In August, I wrote about my love of the music history podcast No Dogs in Space, but mourned the fact that there hadn't been a new episode in over two years. Little did I know that hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks were gearing up to announce the show's return with season four, Punk 2.0. The first episode premiered this week, part one of a series on the New York Dolls, a band near and dear to my heart as a native Staten Islander, home of frontman David Johansen.For the new season, Hidalgo and Parks decided it was time to get back to basics. Part of that was that they felt punk rock was where their passion and expertise were strongest. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta's Muse AI agent has been blocked from shopping Amazon on behalf of its users, GeekWire reports. A popup message started appearing on Sunday for Muse users saying that "continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed."According to GeekWire, Meta didn't notify Amazon that Muse would access its store. Amazon also expressed privacy and security concerns over Muse failing to identify itself when it browses, and seemingly capturing customer credentials."We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nixie tubes look awesome, but for a simple home project, they can be a little pricey. Fortunately, there are ways to get a similar effect using hardware that doesn't cost a pretty penny; plus, it can do other cool stuff too. Such is the case of this Nixie-inspired ESP32 clock, and because it doesn't use real Nixie tubes, they can do more than tell the time.

My smart home already controls most of the devices I use around the house, including the downstairs lights, TV, speakers, smart plugs, thermostat, and more. Yet when I was done for the night, I still handled each part separately. I had to switch everything off, change the temperature, arm the house, and enable Sleep Focus on my phone.

Windows 11 is undoubtedly the best-looking OS release by Microsoft to date. Its design is modern and doesn't look out of place, even for an OS that's nearly five years old at this point. Windows 10's design felt quite flat when compared to something like macOS or some niche Linux distributions. So, Windows 11’s visual overhaul was much welcomed by today's standards. However, I'm not a fan of some of the visual effects, and they can feel slow after regular use.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve tried running local LLMs on several servers, ranging from full-on RTX cards, NAS units, and old gaming PCs to random laptops and Raspberry Pi boards. To no one’s surprise, I’ve had the best luck with Nvidia cards, and not just modern ones featuring Tensor cores. In fact, I currently use an old GTX 1080 to run Gemma-4-E4B for my everyday productivity Docker apps, and this behemoth of a card can even drive the likes of GPT-OSS-20B and Gemma-4-26B-A4B at respectable speeds as long as I rely on MoE offloading.

We've covered our fair share of homemade airplane trackers on XDA, and while they're all fantastic, they tend to be aimed at aviation enthusiasts. Sometimes, though, you don't need all the data; you just want to know what cool plane is flying over your head at that very moment. This ESP32 project does just that by keeping an eye on the sky and automatically informing you whenever a plane flies by.

One of the best parts of the tinkering community is that they always devise ways to repurpose your spare hardware into something cool. If you have a Raspberry Pi 3B or better, and you have a spare monitor kicking around (which is 90% of tinkerers), someone has devised a way to turn the two into a wall-mounted digital calendar.

I’ve been repurposing old systems into server workstations for a while, and managing resource consumption is by far one of the biggest hurdles when dealing with cheap dinosaur rigs. Linux distros are pretty neat for reviving Windows machines from the bygone era, but desktop environments tend to siphon a lot of CPU and memory resources that I’d otherwise like to allocate to my virtualized apps.

Oftentimes, when a new set of open weights drops for a new model, I rush to the scene to see what it's capable of. Most recently, it happened when Qwen3.8-27B arrived in August, and it will probably happen again the next time Alibaba or Google ships something that piques my interest.

Every time I'm on TikTok or Instagram, I almost always come across a video of someone recommending, promoting, or simply raving about Wispr Flow. At this point, I've probably heard some variation of "I barely type anymore" more times than I can count. Now, as a writer, those four words hurt. They really, really, really hurt.

If you come from the Adobe ecosystem, or are still in it, you know that most graphics work pipelines mean a two-app dance. Photoshop for anything raster, Illustrator for anything vector, and a folder full of exports bouncing between them every time something needs to be adjusted. Canceling Adobe doesn't really fix it either because most alternatives specialize in either one or the other - GIMP and Photopea for raster, Inkscape for vector. So it's the same story.