I keep saying this, but VS Code is barely an IDE now. It feels more like an open-source platform, almost like an operating system. You can do far more with Visual Studio Code than just write code. You can turn it into a single workspace for notes, tasks, and code without forcing it into something it is not.

Do you know about the Wipeout games? If not, they're a futuristic racing game, not too unlike F-Zero, that was first released on the PS1. I still remember having a blast with the demo on my console all those years ago. Good times.

HDMI first launched in 2002 with one goal in mind: to eliminate the need to rely on multiple separate cables for video and audio.

By now, pretty much every major operating system under the sun has some variation of the night light feature. If you've never used it before (and somehow still have eyeballs with which to read this), Night Light adds an amber hue to your displays once the sun goes down. The idea is that the color change reduces the amount of blue light reaching your retinas, which is responsible for keeping people up at night, as it tricks the brain into thinking it's still daytime.

GNOME is a minimalist, albeit too simple, desktop environment. It's a part of so many Linux distros, and is the baseline of what you can expect as a desktop experience. GNOME is not new to me, as I've seen it evolve from 2016 to what it's become now, and it certainly is an improvement. But the pain of adopting such an approach is that it doesn't ship many features that you expect from a DE by default. The difference is more visible when you switch from other OS like Windows or macOS, because certain features like simple app categories and advanced tiling support aren't there.

At this point, there's little that hasn't been said about the significant drawbacks of GPUs with 8GB of VRAM. These bottom-of-the-barrel cards are disguised as affordable performers, but they are easily beaten by AAA titles even at 1080p. Sure, countless gamers don't daily AAA titles, but the era of 8GB VRAM should have ended long ago. When smaller competitors like Intel can offer 12GB of VRAM on budget models, what's stopping Nvidia and AMD from doing at least that? However, GPU manufacturers will always do what's best for business, and skimping on VRAM seems to be working well for them. With old and new VRAM-saving tricks constantly improving, and a terrible market forcing people to buy subpar products, 8GB VRAM GPUs will not become obsolete anytime soon.

Every week, we get a sneak peek into what people are working on in KDE Plasma. Well, okay, it's not really a 'sneak peek,' given how KDE Plasma is open source, and you can just pop over to GitHub and check out what everyone is working on. However, it definitely feels like we're getting a curated look behind the curtain to see what to expect from future releases, so it's close enough.

The developer toolkit has reached a tipping point where even the most basic utilities now demand a login and a subscription. For those of us maintaining high-performance home labs or managing complex workflows across different devices, paid, resource-hungry tools feel like a liability.

In recent months, Valve has been working away on three hardware releases - the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and the Steam Controller - but things haven't been going great for their release. We know they exist, and Valve itself has confirmed they exist, but due to the rising RAM and storage prices, the company has been forced to delay the release date, as it seemingly wants to release all three at the same time.

I used Raspberry Pi 4 as my Home Assistant hub and for IoT projects, since it had GPIO pins. But over time, the performance issues persisted, and I migrated Home Assistant's duties to my mini PC. As I got familiar with the ESP32 microcontrollers, building devices became fun. Yet I wondered if Pi was still needed in the smart home loop.

For the longest time, I chased higher FPS like it was the only metric that mattered. If the number in the corner kept climbing, I assumed everything was working as intended. The more I played modern games, however — big, sprawling, shader-heavy worlds — the more I realized that something felt off. I've seen games deliver upwards of 100 FPS on the frame counter, while at the same time feeling jittery and strangely inconsistent in motion.

Some smart home products definitely feel like a bit more of a party trick. You show your guest your automated curtains or your voice-controlled movie mode, and it's cool for five seconds, but then the novelty dies.