I was 8 years old when we got our first "personal computer" — a Pentium 3 pre-built from HP known as "Brio". For around seven years, my brother and I squeezed all we could out of that PC, after which we finally convinced our parents to get us a custom PC. While that was the start of my ongoing tryst with PCs, it never reached a point where the younger me could fully experience the best that PC hardware had to offer, at least not until I was already in college.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says it’s delaying shipments to the US this month while it works out how it will deal with the wide-ranging tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week, according to The Guardian.“As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans,” JLR told The Guardian. The automaker is responding to a 25 percent Trump-ordered tariff on imported vehicles that went into effect Thursday and could add $5,000 to $10,000 or more to the price of a new car in the US. JLR said this week that its business remains “resilient,” but those living in the town where its cars are made weren’t optimistic, with one telling The Guardian that the tariffs could lead to job losses. About a quarter of the 400,000 vehicles JLR sells every year go to US buyers, as The Sunday Times notes in its own story about the pause this morning. It’s thought that the automaker has enough existing US stock to last about two months, and it would take about 21 days for more to come once shipments resume, the Times writes. JLR isn’t alone in its concerns. Earlier this week, Nintendo blamed Trump’s new tariffs as it delayed US preorders of the Switch 2, originally scheduled to start on April 9th. In the wake of the tariffs announcement, the US Stock market lost $6.6 trillion in two days — a record, according to The Wall Street Journal — and industries are bracing for negative impacts to the cost and availability of just about everything, including the high-powered GPUs used by AI companies, gadgets of all types, and even board games

No gaming PC setup is complete without a set of gaming peripherals to go toe-to-toe with the action. While I started my PC journey with cheap no-name peripherals, I elevated my experience to quality models not too long ago. From a budget Cooler Master keyboard to premium mechanical keyboards, and knock-off headphones to high-quality gaming headsets, I've used them all.

What's better than a fidget toy? A fidget toy you can 3D print. That way, when you inevitably break it from playing with it for the 1,000th time, you can just make a new one and get back to fidgeting. If your fingers itch for something to pick at and you have a 3D printer, then boy do I have the project for you. Someone has uploaded the plans for a ton of little fidget toys that play a brief section of famous video game tracks when you strum your finger along the top, and they seem to be an absolute breeze to print and assemble.

I have always freely swapped between AMD and Nvidia and held no brand loyalties when it came to picking the best graphics cards for my PC build. This should be the way to go for all products, but we always tend to have some bias as humans. Having used my trusty RTX 3060 Ti for a few years, it was time to replace this aging card as it was seriously underpowered for my 49-inch super-ultrawide monitor. Enter the RX 7900 XT in 2022, which was impressive to say the least but not a colossal upgrade, especially when using earlier kernels and most Linux distros.

Mini PCs aren't a necessity or an option with nearly as much choice as a mid-tower assemble-it-yourself machine when you're out shopping for a computer upgrade. I have one each of a laptop, mini PC, and mid-tower that I use in rotation, and doing so offered a fresh perspective into why you shouldn't dismissively ignore the handful of adorable and tiny computers you can just plug in to fire up. Besides the general readiness to hit the ground running, there are several (albeit niche) use cases where I've found the smaller form factor to excel.

Microsoft is a large corporation that has a ton of products in its portfolio. Some of the most popular ones include Windows, Office, Teams, Outlook, and OneNote. While these are all apps that are beneficial and provide several features that help people across various verticals, they have certain shortcomings that may deter folks from using them. The biggest deterrent in several cases may be the price, while some users may not be too sure about their privacy when using Microsoft's apps, since their data may be sent to the company's servers. However, there's not much that Microsoft can do about these factors since they're essential parts of running a large business.

The world of smart home devices is awesome but a little bit scary, given the many different competing connectivity standards. Building your own smart home hub is a great way to control multiple standards from the same box. One of the most compatible wireless connectivity standards is Zigbee,a low-power wireless protocol for networking IoT devices, although it's not that widely used anymore.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has infiltrated the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency that has a say over resources Musk needs or could benefit from for some of his private sector business, The Verge has learned. Three people who have been identified as DOGE staffers are listed in a public directory called “Finding People at the FCC.” Tarak Makecha, Jordan Wick, and Jacob Altik are all listed in the FCC directory, with email addresses associated with the agency. Each is listed under the office “OCH,” which in other agency documents refers to the Office of the Chairman.Makecha is a finance executive who, according to LinkedIn, has most recently worked in a drone detection software company and previously worked at Tesla. Makecha has reportedly been involved through DOGE at OPM and the State Department. Wick is a former Waymo engineer who’s reportedly been given access to systems at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Altik is a lawyer who’s reportedly been involved at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Are you a current or former US federal government worker? Reach out securely and anonymously with tips from a non-work device to Lauren Feiner via Signal at laurenfeiner.64.DOGE has recently expanded into other enforcement agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, as The Verge reported earlier on Friday. The FCC’s authority over radio, TV, broadband, and satellite intersects with Musk’s businesses, like granting certain permissions for SpaceX’s Starlink operations. Its role as a regulator and enforcer also means it stores information on SpaceX and its competitors in order to make decisions. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has previously said that Musk would recuse himself from potential conflicts. The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what the DOGE staffers’ role will be at the agency or what restrictions there will be on their data access.

After Nvidia released the RTX 5070 and 5090, we got a taste of just how high GPU prices can get, with the latter going for $2,000 as a recommended retail price. Despite the price tag, people were snapping up cards so quickly that companies had to mark them up at a pretty steep rate. Good luck actually finding a card selling for $2,000.

Earlier this week, when it seemed as though TikTok’s fate in the US would actually be decided by April 5th, everyone — from Amazon to the founder of OnlyFans — was coming out of the woodwork to buy it.As it turns out, none of them had a chance. And now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariff war, no one may get to buy TikTok. People familiar with the matter tell me that, despite all of the bids for the app, the White House was only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium, which included many of ByteDance’s biggest investors who were set to roll their stakes into a new, US entity. The proposal, which would have licensed the app’s algorithm from China and shuffled some shareholder money around to make TikTok look more independent from ByteDance, was set to be announced before President Trump went nuclear on tariffs. As others have reported and I’ve independently confirmed, his tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government. On Friday, less than an hour after Trump said he was pushing back the clock on banning TikTok by another 75 days to finish working out a deal, ByteDance …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hey, would you look at that—I'm writing yet another post about ePaper devices. I really love this technology, so when I saw that Seeed was releasing its own smart home display based on it, I knew I had to check it out. Best of all, it's actually not that expensive, and comes chock-full of a ton of handy features.