Browse home lab forums for a few minutes, and you’re bound to come across dozens of tips to boost your Network-Attached Storage server’s capabilities. Many of these, like enabling SMB multichannel and using an SSD as the boot drive, actually make a lot of sense, and can improve your storage server’s performance. But you’re just as likely to encounter advice on enabling random services – some of which can cause more harm than good.

Whenever your Jellyfin or Plex stream buffers, you blame the network. To fix that, run an Ethernet cable from your home server to the router (or a network switch, if you have one). Wiring your media server with an Ethernet cable is the right call. Most people justify it for the wrong reasons.

If you're a big ESP32 fan, you really owe it to yourself to check out the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD). It's a small display that uses an ESP32 as its processor, and it's, well, cheap. The name does a lot of the heavy lifting, honestly.

If you've been on the fence about picking up an OLED monitor, maybe this is the one that'll change your mind. The Asus ROG Strix XG27AQWMG is a 27-inch, 1440p Tandem W-OLED monitor with a 280 Hz refresh rate and variable refresh rate (VRR). And it's strictly stunning.

I used Obsidian for months without running a cleanup. After a while, I ended up with folders, files, and plugins I hardly ever used. Most of what I added felt like it was only there for decoration. Eventually, looking at my setup became painful with all that mess, and that's when I snapped. I had put it off long enough and decided to save what was important and wipe whatever was left. When I was done, it looked so clean and organized, and that’s when I regretted not doing it sooner.

I'll admit, when I first added Tailscale to my home lab, I was only using it for secure remote access. That's a perfectly good use for it, and likely the one most have heard about, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. Not long after, I was running it connected to every container, device, router, and pretty much everything else.

In an ideal world, Linux would support every piece of tech that has ever been released for all of eternity. There's just one problem: people have to maintain that code, and there's the very real chance that nobody is actually benefiting from it. The result is a lot of manpower spent on ensuring that a piece of legacy hardware continues working with Linux, with zero guarantee that anyone actually uses it.

Android Auto apps are few and far between, but over the years, Google seems to have successfully persuaded a sizable section of developers to integrate Android Auto (AA) support. This includes major-league apps like WhatsApp and Spotify, plus all those bits from the Google suite that make driving a breeze, such as Maps, Waze, Google News, and more recently, Gemini.

You might've noticed a pretty huge shift in the way the average user uses AI between 2022 and now. I'm not really talking about using it for more advanced workflows and relying on it more. That was bound to happen. In late 2022, we got our first real look into what AI was when OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly, and now practically every tool is just an AI tool in disguise. That part of the story has been told over and over again. The shift I'm highlighting here, though, is this: if you use AI for anything more than the occasional search-replacement question, you're almost certainly paying for it now. In fact, you might be paying for two or three different tools, because each one has carved out a specific thing it's best at.

Adobe and I parted ways a while back, but even before that my Photoshop tab was never really the only one open, there was always some or other editor I was poking at. One of them was Pixlr, which I'd honestly forgotten about in the sea of new editors over the years. It's changed quite a bit since I first stumbled across it. Of course, the main driver for this change was AI, and it's now considered an AI editor.

Stream Decks are really nice to have for your PC. They were originally designed to help streamers manage their live content, giving them a plethora of buttons they can map to specific actions on-stream. That way, they're not fumbling with hotkeys and shortcuts on the spur of the moment; they just hit the button that corresponds with the action they want to do. The buttons even have little displays in them that the streamer can customize for easy recognition on the fly.

While troubleshooting what I thought was a DisplayPort issue with my Samsung Odyssey G8, I switched to HDMI using the cable marked "HDMI 2.1," which matches my display's spec. The panel lit up, the resolution was correct, and at first glance, nothing seemed wrong, but when I noticed the refresh rate was capped well below the panel's advertised 4K 240Hz spec, I knew the cable was at fault. Upon inspecting the rest of my HDMI cable collection, I noticed most cables I own aren't capable of the top-end of HDMI 2.1 spec, despite the fact that they came bundled with HDMI 2.1-capable devices.