t just a safety net. It can be a quiet workhorse that makes your entire setup more versatile.

When it comes to allocating a budget for your next rig, most PC builders focus on the pixel-pushing components like the processor and graphics card, with motherboards and RAM being the next priority. Speaking of mobos, the modern motherboard landscape is filled with loads of expensive features that turn out to be marketing gimmicks. But amid a sea of seemingly useless facilities, there are some less-discussed features that are worth the extra money.

Every partner, family, and friend group has that one topic where nobody can come to a consensus. With my gaming group, we can never settle on a game to play. We'll list off all the usuals—Peak, Phasmophobia, Minecraft, and so on—and then we'll all reply with "I'm fine with anything." Which is fantastic, because it means that whatever game we do settle on, nobody will have qualms with. The only problem is that no game is actually picked, leaving us in a limbo where everyone's ready to receive a suggestion but not make one.

Local LLMs aren't just for messing about and having fun with; they can genuinely be useful tools, too. While there are certainly more obvious use cases if you have a home lab, LM Studio enables you to do a lot of the same stuff without needing to know how to set up Ollama or another alternative LLM hosting solution. With its OpenAI-compatible API, many services that support OpenAI but allow you to designate a custom endpoint can be used this way, and there are many ways to make it work for you.

I love me a stupid-ass action movie. Something where the plot is thin while the muscles and accents on all the henchmen are thick as hell. Think Broken Arrow or Eraser - movies that were artistically and sometimes commercially terrible but nevertheless thrilling watches that you forgot about almost immediately after leaving the theater. Borderlands 4 is the video game equivalent of that movie. Is it artistically creative? No. Profound in its narrative? Nope. Innovative in its gameplay? Not really. Fun? Absolutely. And honestly, that's all you really need out of a Borderlands game.If you're new to the Borderlands series, it's a looter sho …Read the full story at The Verge.

Smart homes aren't just composed of hardware; they're composed of software, too. In fact, some of my most powerful automations are built using just software. If you're an Opera GX user, then you have a new option, too: it's just been updated to add a new "Smart Home" integration, allowing the browser to both listen to and publish MQTT messages.

Well, it's almost October, so you know what that means; it's time to load up on horror games! If you're anything like me, you're already getting into the Halloween spirit and giving your Steam library a once-over for any scary games to play.

The never-ending push for faster personal solid-state storage drives with larger capacities gave NAND manufacturers a complex equation to solve. The late 1990s brought widespread adoption of SSD storage based on NAND flash, and at the time, they stored a single bit per cell, so they were known as SLC SSDs. But scaling the number of bytes per millimeter quickly ran into physical limitations, as the transistors and other electronic structures on NAND can only be shrunk down so far before physics takes over, and you can't store the data bit reliably.

Design work is equal parts research and execution, especially if you’re still a beginner learning the ropes. The problem is that those two steps usually live in different worlds — you gather insights in a browser tab jungle, then try to translate them into real visuals in a design software. Since Figma is my top design app, it's usually where that scattered research takes shape.

Everyone’s favorite CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, thinks HBO Max is ripe for a price hike. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference (doesn’t that sound like a fun time?) Zaslav argued that his company’s premium output can command a premium price.“The fact that this is quality — and that’s true across our company, motion picture, TV production and and streaming quality — we all we think that gives us a chance to raise price,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “We think we’re way underpriced.”The recently re-re-branded HBO Max currently starts at $9.99 per month, including ads, peaking at $20.99 per month for its premium plan, roughly in line with its rivals. If that wasn’t good news enough, Zaslav also promised that Max is “going to begin to push” on password sharing, backing up a threat from last month’s WBD earnings call to get “more aggressive” on the practice in September.

It's easy to get carried away with laptop specifications when you're looking for something new. But if there are some rules to follow, it's to buy something that has slightly better specs than what you'll need and to find that at a price that you can afford. Luckily, we've been seeing some pretty good laptop deals lately, and this OmniBook 5 from HP hits all the right marks, and is now down to just $700 for a very limited time.

Windows 10's end-of-life date is just over a month away, and people are still holding onto the operating system. While some are taking Microsoft's offer to extend security support for another year, others will likely force Windows 11 on their system to maintain support.