Obsidian is a productivity tool, yes, but it's also built for tinkerers. There's no denying that tooling around with plugins, themes, and building your own homepage is part of the fun of a vault, and it's something I've admittedly sunk quite a bit of time into. Some of the solutions I've tried were pure jank, utilizing a dozen plugins and CSS formatting that could most kindly be described as haphazard.

If there's one thing I've learned as a newcomer to Linux, it's that people will argue that their distro is the best. Recent debates have focused on X11 versus Wayland, which distro supports which, which display technology is the best one to stick with, and so on. But now a new debate is emerging: does AI have a place in a Linux distro?

Before this industry, I spent three years in financial crime compliance at a major high street bank, which means I've seen more instances of fraud and scams than most people ever will. That makes me instinctively wary of anything claiming to imitate a human voice convincingly, and so, when Kyutai released Pocket TTS, a voice cloning model that's small enough to run on a CPU, I had to try it myself than take the videos at face value.

Grand Theft Auto VI release won’t offer a disc. | Image: Rockstar Games This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedAs a kid, I relished trips to Best Buy, GameStop, and the nearby mall so that I could browse video games. I loved sifting through games and chatting with my friends at the store about upcoming releases. On the lucky days I actually got a new game from the store, I treasured reading through every page of the manual on the drive home. Over the years, I built up a collecti …Read the full story at The Verge.

The 2018 Solar Car Challenge was the last time participants took their designs out on the open road. | Image: Lehman Marks / Solar Car Challenge On July 19th, dozens of teams of high school students will begin a five-day, 630-mile road race from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton in Texas. But this is not your typical contest. The students design and build the cars themselves, using off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed materials. The winner is the team that accumulates the most driven miles. And the only fuel they can use to power their Frankenstein-looking vehicles comes from that mass of incandescent gas that hangs in our sky: the Sun.This year is the 30th anniversary of the annual Solar Car Challenge, a contest that brings together high school students from around the country with the on …Read the full story at The Verge.

I remember reading about incidents where agents like Antigravity ended up deleting users’ entire hard drives while executing certain tasks. These incidents are few and far between, but they do happen, and people who lose their data will not get it back. I think this is one of the risks we all take when using autonomous systems.

If you ask anyone how to safely test a sketchy executable or PowerShell script, the answer will usually involve downloading VirtualBox, VMware, or another similar virtualization suite, followed by finding a Windows ISO, and then spending an evening installing a whole OS within their OS. It's the standard advice, and for a lot of people, that's more friction than they'll ever bother with. Suffice it to say, the executable or the script will likely go straight to the Recycle Bin.

With Microsoft Office being one of the biggest productivity suites in the world, it's easy to assume that the file formats it uses are the only ones anyone really uses. However, The Document Foundation argues that it only happened because we don't use anything else. A new blog post on the LibreOffice website breaks down why using proprietary document formats is harmful and what people can do instead.

If you've got an ESP32 microcontroller sitting around and doing nothing, why not make a cool set piece with it? People have created some cool little simulators you can leave running, such as the ASCII Aquarium. However, this full ecosystem that runs at a smooth 60FPS is definitely one of the best out there.

I'm loyal to my Kindle but suffice it to say that the software has been languishing. Amazon has spent years talking about AI features that would potentially make the reading experience more interactive, but at the end of the day, you're still living in Amazon's world. However, my ebook library isn't. Over the years, I've spent a lot of time moving to a DRM-free ebook collection — all powered by Calibre. That makes Calibre's recent AI-packed update way more exciting and useful than Amazon could do.

Instead of depending entirely on cloud services, I've gradually started running more of my own tools. It gives me greater flexibility over how they work and how they fit into my workflow. As my self-hosted setup grew, I naturally relied less on several paid services that I had been renewing for years. I didn't set out to reduce my subscription list, but that's exactly what happened. It made me realize that many recurring expenses existed simply because I had never explored another way of doing the same job. Self-hosting completely changed that perspective.

Whenever someone gets a game running within a game, people are quick to ask "Why?", and the reply they usually get is "Why not?" Such is the case with this mod that lets you play Grand Theft Auto 3 or Vice City in a screen within San Andreas, and before you ask "Why?", you should already know the answer.