If you're new to PCs or haven't been following the industry for the last few years, the GPU landscape of 2025 can be pretty confusing. $700 doesn't get you a high-end GPU anymore, native performance is somehow less important than upscaling and frame generation, and you can't find anything at the advertised price. Even the nomenclature you might be used to doesn't mean what you might think it should. Oh, and Intel and AMD are big players in the GPU wars now.

When you tinker with your home lab, you're often one misconfigured setting away from not being able to reach your network or devices. This is a common problem, and one of the things you have to figure out when you build your home lab and its network is how to stay connected to your devices and how to reconnect if you accidentally get locked out. By setting up your network according to best practices, and adding a combination of other services, you'll make your home lab accessible to the device you're using, wherever it may be.

Apple's MacBooks are often a go-to in the tech world for developers, and there's a reason for that. Phenomenal battery life on Apple Silicon, great performance, and a Unix-like environment make them perfect for development out of the box. Sure, you can run WSL2 on Windows, but there are a lot of developers out there happy to just use a MacBook and be done with it. The only downside is the lack of support for other operating systems on Apple Silicon, but Asahi Linux aims to bring a full Linux distribution to those Macs.

When building a new PC, you’re naturally focused on the big-ticket components — your CPU, GPU, and motherboard. However, in the excitement of picking out the most powerful parts, there’s a crucial component that often becomes an afterthought — your SSD. You might think it’s a simple choice — just grab an NVMe drive that fits your motherboard’s slot, call it a day, and bask in the glory of “hyper-speed, blazing-fast” storage.

File Explorer is probably one of your most frequently used tools if you are a Windows user. However, if you stick to its default settings, you are not utilizing its full potential. It comes with various little tweaks that can improve your workflow, enhance your productivity, and help you manage files efficiently.

3D printing has evolved dramatically over the past decade, becoming accessible for hobbyists and transforming entire industries. Despite its growing popularity and capabilities, misconceptions continue to surround this versatile technology. It's time to clear up some confusion and reveal the truth behind the most common myths about 3D printing.

Microsoft’s Copilot app for Windows is being “unintentionally uninstalled” on some Windows 11 devices thanks to the latest monthly Windows update. The Patch Tuesday updates that started rolling out on March 11th have led to Copilot being unpinned from the taskbar and uninstalled.“We’re aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices,” admits Microsoft in a support document for the March update to Windows 11. Microsoft says it’s working on a fix for the issue, and that affected users can simply reinstall the Copilot app from the Microsoft Store and manually pin it to the taskbar in the meantime.While this is clearly a bug with the latest Windows update, some Windows 11 users who aren’t interested in Copilot will undoubtedly see it as a feature instead. Microsoft is in the middle of rolling out a native version of its Copilot for Windows app, nearly a year after turning it into a basic web app. The new Copilot app has an improved UI and is also getting a press-to-talk hotkey so you can talk to Microsoft’s AI assistant like you used to be able to do with Cortana in Windows 10.Microsoft is also working on additional updates to Copilot that it’s planning to unveil at a special 50th anniversary event on April 4th. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman will be on stage next month to announce new Copilot features, amid rumors that Microsoft is developing its own in-house AI reasoning models to compete with OpenAI.

Over the years, many things have been said about gaming on Linux. Some of these were true at the time, some weren't, but they've turned from objective facts to vague mythology. What is true now is that, because of Valve and the work they put into SteamOS for the Steam Deck handhelds, gaming on Linux is every bit as viable as on Windows, and in some cases, even better. The lower system load of Linux is perfect for PC gaming handhelds, and their restricted power levels, but it's also just as good for desktop users. There are one or two things still holding it back from being an equal fight between Linux and Windows, but the gap has never been closer.

I have tried Notion’s databases, Obsidian’s graph view, and Evernote’s quick capture and tag system to create an effective second brain. However, each fell short in one way or the other. That’s when I stumbled upon AFFiNE. This open-source, all-in-one workspace promised to unify the best of all worlds, and at first, I was skeptical.

Taara’s current Lightbridges are about the size of a traffic light, but its new chips should deliver smaller designs.Light-based internet project Taara is exiting Alphabet’s “moonshot” incubator X, spinning off into an independent company. Taara’s tech uses lasers to transmit data, and is envisaged as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink when it comes to connecting rural areas to the internet.The Financial Times reports that Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which has also secured funding from Series X Capital. The company currently has two dozen employees and operates in 12 countries, working on everything from connecting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to augmenting the congested network at the 2024 Coachella festival. “We’ve realised over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s so-called captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors and generally be able to scale faster this way.”Taara’s current tech involves firing a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, with transmission of up to 20 gigabits per second over 20km (almost 12.5 miles) distances. The terminals can be mounted on towers, and are quicker and cheaper to install than laying fiber — especially when you need a signal to reach an island, cross a river, or arrive at some otherwise hard-to-reach location. Last month the company announced that it has condensed its tech into a much more compact chip, which it expects to launch in a product in 2026.While Taara’s tower-based optical technology works differently to Starlink’s satellites, it’s setting itself up as a rival in the business of connecting rural areas. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Wired.Taara itself has its origins in another X project, Loon, which imagined distributing data by shooting lasers around a network of 20-mile-high balloons. Believe it or not, that proved unfeasible in the end, and Loon was wound down in 2021 — just three years after it too “graduated” from Alphabet’s moonshot program. Loon’s lasers were repurposed into Taara’s towers by Krishnaswamy, though the tech also found a third home in Aalyria, another spin-off that focuses on coordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks, and has its own Tightbeam project that sounds similar to Taara.

Building a home lab offers a fantastic opportunity to experiment, learn, and take control of your digital life. Docker containers have transformed this process as they provide a lightweight, efficient, and portable way to deploy and manage a wide array of applications. Whether you want to create a robust media server, automate and track your home network, or explore new software, check out these Docker containers to transform your home lab into a powerful and versatile platform.

For years, Kubernetes has reigned over the container orchestration landscape with an iron fist, and for good reason. In addition to its auto-scaling, load-balancing, and automation provisions, this open-source platform pairs well with several container runtime environments.