For most of the last decade, the value proposition of the DIY build was considered gospel. Pick your own parts, skip the OEM's middle-man tax, and end up with a machine that outperforms anything a prebuilt manufacturer would sell you at the price. The ongoing DRAM crisis, however, seems to have changed all of that.

I thought I was done buying more storage for the next few years, but here I am again, ready to spend on yet another external hard drive in this economy. HDD prices have doubled in the last 6 months, and while that's still better than what's going on with SSDs, it's not exactly affordable either. That said, I've been running out of space on my existing storage, internal and external combined, and need a bigger drive soon. My partner has been facing the same situation on her iMac, deleting older files more aggressively in the last few months, as she struggles to keep everything in control.

I write about automation for a living, and my shameful secret is that my Windows 11 desktop PC is a digital mess. I was hoping Windows 11's new AI agents could do the work for me, but they don't work on my desktop as it's limited to Copilot+ PCs. The scale of the issue is why I never got around to doing it manually, with years of screenshots, downloads, and a startup list that grows every time I write about a new piece of software.

What's better than a fidget toy? A fidget toy that evolves as you play with it, that's what. With hobbyist hardware getting better and better, someone has created a fidget toy that comes with a digital pet that develops when you click a button. And the best part is, if everything goes well, you'll be able to buy your very own.

Meta might be the next company to make an always-on AI wearable. The company is working on prototype "super sensing" always-aware smart glasses that could continuously record audio and snap photos "every few seconds," according to the Financial Times. The wearer could then ask Meta AI about the captured audio and images.However, the images and audio might not be directly available to the user. Here's how the FT describes one way the glasses could use the data:In one proposed system, raw footage and audio would not be stored by Meta or made available to the user, several people said. Instead, the metadata from that audio and images would …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's a version of Claude Code that's for developers, but that's not what I use it for. Being apprehensive about the dev angle at first meant it took me a while to actually try it, but once I did, it turned out to be genuinely useful for productivity, and it's been sitting in that role since. It lives inside my plain-text note stack now, stepping in as a task manager, a notes app, and a PKM tool through markdown-aware skills and the CLAUDE.md file.

Choosing the right system to run your home lab on can be challenging. There are so many single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi, not to mention old PC hardware, used enterprise gear, network-attached storage (NAS), and compact business PCs. I've used them all, which eventually led me to using NAS for storage alone and some compact PCs as Proxmox cluster nodes, creating the ultimate smart home and self-hosting platform. It all started with a single $80 Dell Vostro, and the home lab grew from there.

I skipped plenty of projects because I didn’t have enough time to put them together. I might have time to create a full video overview, but not enough time to watch it from start to finish. That’s why NotebookLM’s minute-long Short Video Overview made sense to use. It takes what you’re working on and gives you the gist fast.

While SteamOS on Steam devices definitely gets the job done, some people just prefer to run Windows on them instead. There's quite a lot of proof to suggest that SteamOS has much better in-game performance than Windows, but hey, it's their device, and they can install Windows on it if they want.

Another 29 Starlink satellites were deployed last night. | Image: SpaceX SpaceX is currently ahead of last year's record-setting pace for Starlink satellite deployments. SpaceX launched 1,589 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit in the first half of 2026, according to launch data compiled by Jonathan McDowell's satellite tracker, compared to 1,489 satellites deployed at the same point in 2025.2025 was already a record year for SpaceX, with the company deploying 3,180 Starlink satellites in total. SpaceX has launched over 12,400 Starlink satellites since the constellation's inception, with nearly 11,000 still functioning.To put these numbers into perspective, Amazon's fledgling Leo service has only deploye …Read the full story at The Verge.

Windows is the first operating system I tried, and I've been using it for the last 20 years. Most of my colleagues, neighbors, and family members have been using PCs with Windows and subsequently upgraded to new versions. However, the OS hardware requirements increase over time, and Windows 11 is not easy on older, weaker systems. The latest version aims to look better and offer robust security, and it requires special components like TPM and Secure Boot to work. Windows 10 never required users to enable Secure Boot or TPM and could run on most systems.

Not every Linux distro takes the same stance when it comes to X11 vs. Wayland. Some support both, some are ditching X11 for the newer Wayland, and others still are sticking to the legacy option. Linux Mint has always given people the choice between the two, but the Wayland option has always been marked as "experimental" as the community irons out the bugs.