Blogroll

Terminal apps have a reputation for being too minimal, confusing, and useful only for technical workflows. And while that might have been true a few years ago, modern terminal apps are a lot more intuitive and functional, covering plenty of everyday computing use cases. This makes them excellent lightweight alternatives to typical desktop apps. In fact, here are five TUI (terminal user interface) apps that have completely replaced GUI (graphical user interface) apps in my workflow.

Across the nation, there appears to be growing frustration with the explosion of AI-generated advertising plaguing small-business storefronts and restaurant interiors. Last Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, mandating that all ads, from million-dollar television commercials to printed flyers passed out on the street, contain a disclosure label in the same format as the ad itself.

The purpose of the bill is to combat false or misleading advertising, which is much easier to engage in with the help of AI-generated content. The bill, as introduced, states:

"An advertiser may not create and disseminate or cause to be created and disseminated an advertisement that uses synthetic content in a manner that creates a false consumer perception about the nature, origin or authenticity of the goods or services being advertised, without clear and conspicuous disclosure. A disclosure under this section must state that the advertisement contains content that was modified or generated using artificial intelligence."

And because it applies to all advertising shown in Pennsylvania, it will impact, for example, television commercials created in other states or advertisements made in other countries, so the consequences of this bill will be far-reaching. 

According to reporting by The Verge, though, critics of the bill wonder how effective it will be, given the imprecise nature of some of the language used. As The Verge notes, language like "significantly modified" is subjective and open to wide ranges of interpretation, while extensive exceptions made for "parody, satire, commentary, or criticism" offer advertisers legal wiggle room. 

Whatever the ultimate impacts of the bill or the future interpretations by the court system, it represents another attempt by elected representatives to respond to the overwhelming will of voters to bring artificial intelligence under legislative control, so we expect this bill to initiate a trend.

I'm no stranger to finding weird things for my USB drives to do, such as repurposing them as "rescue drives." But this year, with the RAM shortage spilling over to every area of the PC market, I've found new ways to make good use of just about every piece of tech that I own. From a tiny file server to a retro gaming console, here's what I used my USB flash drives for in 2026.

I switched to Jellyfin from Plex some time ago, and I haven't looked back. While Jellyfin gives me control over my media collection, its clients don't always feel designed for people who run their own servers. The free and open-source Moonfin client supports Jellyfin and Emby and was built specifically with homelabbers in mind.

Microsoft has spent what feels like years pushing Copilot updates into Excel, but for me, it's the little usability improvements that make the biggest difference when you use the app every day. A small change to a dialog box can save you a few clicks, remove an annoying extra step, or make a good habit easier to stick to. One recent change to the way Excel creates tables is a good example, and it's something I've wanted for years.

I regularly need to move files between my Linux PC and my Android phone, but there are surprisingly few good options. You can manually attach your phone to the PC, email the files to yourself, or use a cloud storage service, but those options are either clunky or involve more steps than I'd like. KDE Connect is great for transferring a few files now and then, but it isn't designed as a sync program.

Want to 3D print items that live outside? One option is to throw caution to the wind, print with whatever material you like, and seal everything up with an aftercoat. Unfortunately, this requires time and money, and things can still wear with time.

Android users, listen up: Google is quietly verifying and attaching your phone number across all your signed-in Google accounts, according to reporting from Android Authority. The policy change happened between August and October of 2025, under the "Verify phone numbers automatically" setting, which must now be opted out of rather than opted into.

What does this mean in practice? All Google accounts used on your phone are going to be associated with your phone number, whether you want them to be or not, including accounts you add in the future. Furthermore, because Google periodically attempts to re-verify phone numbers, you could incur carrier charges associated with that verification process.

It might seem like a shady practice, especially because it was set to function by default, but there's also a good rationale for allowing Google to do this, as it improves the sharing functionality across your Google accounts, and makes things like phone recovery much easier, in the event that you lose your phone and want to restore a new phone to the old one's settings. There's also a slew of quality-of-life features, from faster sign-ins to emergency location services, that work better or faster with this feature enabled. 

Of course, there's also an incentive for Google as well, since connecting all your Google accounts via phone number helps to optimize their ad performance, allowing them to show you more targeted advertisements across your devices or accounts. 

If you do decide you would rather opt out of this functionality on your Android phone, navigate to Settings, select Google then All Services and choose Privacy & Security. Once here, you need to select the "Phone number verification" page and de-select "Verify phone numbers automatically" to disable this feature.

When people think of homelabbing, they often picture endless racks of servers and tangled cables. In reality, a $50 refurbished office PC can be all you really need to start self-hosting apps on a home server. But before spending your money on one, run through this checklist to make sure you're actually getting a good deal rather than buying e-waste.

Spooky season has officially kicked off, and this month, there are a lot of scares in store for Netflix viewers. From classic horror hits to new-age thrillers, the platform's horror collection is extensive enough to keep your watch list loaded until Halloween.

I don't know about you, but I have more bills, invoices, bank statements, and healthcare documents than I know what to do with. Finding a specific detail, understanding a complicated term, or comparing this month's charges with last month's can take up more time than I'd like, not to mention the frustration involved. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can make this much easier, but I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of handing my financial, medical, or other sensitive information over to big tech companies just to get a few questions answered. I have enough concerns about how much data these companies collect without voluntarily giving them more.

When it comes to wireless technologies, most people are aware of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the various cellular standards. However, when you want to send messages or information, there are actually tons of alternative radio-based digital technologies that can get the job done.

We're less than a month away from the release of a new iteration of the Apple TV, packed with the kind of computing power once reserved for desktops, so it only makes sense that it should learn some new tricks.  

Yesterday, we learned about one of those new tricks when Instagram was re-listed on the Apple App Store as available for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. But this isn't the first time Instagram has flirted with the big screen. Initial testing of the new form factor began in late 2025 on Amazon Fire TVs and rolled out to Samsung TVs in mid-2026, so Apple is actually the last to adopt the new TV app.

The most visible change as part of this new TV adoption is Instagram having to offer not only the portrait-style videos common to most phone and tablet designs but also horizontal, landscape videos to accommodate TV aspect ratios. As part of its migration to streaming services and smart TVs, Instagram is also exploring new video form factors, including longer-form video, episodic videos, live streaming, and even subscriptions, which would bring it into closer competition with YouTube, the internet's premier video content service. 

Meta, parent company of Instagram, is betting that its famously addictive short-form video content will translate well to the big screen, where it can be enjoyed more communally, and it's working closely with creators to make the experience of uploading or streaming on Instagram as painless as possible. 

It might seem like a risky bet, but if Meta can grab even a fraction of YouTube's massive audience, it will more than pay off.

Some of the best software in the world is produced entirely by volunteers and released for free. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on many of these tools to stay productive and in control of my Mac.

As a long-term Android user, MagSafe was the biggest source of envy for me when looking at iPhones. Built-in magnets inside smartphones open the door to a million creative accessories, eliminating the need for 3M adhesive or annoying clamps. It is a beautiful solution to a hundred different accessory-related problems.

Did you know that 3D printing and woodworking are very similar? They're actually way more similar than you might think. I've woodworked for longer than I've 3D printed, and these are the tricks that I think you should steal to take your 3D printing to the next level.

File systems are something we rarely think about anymore, but in the early days of Windows, they could make a surprisingly big difference in how much of your pricey hard drive you actually got to use. FAT16 had one incredibly frustrating quirk with how it handled cluster sizes. Its inefficiency effectively punished you for buying a bigger hard drive, as it could leave you wasting much of the storage you paid for.

I wasn't particularly satisfied with the Googlebook launch. As a tech writer and product reviewer, I was basically obligated to spend two weeks with a product that felt grossly unfinished and super confused about its identity. But one feature, the Glowbar, just can't escape my mind.

Finding a good alternative app is the easy part. The hard part is deciding what to do with everything you're leaving behind. Years of OneNote notebooks can hold everything from recipes and saved links to work notes you still need. The good news is that moving them into Joplin is easier than you might expect.

Do our phone cameras really record what they see, or do they embellish? We're living in the age of computational photography, after all, and with modern AI technology, it's possible to take a raw photo and turn it into anything. It's like applying an Instagram AI filter to your memories.