Blogroll

Cleaning up a messy Excel spreadsheet can easily take longer than building it in the first place. I wondered whether Copilot could take care of the tedious work for me, so I gave it a deliberately chaotic workbook and a simple prompt. But instead of simply fixing problems, much of its effort went into deciding which ones it shouldn't touch.

With the price of new cars constantly rising, it is becoming harder and harder to find spacious family crossovers without overspending. If you're willing to get something with a few miles on the clock, your options open up quite a lot. On top of this, with depreciation on EVs being very steep in the first couple of years, your budget can go even further if you're willing to make the swap over to an electric crossover.

Everything is becoming more expensive, including things that are supposed to be cheap.

The latest example is DeepSeek's AI services, as reported by Bloomberg. The Chinese AI firm sent a notice to users on Thursday warning of a "significant" price increase, though it did not specify just how significant it would be. DeepSeek has been known for its extremely cheap services relative to the competition, especially with regards to its western counterparts, so this is probably not the most welcome news among DeepSeek users.

To be more specific, DeepSeek currently charges less than a dollar per million input and output tokens, which is how AI services are sold to customers. By comparison, Anthropic's Fable 5 model charges $10 per million input and $50 per million output tokens. It was probably unsustainable for DeepSeek to continue charging so little compared to the competition, especially as the company plans to build a huge data center in Inner Mongolia.

But still, you can't count on anything staying cheap anymore. Not even AI, the thing that's making everything else expensive in the first place.

Thanks to the ability to easily add debit and credit cards for tap-to-pay, Google Wallet has become an irreplaceable part of daily life for many Android users. However, what many people don't realize is that while Google Wallet is great for payments, that's merely scratching the surface of all the things it can actually do.

Letterboxd is down for many users on Sunday, with the film-tracking app confirming service issues and asking users to be patient while its team works to restore access.

According to the outage tracker Downdetector, the majority of reported problems — 54 percent — involve logging in, while another 39% of users report trouble within the app itself; website issues account for just 4 percent of reports.

Letterboxd acknowledged the outage in a series of posts, telling followers its team was "aware of an outage affecting service" and pledging to restore access "as soon as possible." In a follow-up post, the company said it was continuing to work on a resolution, thanking users for their patience. The most recent update came at 12:02 p.m. CT.

No word yet on a cause or expected resolution time.

The command-line terminal is still one of the most popular features of Linux, even though graphical interfaces have been common in desktop computers for decades. There are a few reasons for the terminal to stick around, but if you’re new to the platform, you don’t need to worry about it.

While I have some pretty powerful servers in my homelab, my most important and useful server does just one thing: manages my network. Without it, my whole network goes down, my external services no longer work, and I can't VPN home. So, if my network manager goes down, nothing else matters—that's why it has to be the most robust server, and, therefore, the most simple.

For many years, I had a long commute to work. At one point, I was driving as far as 86 miles each way, which seems insane to me now, but I drove to where the work was. Spending that much time on the road also meant more chances for something to go wrong, whether it was a dead battery, a flat tire, or a minor problem that could leave me stranded.

Most people treat AI model comparisons like a horse race where one comes out ahead and the other becomes unusable or slow. That thinking falls apart quickly once you spend real time with models that were never competing for the same job. Gemma 4’s quantized models and Qwen 3.6 are good examples of this. One is built to run quietly on your own hardware without sending a single keystroke to an outside server. The other is built to sit inside a cloud environment and work through problems at a scale that would make a local machine sweat. Knowing which one you actually need changes everything about how useful each ends up being.

Not every 3D print will go to plan, regardless of what you do. Understanding the underlying cause of a bad print is crucial to correcting it and will help you avoid problems in the future.

Microsoft's (or rather, Mark Russinovich's) Sysinternals suite packs more than 70 utilities, each designed for a specific purpose and useful in different situations. While I used a number of them back in the day when I regularly fixed issues on other people's PCs, I rarely have a use for most of the tools on my own machine these days. That said, there are a few Sysinternals utilities that I consider indispensable for every Windows user, myself included.

In 2019, Amazon signed the Climate Pledge, aiming to help Earth's environmental health. In 2026, Amazon aims to set a record for the most air pollution emitted by a single power plant.

The New York Times reported that the company is building a new natural-gas-burning power plant in Pecos County, Texas, for a huge AI data center project. The plant, if built as planned, would emit approximately 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, making it among the largest emitters in the United States.

AI data centers are already known to have multiple huge downsides to their construction. Aside from their huge carbon emissions, they're also known for generating massive amounts of noise pollution, and they can raise utility bills for nearby residents if they use the local electrical grid. Amazon's new plant won't necessarily do the last thing, as it's providing its own power using natural gas, but the proposed carbon emissions would still be damaging to the environment.

Construction of the plant appears to be proceeding despite recent pushback from the Texas government on data centers. As for Amazon's Climate Pledge, a spokesperson told the NYT that, simply put, things change over time.

"The world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge," the spokesperson told the New York Times.

The NVIDIA Shield TV has had an amazing run. 11 years later, it's still more capable than some Amazon and Roku devices. It's easy to understand why, between the powerful hardware and the Android software that still receives updates. You could watch advanced 4K video, use it as a media server, and stream games from the cloud.

Replacing your phone's operating system with an aftermarket alternative has always come with compromises, but it used to feel like a hacky solution. That has changed. You can now install the latest version of custom ROMs like LineageOS and walk away with a phone that looks and feels as high-end as any other—without any AI gimmicks to boot.

If you’re like me, you’ve turned nearly everything in your house into a smart device. Whether it’s through a smart plug, a smart USB adapter, or replacing an appliance with its smart equivalent, almost everything in your home can be controlled remotely or with your voice.

When people are looking to take on a home improvement project, many are concerned about their return on investment (ROI). Do you want to invest in new windows, a bathroom remodel, or a kitchen project? Which one will add the most value to your home?

If you're using your Samsung Galaxy Watch for notifications, health tracking, and calling it a day, you're missing out on a lot of what it can do. That said, I don't necessarily blame you—many of these features are buried deep in accessibility menus, hidden behind obscure toggles, or tucked away in your phone's settings, making them genuinely hard to find. That's why I've rounded up five underrated Galaxy Watch features that deserve far more attention.

Proxmox VE has earned its reputation by bringing enterprise virtualization features into the homelab. You get KVM virtual machines, LXC containers, snapshots, clustering, and support for filesystems like ZFS. On paper, it looks like the perfect foundation for every self-hosted setup.

While my first experience of home audio was via vinyl records, the miraculous CD, or Compact Disc, was the gold standard music format of my childhood. I never liked how vinyl sounded or how annoying it was to operate. The first time I put on a pair of headphones and listened to a CD blew my mind. Crystal-clear stereo audio like I'd never heard it before practically suffused my soul.

Spinning hard drives have to spin those platters at some sort of speed, measured in RPM or Revolutions Per Minute, but they all seem to have standardized to a small group of specific numbers: 4,200 RPM, 5,400 RPM, 7,200 RPM, 10,000 RPM, and 15,000 RPM(!).