It's been a while since I swapped over to Immich from Google Photos, but one of the small things I miss after moving my photo library away isn't cloud storage, easy sharing, or even AI-based editing. It's actually the daily reminders that used to bring back old memories to the surface.

If you have got a new laptop in the last few years, you must have noticed that most modern models lack repairability, something which was largely the norm until a decade ago. I still have a 12-year-old HP laptop (HP ProBook 640 G1), and it's clearly more repairable than both of my newer upgrades: a Dell 2-in-1 and a MacBook Air. And that's perhaps the only reason I still have it.

For many other smart home users and me, a smart home assistant should be a local deterministic traffic controller rather than an analytical cloud companion. By turning a simple light toggle into a multi-second LLM processing loop that constantly passes ambient household conversations and continuous Nest camera history, Google isn't making your home smarter by introducing Gemini for Home. They are introducing massive network latency, a recurring subscription tax, and a violation of the telemetry boundary into your family's private life.

When you encounter problems with smart home devices, you probably think about the router's range, Wi-Fi interference, or hardware limits. It can be surprising to learn that your router's security settings might be acting as the bottleneck. Modern routers have been supporting WPA3 for many years now. Since WPA2 was proven vulnerable to dictionary and brute-force attacks and used a shared password for all devices, it was more secure to use WPA3 to connect to all your devices. While routers and most other devices made the jump to WPA3 with modern Wi-Fi chips, the bulk of smart home devices remain stuck on WPA2. This forces you to use the WPA2/WPA3 Mixed Mode on your router, which often creates handshake failures and connection issues on your older smart home devices. The best fix is to ensure maximum security using WPA3 for your newer devices, while isolating your IoT devices to a separate, WPA2-only network.

I've been using self-hosted LLMs for a while now as part of my daily workflow. They help me research topics, brainstorm ideas, and summarize information faster. Like many people interested in local AI, I initially spent a lot of time testing different models, comparing benchmarks, and trying to find the best setup for my hardware.

Having a personal media server that's online 24/7 is an underrated luxury. It gives you complete control over your media, enhancing your streaming experience in this age of enshittification of streaming. If you're finally convinced about creating a media server for your family and yourself, there are multiple ways to go about it. You could buy a mini PC or SBC and set up Jellyfin or Plex, or you could buy a NAS that handles not only your storage but also your self-hosted stack, including media streaming. That said, you might be ignoring the ready-to-go media server already gathering dust in your house. An old office PC that you stopped using because it became outdated for basic productivity is still more than equipped to double up as your media server. Transcoding your movies, so that your TV or smartphone can play them without compatibility or bandwidth limitations, is small fry for your decade-old PC. And with an inexpensive GPU from eBay, you can make it way more powerful, allowing multiple people in the house to stream simultaneously without hiccups.

From October this year Samsung will roll out a variety of new paid tiers for access to its SmartThings API, including a $4.99 monthly plan for "non-commercial, individual developers."It won't just be developers that pay the price though. Some more advanced smart home users are likely to fall afoul of the rule change if they directly access the SmartThings API for more flexible smart home controls, or use third-party tools that do the same. "Use of the Home Assistant integration will be affected by their changes and will fall under their new 'personal plans,'" wrote Paulus Schoutsen, founder of open-source smart home platform Home Assistant …Read the full story at The Verge.

Local LLMs are at a point where I can use them for most of my coding tasks, but moving up to larger models comes with some caveats. If you've got unified memory like on a Mac, you're golden, but I've been running models on an Nvidia RTX 5090 and noticed the model seems to get worse over time.

Android Auto already makes driving safer by keeping my eyes on the road and my hands off the phone, but Gemini’s integration with Google Messages has taken that convenience to another level for me. I no longer need to dictate a basic reply and hope it gets the context right. I can use voice commands to send messages, pull details from my existing Google tools like Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, and turn that information into a useful text without touching my phone.

The release of Grand Theft Auto VI is a singular moment, the kind of massive cultural phenomenon that makes people want to go out and buy a console to play it. It is the preeminent modern example of what's known as a "system seller." There's almost certainly a large audience of people who were waiting to buy a console because all they really play on it is GTA, and they haven't needed to upgrade since GTA V. But there's one big problem: At the same time people are getting excited to finally play GTA, the hardware it runs on is becoming prohibitively expensive.Fans have been waiting for the next Grand Theft Auto for a long time. GTA V origin …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're finally ready to ditch all the cloud services you pay for, or if you're just someone who wants a better way to back up all your data, this Ugreen NAS is going to be a good way to go. Right now, for a very limited time, you can score the Ugreen DH2300 2-bay NAS for its best price at $175. This price won't last long, so you'll want to be quick.

Steve Jobs thanking Bill Gates for helping Apple still feels wrong, yet it's exactly what happened in 1997. At the time, Apple was battered, yet Microsoft was the company that Mac users loved to hate, and the MacWorld Expo Boston crowd at the time wasn't exactly waiting for a reason to cheer for Bill Gates.