Home Assistant is incredibly versatile through the use of automation. It's easy to configure a few with nothing but a sensor or two and some integrations. Throw some Philips Hue bulbs, a Ring alarm system, and some smart plugs, and you've got the necessary hardware to have some fun and show off to guests who pass through the front door. Here are some ways I've been using Home Assistant automation to show off to others.

Sometimes, you just have to 3D print something that you could otherwise buy, just for the sakes of building it. Even if the end process is a little more convoluted and takes more patience than simply finding the target product on Amazon and clicking the "Buy Now" button, you still learn a lot, get that satisfaction of making something, and have all the knowledge and equipment to repair it if something breaks.

External GPUs have been around for decades, but despite an influx of mainstream options with the release of Thunderbolt 3 nearly a decade ago, eGPUs haven't really caught on. Despite how simple eGPUs seem as a solution — you literally plug more power into your PC — they're surprisingly complex. Different interfaces passing data over cables that weren't designed for it naturally lead to some issues when using an eGPU. You can still get great performance out of an external graphics card, but there are some common misunderstandings you need to keep in mind.

The standard Windows 11 does the job, but requires some customization out of the box to run at its best and become more user-friendly. I usually use apps like Winhawk or PowerToys to do this, and have never tried Winaero Tweaker until now. Winaero Tweaker is a free application that provides numerous tools for customizing Windows functionality, organized into several sections for appearance, behavior, and more.

Do you have a Pi-hole set up at home? If not, they're a great way to monitor your network and prevent people from tracking you in ways you don't want them to. We love Pi-hole here at XDA, to the point where we even added two Pi-hole devices to the same network and noticed that it made things even better.

As cyber criminals get better and better hardware, we're seeing attacks that eclipse anything we've ever seen before. Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are getting especially nasty, and because they deliver a measurable amount of data during the attack, cybersecurity experts have been monitoring them and seeing if they break any records. Well, one attack just took the record for the biggest DDoS attack ever, and when put into perspective, it's a stunning amount of data being transferred to one IP address.

Most games build on ideas that came before, genres that have been around for ages. But every now and then, a single title does something so radically different that it spawns an entirely new genre. These five games didn’t just raise the bar; they created an entirely new one.

Once you start using Home Assistant at home, it’s hard not to go overboard. To make the most of it, I used Home Assistant to create a shared shopping list with my family to organize our home better. The idea was to bring some semblance to the chaos: random purchases to stock up the fridge or pantry, and other household items. From impulse buying to double-stocking, it was vexing for me to shop with my family.

If you're in the habit of making System Restore points on Windows 11, first of all, good on you for making backups. It's always good to have something to go back to if a drive goes wrong or a system file goes missing somehow, and if you set it up just right, you can have them automatically make themselves without you even needing to lift a finger.

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans - among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant's 2025 Re:Vision trends report, published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will "leverage emotional and psychological data" to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of day and light level. It could even adapt to reading speeds and emphasize the important portions of online text for greater engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through "intelligent agents and chatbots" and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn't certain, possibly as part of proprietarily trained apps. Indeed, how any of this will work remains nebulous.Monotype isn't alone in this kind of speculation. Typographers are keeping a close eye on AI as designers start to adopt tools like Midjourney for ideation and Replit …Read the full story at The Verge.

One of my favorite things is taking something that's not at all affiliated with tabletop roleplaying games and finding a way to shove one into it. For instance, there was that time I played D&D with ChatGPT and had a lot of fun doing so.

Data collection without analysis is a waste of time. Analyzing your data is the only way to uncover fresh insights and get valuable information about the population your sample represents. Facts must be extracted after administering questionnaires, and researchers use various statistical tools and techniques when trying to do this. I prefer the easier route: SPSS. It is great for analyzing survey data, since it does not require coding or any special syntax. The point-and-click interface makes things easy; even researchers with no prior experience can quickly learn to analyze surveys with SPSS and bring out valuable facts from figures. Regardless of whether you've distributed a questionnaire virtually or physically, the same method could be employed to analyze respondents' data. In this guide, I'll show you a step-by-step process for analyzing answers obtained after administering survey questionnaires.