Despite spending my teenage years drooling over enterprise-tier hardware, my current home lab mostly consists of consumer-grade systems, with the only outlier being a Xeon workstation from 2016. In fact, running a few Proxmox experiments on my old gaming PC proved that I don’t need top-of-the-line specs to access its virtualization features, and today, I’ve got everything from mini-PCs and thin clients to x86 single-board computers fueling my tinkering escapades to some extent.

When people talk about replacing Notion, Obsidian is usually the first app that comes up. I tried it too, and while it's an excellent note-taking app, it wasn't the replacement I was actually looking for. I wanted something that felt closer to Notion while giving me complete control over where my data lived. That search eventually led me to AFFiNE. After using it for a while, I realized it offered a better balance between flexibility, ownership, and everyday usability for my workflow. AFFiNE has become my favorite Notion alternative, rather than the one most people expect.

For roughly an hour this week, Telegram vanished from Apple's App Store. Even during that blip, it was a stunning absence for such a major app: an avenue of communication for more than 1 billion users around the world, used widely as a secure platform for people who live in countries under censorship. Apple later revealed that it had removed the app due to the presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and restored it once that content was removed.But the decision once again stirred up questions and confusion about Apple's moderation policies and how it treats different companies. And one company in particular sprang to many people's m …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's not news at this point that USB hasn't exactly been able to deliver on its lofty promises and goals. The "Universal" part of that acronym doesn't always hold up when it comes to power and data transfer speeds.

The most capable AI models on the planet have started breaking into companies that never agreed to be part of any test, and in most cases, nobody at those companies noticed until a person at one of those companies reached out to let them know. In the span of just a couple of weeks, three separate organisations disclosed that models undergoing cybersecurity evaluations had escaped or wandered out of their test environments and attacked real systems on the open internet, despite nobody instructing them to. Each one believed, or talked itself into believing, that it was still playing a game.

From the omnipresent One Night Only trailer, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the movie glosses over its terrifying and absurd premise - in otherwise normal modern New York, single people can only have sex one night a year - to deliver an entirely traditional romantic comedy. I'm here to report that it does not do that. No, the film is very much about life under Sex Purge Law, but where you might expect questions of politics or religion or fear or humanity, there are instead questions of boning. Questions like "Who should I do sex to and why?" are explored in an episodic format that sees two special hot people (Monica Barbaro and Call …Read the full story at The Verge.

The most memorable PC I've had was the one I bought in 2013, and it stayed with me till 2023, until I built my new PC from scratch. Over the course of a decade, this PC went through three GPUs, two CPUs, and even a motherboard upgrade, evolving with the times (and, of course, my bank balance). This PC was never really finished, and it almost felt like a sibling that grew up with me in the same house.

One of the best parts of being an adult is realising you have the money and the know-how to acquire all the things you coveted as a child. But what if you could make a device that put everything you ever wanted into one handy portable device you can take wherever you want? That's exactly what one Redditor did when they made an ESP32-S3 handheld that combines several uses into a single device.

Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico."This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …Read the full story at The Verge.

Having built my first home server using components cobbled together from older builds, I realized fairly quickly that an experimental workstation doesn’t need cutting-edge specs to drive my virtualization projects. As time went on, I started grabbing outdated machines from flea markets, and with a little coat of Proxmox, they became reliable nodes for my home lab, self-hosting, and DevOps experiments.

Ever since I got into hosting my own large language models, I’ve tinkered with AI inference engines across multiple devices. So far, my RTX 3080 Ti remains my primary choice for deploying the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B for coding-heavy tasks using MoE offloading, though I’ve also had decent experience using Gemma-4-26B-A4B and GPT-OSS-20B on old Pascal-era graphics cards.

The problem with watching the DVD logo bounce around the screen is that, at some point, someone's going to actually want to watch a movie on that screen. But what if you had a homemade mechanical device that endlessly bounced a DVD logo around a screen so you could celebrate corner hits forever? Well, that's exactly what this 3D-printable project lets you do.