By default, Amazon locks your device down to its curated ecosystem. This means you miss out on powerful media players, custom launchers, and niche streaming tools.

NotebookLM has long exceeded expectations in the functionality department, making it easier to use than any other publicly available LLM with user-added guardrails to perform similarly. Although this AI tool shares the Gemini LLMs with other Gemini-branded Google utilities, its standout feature remains minimal hallucinated info in results because each notebook is limited to the sources you're supplying.

Any smart home user knows the familiar irritation of asking a cloud-based smart speaker to turn off a desk lamp. You will find that the audio is recorded, shipped over the internet to a corporate data center, processed, and then sent back. When it fails, you get the spinning red or orange ring of doom and a robotic voice complaining about connection issues. If it succeeds, you will find that it took so much longer to turn off your desk lamp than if you had just gotten up and done it yourself.

If you take a look at the modern handheld landscape with devices like the ROG Ally X, the Lenovo Legion Go, and the MSI Claw, the numbers are just jaw-dropping, with 8-core CPUs, 24GB of DDR5 RAM, and massive screens. On paper, these devices absolutely annihilate the Steam Deck's aging custom APU, but in practice you plug them in, boot up a game, and watch the battery drain 1% every minute while the fans shriek like a server rack.

It's always a fun time keeping tabs on the development of a Linux kernel, distro, or desktop environment. If the next version is a long way away from releasing, you can satiate your excitement by checking out all the cool new features that are getting added on a weekly basis. As the release date nears, the developers move away from adding features and move toward bug fixes, which aren't nearly as exciting, but it does mean it will release soon.

It’s easy to get caught up in the LLM race. For a while, my monthly credit card statement read like a lineup of premium AI subscriptions: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Microsoft 365 Premium with Copilot.

While people have settled on the desktop OS they want the most, the fight for the king of the handhelds still wages on. Right now, we have two major competitors in the world of portable PC devices: SteamOS and Windows 11. Microsoft had a headstart with non-Steam Deck devices, but Valve eventually began taking the fight outside of its territory by releasing SteamOS for people to use on whatever handheld they like. Now, Valve is working on making SteamOS work better on other devices, and the new update adds control support for some well-known handhelds.

When comparing Windows, macOS, and Linux, Microsoft's offering has one gigantic advantage: 99.9% of PC apps work on it. While Linux has made a ton of headway with Wine, and macOS has its own exclusive apps, stuff just runs on Windows the vast majority of the time. If you want to run something like Claude Code, a new video game, or any powerful app, there's an extremely good chance it has a native Windows app, and a very low chance that it has any others.

I don't really need to convince you that AI tools go haywire pretty easily. You ask them a simple question, they give you an answer that answers nothing you actually asked. You ask them to tidy up your desktop, they wipe the whole thing. At a company called PocketOS, a Claude-powered coding agent casually deleted the entire production database in nine seconds when doing a routine check. When the founder asked what had happened, the agent confessed that they had guessed instead of verifying it. All that to say, an AI agent going haywire and making bad decisions is a very real concern right now.

It's always exciting to wake up one day and remember a game you used to play. You download it immediately, but the joy lasts only 10 minutes until the first Game Over screen, after which you promptly forget about it. Part of that comes down to how these old games were actually meant to look. There were a lot of rough edges in older games that motion blur, pixel art, and the softness of CRT displays helped to mask. Playing them on a razor-sharp modern monitor can sometimes make them feel... sterile.

As people are getting their hands on the Steam Controller, they're discovering that it's better at making sounds than a controller has any right being. First, people discovered that the Steam Controller played the Wilhelm scream whenever it was dropped. Now, someone has made a program that allows the Steam Controller to play entire songs through its vibration motors alone, and you can try it too if you like.

If you’ve been a part of the PC master race for as long as I have, you’ve probably upgraded your gaming machine enough times to have some spare hardware lying around. Or maybe you skipped the Ship of Theseus situation altogether by replacing your entire system with a shiny new PC. Either way, if you’re not actively using your old gaming companion, there are a bunch of ways to breathe some new life into it – like turning it into a home server.