Transitioning from downloading STLs from Printables to making your own models in CAD software is the most liberating leap you'll make on your 3D printing journey. It transforms you from a consumer of ready made hardware to a thoroughbred creator. However, there's a cavernous difference between any random 3D model and one that's actually printable, meant to survive real-world usage, serving its intended function.

Upgrading your PC is supposed to feel rewarding, especially after spending hours poring over spec sheets and YouTube reviews to decide on a new CPU, GPU, RAM, or SSD. Every time you install a new part, you expect to feel the difference almost immediately. But if there's anything that I've learned over the past decade chasing newer hardware, it's that not every upgrade works out exactly like you expected. And that's usually when buyer's remorse kicks in.

Claude has been having a big moment lately, and it’s not just hype. It’s genuinely one of the most useful AI tools I’ve come across. It’s long stopped being just a tool I open on occasion - I now practically live in it. It’s there when I need ideas for the novel I’m chipping away at, references for design projects, random research I actually need to retain, literally everything that I’d normally spend four times as long Googling or procrastinating on. It became my default first stop for a weird spread of things.

Apple and Samsung dominate the US phone market, and they've done so for years. Together with Google, they've shaped our sense of what a smartphone is and what it can do, pushing the boundaries of mobile photography, software, and processing power. But over the last few years, they've sat back, content to iterate rather than innovate - and in the interim, China's tech giants have plowed ahead. Now a gulf is growing between the phones on sale in the US and those available in the rest of the world. US phone buyers are missing out.Some of the blame for that gap lies with Apple. Where it goes, the market follows, and in recent years it's gone s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Everything seems to be on a subscription model these days, from the tools we use to the places where we store the documents we create. Maybe that's not surprising since the U.S. market was prepared for this by decades of cable TV pricing, but the drain on the average household's finances is real.

It's never a bad idea to have an extra set of eyes to make your home feel more secure. And while there are plenty of options to go with when it comes to security devices, we think a video doorbell is a good first step. If you can grab a wireless camera, that's even better. Of course, buying a couple of items at once can a heavy investment.

Proxmox isn’t the only serious option for a home lab, and that’s exactly why I think this point matters. You can build a great setup around TrueNAS, Unraid, plain Debian, or a carefully maintained Docker host if that’s what fits the job. None of those are fake alternatives, and none of them need to be dismissed just to make Proxmox look better. But once you have to actually live with your setup day after day, Proxmox starts to stand out less for the platform itself and more for everything around it.

My workflow with AI always followed a tedious, predictable rhythm: find the document, copy the relevant text, paste it into a chat window, and take relevant action. It worked, but it always felt like I was doing the heavy lifting.

A couple of years ago, when I was working on my Raspberry Pi 5, I noticed that it was very slow. I googled possible reasons, and the main one was its lack of RAM. It has 4 gigs of RAM, but I noticed that running multiple Chromium tabs made it run at a snail's pace. So, I looked for ways to increase the RAM. Given that I was using an SD Card as a hard drive, using a swap file wasn't really an option. However, I found a program called ZRAM and promptly installed it from the Pi-Apps app store. I found it increased my performance by a sizeable amount when running many apps. ZRAM improved my performance when running multiple apps, is easy to install, and doesn't require any extra hardware, but it does come at the cost of CPU speed.

PC performance comes down to more than just a few small tweaks, but there are small setting changes that can make a big difference to your system's ability to churn out frames or blaze through productivity tasks. None of the items on this list are asking you to set aside a weekend to completely reinstall your OS, repaste your CPU and dust out your computer, but instead, they're changes that take one or two clicks that give a noticeable bump in FPS, clean up frametimes and latency, and make your system feel a bit snappier overall.

If you've been using Claude Code over the last month or so, you may have noticed that the agent's quality degraded somewhat. It's easy to chalk it up to your imagination, but this time, it's not you; it's Claude Code. Anthropic has published a blog post detailing three areas where Claude Code had degraded performance since March, and how it fixed each one.

Despite enjoying the OS for decades, there was one thing I loathed about Windows. If you wanted to restart your PC or shut it down quickly, but Windows had downloaded an update in the background, you couldn't skip the update and perform the action you wanted to do. Instead, you had to let Windows update itself before it would properly restart or shut down.