Buying second-hand hardware is smart if you want to keep the costs down, but it turns out that anti-cheat mechanisms in video games are getting so advanced that they can blacklist specific components from confirmed cheaters. Someone discovered this the hard way when they purchased a second-hand CPU, put it into their PC, and then got immediately banned from Valorant when they booted it up.

I was tired of my titles in my Plex library showing up at random. Even with the best companion apps, I end up flipping endlessly through movies and poster art icons, trying to find something to watch. I wanted a new experience more like linear TV, so I could turn my self-hosted library into a TV station.

Apple will add new limits for "full disk access" on Mac in response to risks posed by AI agents, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In an update on Friday, Apple says it's rolling out new controls to "ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action."The change comes just weeks after Inc's Jason Aten found that Meta's Muse AI somehow knew the contents of his messages, despite not giving the chatbot explicit permission to access them on his iPhone or Mac. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone pushed back on this report, saying access to Messages is "entirely opt-in. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta now lets you make your own Muse gadgets that feature the company's new AI agent with code that the company open sourced. The company suggests projects like loading Muse on a color E Ink display to show reminders, adding it to an HDMI stick so you can display Muse on a big screen, or putting Muse on a small touchscreen device to make what looks kind of like a DIY Muse Charm."Muse gadgets are open source devices you build yourself," Meta says. "Program an off-the-shelf ESP32 board or set up a Raspberry Pi with our SDKs, then connect Muse to your displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else you've got lying on your workbench. …Read the full story at The Verge.

I started self-hosting to take control of the services I use every day. Over time, though, I noticed that some of my setup worked better on a desktop than anywhere else. That became annoying whenever I was away from my computer and needed quick access to something running on my server. Instead of treating mobile access as an afterthought, I started looking at it when choosing services for my stack. That changed how I built my setup. I began favoring tools that offered a proper mobile experience alongside their self-hosted versions, without sacrificing the flexibility I wanted.

Playing chess digitally, either versus a bot or a player, is always a great way to get some practice in and learn some strategies. But there's something about a physical chessboard that just feels right, you know? It's like owning a physical version of a book, a CD for your album, or the game box for your fave title.

Intel pulled the plug on Optane in July 2022, wrote off more than half a billion dollars in inventory, and walked away from one of the more interesting storage technologies of the past decade. More than four years later, the P1600X, a 118GB M.2 drive Intel built to boot data center servers, keeps turning up in home lab communities and build threads. On paper, it doesn't make any sense: the drive is PCIe 3.0, smaller than most modern SSDs, and any current NVMe will beat it in sequential transfers. The reason why home labbers want it has nothing to do with normal SSD performance, though. It's a specialist, and whether it belongs in your home lab really depends on what you're running.

Even if you have a fiber internet plan, you might notice that sometimes your smart home devices lag, your video calls stutter, and ping times spike unpredictably while sitting just two rooms away from your router. This is because we blindly trust modern consumer routers running on default auto settings to intelligently manage the invisible radio waves filling our homes. But if you pull out a free Wi-Fi analyzer app, scan the local airspace, and discover a shocking reality: your home network isn't operating in a private vacuum. It's crammed onto a single 2.4GHz or 5GHz channel alongside a dozen neighboring routers stepping on each other's packets.

The N100 mini PC has been an automatic recommendation for home lab use since it was introduced, and it earned that spot legitimately. It's low power with cores powerful enough to run a decent collection of services on, and it doesn't cost a fortune to leave running 24/7. It's still a good mini PC, but if you're entering into the market today and looking for something brand-new, the N150 costs about the same. Just don't overpay for it, because the N100 is still a worthy node in many respects.

Many of Netflix's biggest critically acclaimed hits have been the products of its multiyear production deals with noted directors like David Fincher and Shawn Levy. In the past few weeks, though, the streamer has brought some of those partnerships to an end in a way that feels indicative of a larger strategic shift. With rival studios Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on the verge of a megamerger that will reshape the entertainment landscape, Netflix is clearly thinking about how it can continue to hold its own in the ongoing streaming wars. But as the company charts its path forward, its plan to court subscribers might not put so much em …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whether or not 2026 will become the 'year of Linux' is highly debatable, but one thing that's objectively true is that it's the year when lines were drawn in the sand over AI use in Linux projects. Now, COSMIC is the latest development team to make its stance known, as it declares a hard pass on all LLM-created content, including comments and descriptions.

I never set out to fill my Windows PC with open-source software. It happened gradually as I found tools that fit the way I work better than some of the alternatives I had tried. The surprising part came later when I realized how many of these tools were connected to Microsoft. Some are fully open source, while others have an open-source foundation with Microsoft's own additions. I had been using them for years without really thinking about where they came from. Here are a few that have become regular parts of my Windows setup, and the Microsoft connection surprised me.