Modern productivity workflows often revolve around getting your work done within the conglomerate of some big-tech company's ecosystem. You'll often be forced into using it if your company does, but for personal use, you have more control over where you store your data and collect your ideas. Google is one of the most pervasive companies in this regard, housing personal email, web browsing, document editing, photo storage, and not to mention the Android ecosystem. I use Google's products in many facets of my personal life, and once I realized just how tight their grip was on such a big portion of my online activity, I wanted to make a concerted attempt to de-Google my life.

As an industry, video games are pretty young. However, within the short time that gaming has been around, it has given birth to characters that have significantly impacted entertainment. Whether it was during the heyday of arcades or the excitement of home console wars, gaming has always resonated with people through its colorful characters on full display. Some characters have grown to become iconic, turning into symbols of nostalgia or clear ideas that players connect with on a personal level. They aren't just characters within their own games, but rather mainstays of gaming culture.

The Xbox 360 was a console that marked a turning point in the home console market. It not only had a great library of games released throughout its lifetime, but it was also the console that helped usher in a new period of competition between game companies. While the PlayStation 3 had its own collection of hits, Xbox 360 owners were seeing original games that would go on to become major franchises, as well as an amazing online experience for the time. To me, the Xbox 360 is one of the great consoles of modern gaming that many Xbox fans look back fondly on as a high point for the company.

Driving a 2026 Ioniq 9 SUV around the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Georgia can feel like a victory lap for the South Korean automaker. Hyundai's electric flagship carves out room for three America-centric rows of seats, from a booming brand whose EVs and hybrids already make up one in every four US sales. Even better, the Ioniq 9 and smaller Ioniq 5 are emerging from a futuristic new factory in America, giving Hyundai a defensible bulwark against the tariffs and onshoring fervor of Donald Trump's administration. As I watch these electric SUVs roll off a surgically clean assembly line, Hyundai's opportunistic timing looms as large as the hulking robots that help build its cars.A tour of the $7.6 billion factory also underlines how many automakers are plowing ahead with long-laid EV plans, regardless of Category 5 Washington winds that threaten to blow away Joe Biden-era support for EV manufacturing, consumer tax credits, and public charging. Hyundai's opportunistic timing looms as large as the hulking robots that help build its carsSeen from the air en route to Savannah, the Metaplant resembles a printed circuit board on a green background, blown up to epic scale. Eleve …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm an avid photographer who clicks using both my smartphone and camera. Since I use different devices, I prefer shooting in RAW so that I can match the colors later on when editing the photos. I've been using Lightroom for all my color grading needs over the years, and it has fared well. However, the subscription costs started bothering me, especially since I don't click or edit photos as often anymore. So, it didn't make sense to continue paying for a service I didn't use regularly. So, I canceled my subscription and started looking for free alternatives. While several options don't need a subscription, I settled on Darktable.

WhatsApp is developing a solution for users to take a break from the messaging service without nuking their account data. A new “Logout [internal]” option spotted in the WhatsApp 2.25.17.37 beta release by Android Authority presents users with the choice to sign out on their primary WhatsApp device while either retaining or erasing their app data and preferences.For all intents and purposes, the only way that users can currently sign out of WhatsApp’s mobile app is to either wipe the app data from Android device settings or delete WhatsApp entirely on iOS. Linked devices running the web and desktop app versions of WhatsApp make it far easier by comparison, providing a clear log out button under the user profile.The new Logout button is located in WhatsApp’s user settings below the account deletion button. The “Erase all Data & preferences” option does exactly that, according to Android Authority, while the “Keep all Data & preferences” option is better for taking some temporary respite from the service, or for users without dual-SIM devices who need to switch accounts, as the account will be exactly as it was left when you sign back in.It isn’t clear when (or if) this developmental feature will be rolled out to the public, or if it will be available on both Android and iOS, given each currently has a different logout process. We have asked Meta for more information.

Musk waves goodbye to the Trump administration after four months of government meddling.Elon Musk’s official role within the United States government is coming to an end. The billionaire Tesla CEO announced his White House departure in an X post on Wednesday night, thanking President Donald Trump for the opportunity to “reduce wasteful spending” by leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).“The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government,” Musk wrote, saying that his position as a special government employee was coming “to an end.”Musk’s departure was expected. He had announced plans earlier this month to step away from government and spend “a lot less” on US political campaigns, having invested nearly $300 million into Trump’s Presidential run. He’s also pledged to spend more time on Tesla, with his controversial political stint having likely contributed to the EV maker’s spiralling sales. The role of special government employee also comes with a 130-day time limit — a deadline that was fast approaching if DOGE’s establishment on January 20th is considered Musk’s start date.A White House official told Reuters that Musk was being off-boarded on Wednesday night. The publication reports that Musk didn’t formally discuss his departure with Trump before announcing it on X, and that his exit was decided “at a senior staff level.”Musk is parting ways with the Trump administration a day after criticizing the President’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in an interview with CBS, saying the landmark tax legislation would increase the federal deficit and undermine his cost-cutting efforts at DOGE. During Trump’s campaign, Musk initially pledged that DOGE would cut at least $2 trillion in federal spending before later slashing its targets to $1 trillion and then $150 billion. The DOGE website currently claims to have saved $175 billion, but that figure should be taken with a fistful of salt given previous exaggerations.

I really like it when people take older tech and give it a modern-day remix with some new hardware. There's something about preserving the "spirit" of a piece of retro electronics while also giving it some nice quality of life features for the modern day that really pleases me. As such, when I saw that someone had constructed an HP bubble display clock and added Wi-Fi capabilities to it, I knew I had to check it out further.

Microsoft is rolling out a monthly update to Windows 11 that includes some important updates to HDR support in the operating system. The updates allow you to keep HDR disabled across the whole of Windows, but still stream HDR video in all its glory, alongside more control over Dolby Vision.The latest KB5058499 update is available to all Windows 11 users right now if you’ve enabled the “get the latest updates as soon as they’re available” option in Windows Update. Once it’s installed, you can now toggle the ability to stream HDR video option even when HDR is disabled in Windows, allowing you to view HDR content from apps like Netflix or websites like YouTube without having to enable HDR throughout Windows.Microsoft is also updating Windows 11’s HDR support to allow you to independently toggle Dolby Vision support in content or throughout Windows. Dolby Vision used to be forced on inside Windows if you enabled it on your monitor, so it’s nice to have the option to be able to toggle it on or off.These new options are great for people who simply disable HDR in Windows because of its patchy support. I personally disable HDR in Windows and use the keyboard shortcut (Windows Key + Alt + B) to enable it in games that properly support it, simply because I rely on a variety of content capture tools for screenshots and screen recording that produce a washed out image because they don’t properly support HDR or provide a way to capture individual SDR content.While HDR support in Windows has improved over the past year thanks to the latest batch of OLED monitors, I’d still like to see game developers and Microsoft take HDR more seriously. Auto HDR is great for games, but it’s still a really fiddly and manual process to get HDR to work well across a variety of apps and games in Windows.

For some people, a new PC build isn't done until all the wires and plugs are hidden away. That way, you just have the computer, the screen, and any peripherals; a very clean, sleek look. But what if you wanted to go one step further and hide the PC itself?

I have a lot of storage accumulated over the years. From old HDDs and SSDs, I've got terabytes of storage just lying around. With some of them, they're simply just older storage drives I used myself, but with others, they're drives that were given to me by friends or family, often removed from machines that were used in their respective companies. Because of this, many of them are old, and some of them still contain data that may be important to retrieve or pass back to the original owner before I can wipe them.

A reverse proxy is one of the best ways to access your self-hosted services, as tools such as Caddy and Nginx Proxy Manager will enable you to host services on various subdomains of a domain that you own, complete with their own SSL certificates. The downside of this is that, if hosted on a public IP address, your connections will be routed out of your home and then back in, or they may require you to keep a VPN like Tailscale always connected. There's a way around that, though; a Pi-hole.