Home Assistant 2026.7 just landed, and it brings with it a number of improvements. What I'm most interested in with this update are the changes made to automation. The team has once again poured time and resources into improving the way they're handled. With 2026.7, automations are now easier for everyone to build, understand, and maintain, making it much more accessible to build a feature-rich smart home.

Battery life is one of the things that people look for when buying any device. After all, your phone goes everywhere you go, and it is expected to last you all day. For a lot of people, a laptop is the same — another device that is expected to last. However, over time, you might have noticed your device's battery draining more quickly and even dying on you sooner.

It might be easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you need to upgrade your router, and the one provided by your internet service provider simply isn't good enough. However, modern ISP gateways, especially the Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E units distributed over the last few years, feature decent chipsets and capable internal antenna arrays. The problem isn't actually the internal silicon or even the settings. It's that ISPs routinely install these boxes next to incoming utility lines in the worst possible locations in your home, like dark basement corners, inside metal utility closets, or wedged directly behind massive smart TVs. Your ISP router doesn't need to be replaced. It needs to be moved.

I have been in an on-and-off relationship with local LLMs. Initially, I tried 1st-gen or 2nd-gen 8B models, but they were not always up to my expectations. I gave up on them and moved back to cloud models. A couple of weeks ago, I gave local LLMs another shot. I even tested three local LLMs side by side on my RTX 4070 Ti and decided to keep one of them as the default. Not because that one single model beat the other two, but because running all three side by side for every single prompt wasn't practical. Every model had its own strengths, though, so I kept the other two around and reached them whenever the prompt really mattered. That got me thinking: what if I could use all three to get better output? That’s when I came across Karpathy's LLM Council, initially designed to work across cloud APIs. I liked the idea and decided to rebuild it around local models running on my own hardware.

The drive that used to copy a folder of games in seconds now crawls halfway through and stalls, and the explanation seems obvious: the thing is just getting old. It has probably been in your PC for years, and everything slows down eventually, so why would SSDs be any different?

Text snippets are one of the easiest ways to save time in your day-to-day life. Essentially, you can type a very short text string and have it automatically expand to a piece of text that's as large as you want. It can save a ton of time with repetitive bits of information you may use throughout the day, like your address, email, and so on.

The interesting thing about a brilliant idea is that, just like everything else, it will eventually fall out of style. However, unlike everything else, someone will end up reinventing it years or even decades down the line. It may not be a one-for-one replica of the original concept, and it may have a totally different name, but its very DNA is strongly reminiscent of an idea from the past.

When we reviewed the Corsair 3500X case, we loved that it provided so much at an affordable price. Corsair managed to take one of its more popular cases, and make it more accessible. This case looks good, delivers great airflow, and it's easy to build.

Between its terrific support for low-end hardware, detailed documentation, and the ultra-handy PVE-Helper Scripts repo, Proxmox is significantly easier to pick up for newcomers compared to other virtualization platforms. But that doesn’t change the fact that Proxmox is loaded with cool QoL-enhancing (if somewhat complex) features, some of which you might not even encounter unless you go look for them specifically.

The man whose Tesla struck and killed a woman inside her Texas home last month is now facing manslaughter charges, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and local news outlet KHOU 11. 44-year-old Michael Butler was arrested on Wednesday and claimed to have been driving his Model 3 using Tesla's Full-Self Driving (FSD) system at the time of the crash, according to an arrest affidavit.The court document includes the officer saying that data extraction from Butler's phone found several FSD-related Google searches from May 2026: "Tesla fsd not aggressive enough 2026 model," "tesla fsdnot [sic] aggressive enough 2026," "tesla fsdnot [s …Read the full story at The Verge.

DDR4 platforms seem to have made an unexpected comeback this year, and for most hardware enthusiasts, that's a sign of bad news. The industry-wide demand for DRAM over the past ten months, followed by a supply shortage and subsequent inflation in prices has made platform upgrades to the DDR5 ecosystem economically unfeasible for many. With the demand from data centers showing no signs of slowing down, the return of DDR4 in consumer PCs feels like a rational response.

Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch: this new app lets you make and share little interactive "gizmos" built from an AI prompt, as reported by Business Insider. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea, and it follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called …Read the full story at The Verge.