I use a MacBook Pro for the majority of my work. I've been immersed in the Apple ecosystem for years, reserving my Windows machine solely for gaming, coding, and testing Windows-specific applications. It's a controversial opinion, but I have always believed Apple to be better for productivity and workflow, but the PowerToys utility is slowly changing my mind on that front. PowerToys Peek, in particular, has made sorting through folders and files significantly faster than it normally is. In a way, it feels similar to several of my favorite Mac tools, and has made the prospect of writing on a Windows machine much more appealing. Here's why.

If you’ve been following my articles here on XDA, you may know that I love working on the most bizarre and insane projects imaginable. From running Windows 11 as a container on my Raspberry Pi and gaming on a Proxmox virtual machine to emulating PC titles on my smartphone and conversing with Skyrim NPCs using locally-hosted AI tools, I’ve experimented with several wacky ideas.

Are you ready for Computex? As you read this right now, people have descended onto the hallowed tech halls and are currently checking out the latest that companies have to offer. Well, if you're stuck at home (like I am) don't fret, as we have the details on what companies are showing off during the event.

Don’t buy the RTX 5060 yet. Nvidia’s latest GPU, which almost seems destined to become the most popular option among its Blackwell options, launches today, a fact that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang graciously referenced during his Computex keynote. The problem is that there aren’t any RTX 5060 reviews today, or at least, there aren't very many.

Chapter 12: Sentinel Command Station in Doom: The Dark Agesgets the Slayer back to the Sentinel command station on Argent D’Nur, where he and Commander Thira prepare to meet Bishop Kreed, not knowing the Maykr’s ulterior motives. Moving through beautifully-lit corridors and fiery hallways, the brilliance of the id Tech engine 8 is on full display in this level.

After announcing the first Thunderbolt 5 external GPU earlier this year, Asus is doubling down with a Thunderbolt 5 external GPU dock. The ROG XG Station 3 is only the second Thunderbolt 5 GPU dock I've seen, and I had a chance to see it up close at Computex. It's a looker, that's for sure, but more importantly, it brings Thunderbolt 5 to whatever graphics card you can slap into the PCIe slot.

Asus has something very interesting for Computex 2025. The ROG Falcata is a new keyboard targeting competitive PC gamers, and it uses Hall Effect — or magnetic — switches. But the interesting twist Asus has is the split design of the ROG Falcata, which typically only shows up on keyboards angled toward typists with a keen eye for ergonomics. The Falcata not only provides better ergonomics when typing, it also allows you to move or disconnect half of the keyboard to give you more mouse room when you're flicking around in Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant.

OPNsense is a free, open-source software platform that can be used to manage and secure computer networks. Think of it as a powerful, customizable firewall that acts like a gatekeeper for your internet traffic -- deciding what data can enter or leave your network. It's super-useful in ensuring your network stays protected. It's the need of the hour, especially considering how data on the internet is prone to breaches. In fact, I would recommend replacing your ISP's router with an OPNsense firewall since it's much more effective. Once you do that, you can add several plugins to OPNsense that go a step further in protecting you when you're online.

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling ‘LLM Siri’ — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”

Building a functional home lab takes more than just good gear. It’s about creating a space that works for you, where every cable, tool, and accessory has its place. That’s where 3D printing has come to my rescue more times than I can count. With a spool of filament and a bit of creativity, I’ve been able to fix frustrating problems and organize my workspace in ways I never could with store-bought solutions.

Setting up Home Assistant armed my home with the smarts I always wanted. The next logical step was to create automation using the different IoT devices. Still teething around my way with automation, I found the visual editor easy to use instead of editing the YAML configuration files. Thankfully, Home Assistant provides a handful of user-friendly features to kick off the journey to build automation with the least hassle. Here are some features that help me create flawless automation in Home Assistant besides using it for cool things.

Compact keyboards are a niche within the expensive but highly customizable world of mechanical keyboards. My modest collection of sub-60% keyboards often evokes a mix of curiosity and skepticism about practicality for everyday use. After dallying with an accouterment of tiny boards for a couple of years now, I seem to finally have the answer to this general skepticism. In my experience, these small keyboards are surprisingly efficient, much more so than their larger space-hogging counterparts.