Setting up a home sever is one of those projects that can look gargantuan from the outside looking in, but in reality, it can be done in a weekend. The hard part isn't the initial installation, but all the small decisions you make in the first few hours. Most of them don't seem consequential in the moment, but almost everything I did wrong with my first setup was due to a few of those small initial decisions. If I were to go back in time to give myself advice before starting, these are the five tips I'd give.

Released in 2019, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro remains a top-tier Android TV box for streaming, Plex server use, and AI-enhanced upscaling). However, the seven-year-old box is getting a bit old, and sometimes it slows down, or things don't work as they should.

Modern households have gotten a little bit chaotic. You might have a Windows desktop backing up to an external USB hard drive, a MacBook relying on an unmounted Time Machine drive, an iPhone tethered to a 450GB iCloud plan, and Android phones prompting you to update your Google One storage. The alternative to this is manual backups, but it's easy to forget to manually back up your files for months.

I've spent a surprisingly long time convincing my Jellyfin server to behave like the only media server I'll ever need. Movies and TV shows are easy enough, and so are home videos, but audiobooks have always been another story with Jellyfin. For years now, Jellyfin has treated audiobooks like collections of MP3 files instead of proper books, which means that chapters, playback, and living-room playback has never felt quite right.

I’d had a spare 500GB WD Blue NVMe sitting around long enough for SSD caching to become one of those projects I figured I should try. My UGREEN DXP4800 Pro made the most sense for it because that NAS runs Jellyfin and the rest of my media library stack, so it’s doing a lot more than just storing big media files. I installed the SSD, enabled caching in UGOS, and expected the usual NAS upgrade problem, where the benchmark shows something changed but day-to-day use feels exactly the same. That wasn’t what happened. The improvement was obvious almost immediately, but not in the part of the workload I’d originally assumed would matter.

Meta is updating its AI-powered smart glasses to close a loophole that allowed wearers to keep recording after covering the front-facing LED. Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of augmented reality, writes in a post on Threads that "the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording."The company's line of smart glasses already disables their built-in cameras if someone covers the LED capture light, which blinks to alert others that you're recording or taking a picture. However, some wearers found that they can bypass these restrictions by covering the LED light after they started recording. This latest fix comes a l …Read the full story at The Verge.

AI agents are really handy, but they lack a certain human touch to them. Good AI agent apps inform you of what your agent is doing at any given time, but it's not as evocative as seeing someone actually working. Well, now you can fix that problem, as someone has released an open-source ESP32 desk robot that reads what your AI agent is doing and mimes out their actions in real life.

For a little while now, the Samsung Galaxy Z range has been the only product that can come with One UI 9 pre-installed out of the box. However, that's about to change. While some of Samsung's Galaxy range can install One UI 9 as part of an update, the newly announced S26 FE will be the first one in the series to come with it as default. Plus, a feature that was previously a Samsung Z exclusive is now on its way to debut on the Galaxy range.

Nobody really needed another desktop operating system, especially one devoted to carrying forward an OS whose commercial story ended more than two decades ago. Windows, macOS, and Linux already have the software libraries, hardware support, and development communities that make them the obvious choices for almost everyone. Haiku is at a huge disadvantage before it even reaches the desktop, and I went into it expecting more of a curiosity than something I’d want to keep using. Instead, I kept finding small reasons to boot it again, mostly because it feels unusually fast, focused, and opinionated about what a desktop computer should be.

Choosing the perfect Raspberry Pi OS isn't for the faint-hearted. Many options exist, and each tries to stand out, even though they share the same Linux OS. The most obvious choice is Raspberry Pi OS Lite, which comes without a desktop environment, and you must navigate the CLI interface to manage the device. However, it's not the most interesting choice for a new user or anyone who's not comfortable with a pure CLI operating system.

Jellyfin has spent years becoming the media server I recommend when someone wants control without another subscription or someone else’s cloud in the middle. That also means an upgrade matters a lot more once the server has years of metadata, plugins, users, and small decisions built into it. Jellyfin 12 is likely to make some of those installations complain, and a few may need actual repairs before they behave again. I don’t love that prospect, but I think Jellyfin has reached the point where occasionally requiring us to maintain the server is healthier than pretending every old configuration will keep working forever.

I think I know why Rockstar Games debuted its "extended look" of Grand Theft Auto VI on Netflix instead of immediately dropping it for free on YouTube. Unlike most video game trailers, the almost 27-minute preview of GTA VI felt more like a slice of a prestige crime drama than any video game trailer that I've ever seen. To make a new game that lasts another decade or more and potentially rivals the success of its predecessor, Rockstar is clearly trying to further blur the lines between Hollywood and video games. The line between games and movies has been getting consistently fuzzier. Look no further than this year's James Bond game, 007 Fi …Read the full story at The Verge.