As our data collection grows, it's become even more important to find a proper way to store it all. And while some prefer to store their data in the cloud, others prefer a more hands-on approach with a local solution like NAS, DAS, or portable storage drive. Well, if you've been thinking about setting up a NAS of your own, or already have one and need to add more storage, this 24TB HDD is going to be a great way to go. The Toshiba N300 Pro is a fantastic performer and is now $150 below retail, coming in at $400 for a limited time.

Setting up virtual local area networks or VLANs in your home network or home lab makes management of your network easier. You can use one as a guest network to share your internet connection with friends, separate off noisy devices like smart TVs, and keep IoT devices on their network so they don't interfere with the devices that need low-latency connections. VLANs aren't challenging to set up or use, but I've made several missteps along the way and seen plenty more on other people's networks. The most common tend to be the easiest to fix, so let's run through what those are.

I'll never forget how it felt logging into good old Windows XP in my elementary school's computer lab. Maybe some would say XP was "ugly" by today's standards, but I'll always have nostalgia for it, with its iconic rolling fields wallpaper and vibrant blue and green UI. Modern Windows is dull by comparison.

When using Linux, you're bound to fire up a terminal session at some point. Whether it's to dabble with some commands to see how you fare, learn something new, or troubleshoot an issue that the GUI is unable to assist with. Although many would love to believe you can solely use Linux without touching the command line interface (CLI), that's simply not the case, even in 2025. Thankfully, there are some cool tools available to help you should you encounter the dreaded terminal.

It’s almost time for Geoff Keighley’s next major gaming show. The 2025 edition of Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event kicks off at 2PM ET today, and you can watch everything on the official livestream on The Game Awards’ YouTube channel. Ahead of the main event, there will also be a preshow at 1:30PM ET featuring “multiple new game announcements.”Keighley has already teased a bunch of the games that will be featured, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Resident Evil Requiem, Ghost of Yōtei, and Ninja Gaiden 4. It seems like there’s even going to be an announcement about the highly anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong, which has been in development for years and is set to launch sometime in 2025. Expect some kind of announcement about the second season of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show, which premieres in December. There will even be a live performance of the excellent music from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

While the smart home is packed with handy devices, not all are as easy to start with as the humble smart plug. These mainstays of the smart home are inexpensive, provide smarts to dumb appliances, and can be controlled from your smartphone or sometimes from a voice assistant. While many plug into your existing sockets, they sometimes come as socket replacements for a more streamlined look. The better models offer power monitoring, API access, and the ability to trigger automations. And yes, they cansave you money on your power bill, but that's a happy by-product in my eyes, because they can do so much more.

Sometimes you just want to tell Excel what it is you want your formula to do. It'd be a lot easier if you could just say "sort this data in ascending order and find its average" instead of messing around with cells. However, for the longest time, you either had to learn how to turn that sentence into code or tell someone else to do it instead.

Despite tech giants rushing to incorporate artificial intelligence into their products, AI features usually leave a lot to be desired – and it’s gotten to the point where I’d just groan every time a new app developer or hardware manufacturer touts LLM-powered facilities as the next big thing. That said, there are a couple of examples where AI tools can be surprisingly effective, with NotebookLM being a prime example of how artificial intelligence can simplify complex tasks.

After years of tinkering with computing devices, I’ve accumulated huge volumes of data – including photos from my childhood, movies I’ve bought over the last decade, and the ebook library I’ve painstakingly built. As if that’s not enough, the other denizens of my household also create GBs of data every month. Luckily, I’ve got a reliable set of self-hosted applications to help me manage all these files.

Running K3s on a Raspberry Pi has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve tried in my home lab. The lightweight nature of K3s makes it perfect for a Raspberry Pi cluster, and it allows me to run applications in a way that is both resilient and easy to manage. Over time, I’ve experimented with several different workloads, and some of them have become permanent fixtures in my setup. Here are five of the most useful applications I’ve deployed.

This is one of those drives that doesn't fail to deliver. You're getting awesome speed, mixed with great reliability from a brand that's been in the business for quite some time. The best part about all of this is that the WD BLACK SN850X 2TB SSD is now down to one of its best prices of the year, coming in with a steep $60 discount, which brings it down to just $130. This is one of the cheapest prices we've seen this year for this SSD, so grab it now while you can.

There are few experiences that can eclipse that of firing up a new GPU and getting to see your favorite titles in newfound visual fidelity, or feeling your workflow efficiency increase significantly. Before that, however, like with any new component, installing drivers is necessary. Most settings that come stock with a fresh driver install will be good for most people, and that's the goal for Nvidia, Intel and AMD: to have a set of default settings that will cause the least number of issues for users out of the box.