While you might be thinking about the chipset, VRMs, expansion slots, and maximum RAM speed when choosing a motherboard, there's one important thing that can often get missed. You don't realize how important the number of motherboard headers is until you run out of them at the worst possible moment. This was one of the worst PC building blunders I've made in the past, and it's one that could have been easily avoided had I been better prepared.

You know what I miss? Battling robot TV shows. Back when they were on the air, it felt like the future of entertainment, watching little bots take chunks out of one another until one was standing. It was like some sort of Roman gladiatorial arena, except nobody got hurt, and there were a lot more flamethrowers.

When new employees start at Weta Workshop, they're herded into a meeting room with a long, unassuming conference table. On the walls, behind panes of glass and in between statues, swords, and masks, are five Oscars. Four of them were awarded to the studio for its efforts on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films. New hires are offered a chance to hold one of those Oscars, but there's a catch: handling the golden statuette marks you with a curse, preventing you from ever winning one yourself. Rarely do inductees take Weta up on the offer.Weta Workshop's fledgling Game Studio hasn't achieved the same level of prestige as its film and sp …Read the full story at The Verge.

Nintendo is using a pretty interesting strategy when it comes to the Switch 2. Instead of drowning people in titles day one, the company has been delivering a slow but steady trickle of games for people to enjoy over the coming months. And given how much these games cost now, it's probably for the best for everyone's wallet.

You already know that you shouldn't be treating your RAID array as a backup, but in case the point hasn't settled in, I'm here to remind you once again. Your RAID array, regardless of how it's configured, is not a backup.

I've been using turnkey NAS enclosures for a decade or so, and none have given me more issues than the first unit I ever owned. I got the wrong hard drive types, thought I could postpone some upgrades for a later date, and overestimated just how many things I could run on it at one time. But I learned a lot during that time, mostly from frustrating hours troubleshooting things that were (mostly) my fault, and every NAS installation since has been relatively stress-free. Maybe you can learn something too, and not repeat the problems I found myself with.

If I had to pick a single AI productivity tool to use for the rest of my life, I'd choose Google's AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, without thinking twice. But unlike a lot of people, I don't just use it to make research easier and generate Audio Overviews of the lengthy readings my professors assign me every week.

The OnePlus Nord 5 does exactly what the company's Nord phones have always done: deliver strong specs at a relatively low price. It's one of the more powerful phones at this price point and should easily outstrip Samsung and Google's more expensive alternatives.This is a function-over-form phone, one where the key selling points are a powerful processor and long battery life, which are the boring mainstays that tend to matter the most in midrange models like this. The problem for the Nord 5 is that other midrange phones in the markets where it's available - including Europe and India, but not the US - offer even faster chipsets and bigger …Read the full story at The Verge.

As the PC market share of game sales continues to rise, it seems like the console scene is ready for a big shake-up. While Nintendo and PlayStation have been able to operate as business as usual, Xbox has struggled, resulting in Microsoft making moves that will likely kill its own console. The current console generation has been lackluster, but Microsoft has been reportedly kicking around some interesting ideas. Those ideas include integrating PC storefronts into the next Xbox, but Microsoft hasn't met a rake it won't step on, so my expectations for that are low. But it does show that there is a place in the market for a console that runs PC games, and why not let the company that made Steam so successful take a crack at a home console?

Were you around during the big Y2K scare? There was a huge amount of panic as computers were primed to change their internal dates from 2000 to 1900 when the new year turned over, which would have caused a lot of systems to fall over. Fortunately, there were a ton of efforts to get the issue fixed, and when the ball finally dropped on January 1st, 2000, everything kept standing.

As I've gone down the Home Assistant rabbit hole, I've quickly learned which devices are difficult to deal with in a smart home focused on local control. Integrating older smart devices that I have lying around can pose varying degrees of challenges depending on what I'm trying to achieve, but there are some companies that make products that are known for being easy to integrate and will play nicely in a self-hosted context. Reolink is one such company, and I've spent nearly a month with the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi camera to put it through its paces.

Last month, Microsoft quietly dropped a major hint that suggested we aren't far away from the release of Windows 11 25H2. The company hasn't officially confirmed the Stable release of the upcoming major Windows 11 update, but it'll likely arrive in the October-November timeframe if the software giant sticks to its previous rollout strategy. In addition to giving the final touches to Windows 11 25H2, the company is hard at work to push Windows 11 24H2 to more eligible PCs.