Everyone knows about Steam's huge seasonal sales, but the little sales don't quite get as much love. It's easy to see why; while the quarterly ones tend to take a giant discount hammer to the entire store, the smaller ones focus on a specific niche with some modest money off. Still, despite them not being as excited as the "big sales," they're still worth mulling over at the very least.

Most people are familiar with sharing files over a network using something like SMB or NFS. These protocols work well, but they're designed for transferring files, not for treating storage on another machine as if it were directly attached to your own. That's where protocols like iSCSI and more modern adaptations like NVMe-over-TCP come in.

Home Assistant is a powerful software suite that can automate just about everything inside your home. Since making the switch to Home Assistant (HA), I have been able to replace a few smart home devices and services. From Amazon Alexa to Spotify, here's everything I have been able to use Home Assistant for, saving money and numerous headaches. The best part about building out a smart home is being able to pick and choose which routes to take.

I have what you might call a browser commitment issue. I keep hopping from one browser to another, partly because you can’t be in this profession without trying new things. I am currently using Dia, and previously, I used Arc, having previously ditched Brave. And while all of these browsers are great, I have come to realize that ditching Brave was a huge mistake. The ad-blocking features alone make it superior to most other options, and additional features like Shield, Tor private browsing, and link cleaner make it worth sticking to.

Nvidia artificially limits the capabilities of its consumer graphics cards. Start sharpening your pitchforks, get the torches ready, and then set them aside and take a breath. Consumer graphics cards don't have all the capabilities of their datacenter counterparts, despite sporting similar, or in some cases the exact same, silicon. It's an artifical limitation that shouldn't exist, but Nvidia has a good reason for creating it.

AOL's early internet days were a real Wild West frontier of tech ideas. Just ask anyone who was around in the 90s to tell you about the AOL trial CDs, and they'll be pleased to regale you of tales about how they used them, and some will even show you their collection. Yes, back then, you got compact discs that gave you a certain number of hours of free dial-up internet access, and it was one of the very first advertising drives to get people online and using the net.

We've all played our fair share of fighting games, and while this genre could do with a bit of additional love than it gets right now, at least it isn't on the ventilator. Flashy combos and colorful battles are the lay of the land when it comes to fighting games, but there have always been exceptions that have made our palms sweat, painted the screen red, and made our friends wince while watching.

If you're a freelancer like me, you probably have to juggle multiple projects at the same time. I initially tried using tools like Google Keep or Microsoft Excel to track all my deliverables, deadlines, and completed projects. However, none of these services offered niche features that could help manage projects. So, I turned to one of the most popular project management apps — Trello. For those unaware, Trello is used by several multinational organizations to manage projects. It's essentially a Kanban-style project tracker with multiple columns denoting the status of the task. While it worked well initially, I soon began seeing the limitations of Trello. For starters, it's an online-only tool. So if I wanted to work offline, it wouldn't load. Moreover, the interface was often sluggish in my experience, which ruined the experience.

If you ever feel useless, rest assured that you're currently not as useless as the Copilot key on a Linux user's laptop. Well, I say "currently," because the Linux community are finding ways to tweak the Copilot key so it's actually useful to them, instead of just being a dead key.

From the time I picked up a 3D printer, I've tried printing several functional objects and accessories that can be used regularly. This includes everything from shelves that go around the house to upgrades for my mouse to extremely useful laptop accessories that I carry wherever I go. I've also printed a bunch of stuff for my home office — especially for better ergonomics. More recently, I even printed some cheap PC parts for better cable management and cooling. After cleaning up the cable mess inside my PC case, I figured that my desk was also quite messy and needed a desperate clean-up. Well, 3D printing to the rescue!

For the past few years, my world of AI was limited to the big names like ChatGPT and Gemini. But when my colleagues at XDA started sharing their experiences with self-hosted LLMs, my curiosity was piqued. The idea of running a powerful AI on my own machine, completely under my control, was incredibly appealing to me. So, I decided to give it a try.

By now, I've realized there's no escaping AI. The only way forward is to embrace it and begin incorporating it into your workflow. Though AI chatbots and different productivity tools have been around for quite a bit now, something we're only now seeing is AI-powered assistants being baked directly into browsers.