Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 139, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, barbecue sauce, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Johnny Knoxville and Google Zero and the history of the bicycle, @all-ing everyone in all my WhatsApp chats just because I can now, rereading There Will Come Soft Rains because this week is when it happens, seeing if Sabbath can help fix my screentime problems, once again moving everything around in my home office, eating altogether too much of the fabulous Trader Joe's snack mix, testing th …Read the full story at The Verge.

It's time to get back into school, and here at XDA, we're ready to help you make the most of the upcoming term. School is never easy, which is largely the point, but it can quickly feel overwhelming to get through a seemingly never-ending stream of projects, lectures, and social events. It's also incredibly easy to get distracted and achieve absolutely nothing for a few hours, which is why you should turn an old PC into a home lab before getting through the first week of computer science.

I started self-hosting because I was tired of paying separate subscriptions for cloud storage, media streaming, and every other app I used regularly. Running these services on my own hardware gave me control over my data while removing several recurring bills. I still had to buy the hardware and pay for electricity, but the cost wasn’t much compared to the subscriptions, and at least I owned the infrastructure.

When I think back to features I really liked about earlier Pixel smartphones, one key feature always comes to mind: Active Edge.

When you’re building a Network-Attached Storage, you’ve got quite a few options at your disposal. You can opt for a pre-built chassis if you want a simple and straightforward setup, though its first-party distribution and a lack of customization options makes it a bit of a problem for hardcore users. Or, you can go all out and build a custom backup workstation that’s outfitted with a dedicated HBA, high-speed network card, and dozens of HDDs.

Obsidian is probably one of the best note-taking apps out there, but it's not open-source, which is fine, there are perfectly good reasons for that. But a part of the Obsidian user base has always wanted a properly open-source alternative, one that isn't half-finished or abandoned. So when SoloMD popped up as MIT-licensed and Markdown-native with a built-in AI panel, it seemed worth a look.

If you're as big a fan of e-ink displays as I am, you'll likely share my desire to see people create e-ink versions of common gadgets. As such, when I saw that someone had created their own e-ink watch, I knew I had to check it out. Not only does this watch come with over 20 faces, but the creator has stated that they hope to get the source code and STL files uploaded soon.

Printers are already annoying enough to work with without your operating system making things worse. For a while now, KDE Plasma has had an annoying issue where attempting to print a document on an unavailable printer would cause it to fail silently. Fortunately, the next version of KDE Plasma, 6.8, will actually tell you when something goes wrong.

Cute name, especially if it were a wookiee. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Finding a good laptop under $500 was hard enough before RAMageddon. They nearly always had cheap hardware and underpowered, often outdated chips. That's what made the MacBook Neo so disruptive: It offered great build quality and good-enough performance starting at $599. Windows laptops couldn't touch it. Even though it's gone up to $699, it's still the laptop to beat.So when little-known Chinese brand Chuwi announced a $450 Windows laptop with an aluminum build and a brand-new Intel Wildcat Lake processor, it sounded too good to be true.It is.Chuwi UniBookScore: 3ProsConsIt's $450Tons of ports for a small laptop (though none are very …Read the full story at The Verge.

There's nothing worse than a power outage wrecking your favorite tech products or, even worse, wiping out your data. It's not common, but it can happen, which is why you should protect your products with a battery backup if you can.

My previous experience with running local AI models taught me to keep my expectations modest. I'd mostly deferred to them for simple stuff that I didn't want to send to the cloud: autocomplete in VS Code, boilerplate generation, and easy tasks that are hard to screw up. For a while, I thought that was about as good as it gets for running AI at home.

The Nitecore NB10000 Gen 4 power bank is a great option for endurance athletes and backpackers. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge There's two things you should know about me, your intrepid reviewer: I hate the feature creep associated with modern power banks, and I love shaving grams off the gear I carry when backpacking, bikepacking, and trail running. So imagine my delight when Nitecore released a new generation of its ultralight NB10000 battery. After a few weeks with it I can confidently say: Haribo be damned!The $83.95 NB10000 Gen 4 weighs just 146 grams, according to my scale, and measures 1.45 x 11.6 x 4.68cm (0.57 x 4.57 x 1.84 inches), according to Nitecore's spec sheet. That makes it the lightest and most compact 10,000mAh power bank I can find. Even when …Read the full story at The Verge.