I like self-hosting because it lets me build tools around the way I work instead of adapting to another service's limitations. Over time, my homelab has become more than a place to experiment with Docker. It now handles several everyday tasks and helps me stay productive without constantly adding new subscriptions. I don't self-host everything, but I've found a few containers that genuinely make my workflow easier while keeping more of my data and tools under my control. These are the ones that made the biggest difference.

If you're on the hunt for an open-source alternative to Microsoft 365, you may want to give LibreOffice a try. The Document Foundation has been spending some time unpacking why Microsoft's strategies are harmful to digital sovereignty, while also teaching people how it does things differently. Now, The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, which contains a new UI for the Notebookbar, a new tool for setting your word spacing, and a huge serving of absolutely zero AI tools.

Ayaneo's new budget line, Konkr, has been spending the summer drip-feeding reveals of the Pocket Advance before it went on sale in early August. It debuted at an early-bird price of $89 for the 3GB model and $109 for 4GB alongside a unique pitch: PS2 emulation in a Game Boy Advance-shaped shell. However, there's a pretty big problem with that: it can't really do PS2 emulation at all. What it does instead, though, is play Game Boy Advance games better than anything else at this price, on a screen that is an exact four-times match for the original hardware, just like the Ayaneo Pocket Micro had.

Your honor, We all know that the woman who sits before you is tired. Just look at the circles under her eyes. The novelty Pride and Prejudice T-shirt and Muji sweatpants that pass for pajamas. The unkempt, banana clip hairstyle that says "I really did wake up like this." But she's doing her best. And that's why she deserves this court's time and attention, to correct the injustice of last night's sleep score.To be clear, my client thinks the sleep score assigned by her Pixel Watch is generally fair. Should she go to bed before 10:30PM most nights? Sure. Dinging points for a late-night Instagram scrolling session is reasonable. She's rece …Read the full story at The Verge.

OneDrive is the default choice when it comes to Windows backup, not because it is better than others, but because Windows keeps putting it in front of you. Once you enable OneDrive, it feels too convenient to question. I've used it from day one, but as my workflow expanded, my storage needs grew too.

The Galaxy S26 FE holds few surprises. The Fan Edition phones are rarely Samsung's most exciting launches of the year, but the new Galaxy S26 FE feels especially familiar. Hardware-wise, little has changed since the S25 FE launched 12 months ago, and the upgrades have mostly come in the form of software tricks which themselves were already seen on this year's previous Samsung flagships.At its core, this is the same phone as last year's. The 6.7-inch OLED display, 4,900mAh battery, and triple rear camera are all identical. The changes are few: The chipset has been given its annual upgrade, and the 12-megapixel selfie camera is a little wider, with an 85-degree field of view, up …Read the full story at The Verge.

Samsung announced its upcoming lineup of Odyssey gaming monitors today at Gamescom, and says that several will feature "world-first innovations" across display speeds and design. This includes the 27-inch Odyssey G6 it initially unveiled in December, which now features a 1,100Hz refresh rate, alongside new OLED Odyssey G9, G8, and G7 updates for 2027.The Odyssey G6 G60H's upgraded 1,100Hz final launch specification is a smidge faster than the already ridiculous 1,040Hz refresh rate that Samsung announced it would have at CES 2026. Little has changed otherwise, so this is still a dual-mode gaming monitor with an IPS-based display and a 1ms …Read the full story at The Verge.

Everyone is excited about buying new PC components and soaking in all that extra performance. Building a new PC or upgrading a component is the easy part; it's the smaller yet trickier details that most of us tend to ignore. Managing the cable mess inside and outside the build, keeping it dust-free, and updating it regularly are the things where PC gamers falter.

After a large family event or outing, I would often be hounded for any photos that I or others had taken, and the usual process of sharing those photos involved sharing large-ish files over email, with a Google Drive link, or if they were on my phone, sent through iMessage, which rips through everyone's storage. I recently started self-hosting Immich to replace my monthly storage subscriptions, and while the experience has been great for me individually, it's arguably been better for my friends and family who don't even store their own photos on my server. Sharing photos with one link has been a game-changer, and it's one of Immich's most underrated features.

AI-assisted coding has seen massive changes in the last few months. For starters, it's turned from what seemed like a gimmick into something that can handle a meaningful chunk of a development workflow. LLMs have also gotten incredibly capable, and the kind of tools that exist for development now are very different from what we had initially.

The Note 17 Pro Max also has a photochromic design, which is revealed by sunlight. The 9,210mAh dual-cell battery in the new Redmi Note 17 Pro Max is the biggest that Xiaomi has fit in any phone it's sold in Europe - and remarkably, in some other markets the phone comes with an even larger 10,000mAh single-cell design.As you can probably guess, this is a silicon-carbon battery either way, one with a high 16 percent silicon content, meaning it's more energy-dense than most. It's allowed Xiaomi to fit this huge battery into a phone that's basically the same size as an iPhone 17 Pro Max, but 8g lighter and fractionally thinner too.Xiaomi says the Redmi Note 17 Pro Max should give you "worry-free use" for up to three days, …Read the full story at The Verge.

The cool thing about checking out ESP32 projects is that they will sometimes evolve. We'll sometimes see a project reappear after a year or two with a brand new look and design, and sometimes people will get a new version out within a month of releasing their first iteration.