Technology

Gboard has been my go-to Android keyboard for years, but lately, I’ve found myself wondering whether I’m really getting the best typing experience. Customization feels limited, privacy can be a concern, and some features I’d like to have simply aren’t there. None of these issues is a deal-breaker on its own, but together they made me curious about what else was available.

Mention the term "VPN" and most people picture a subscription app that hides their location and encrypts their browsing. Your router's built-in VPN does something different, though: it lets you tunnel back into your own home network from anywhere in the world.

Filmmaker Mode, created by UHD Alliance, is often considered the gold standard picture mode for your 4K TVs. It promises a viewing experience as close as possible to what a filmmaker intended by preserving the right aspect ratio, colors, and frame rates, and by removing unwanted post-processing.

Obsidian has always made waves in the note-taking space, competing with rivals like Notion. While the idea of building your second brain with Obsidian seems fascinating, it does require some effort upfront. Whether it's playing around with hundreds of plugins, tweaking frontmatter, or exploring Graph nodes before you even start writing a 200-word note, the setup can become overwhelming for many.

My favorite app store for Android isn't the Play Store—it's F-Droid. I find this repository of open-source software to be a more reliable way to discover new apps that I actually want to use. But I have a problem with how F-Droid looks. If the design also puts you off, this is thankfully an easily solvable problem.

If you haven't already guessed from the dollar amount and the distro's logo, I'm talking about Omarchy. It’s the new Linux distro developed by DHH — the guy behind Ruby on Rails. Now, version one actually dropped back in June 2025, but it really took off with its fourth major release, Omarchy Quattro, released August 2026.

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of 3D models out there to choose from. I decided to 3D print some of the top models on Thingiverse, one of the gold-standard model websites, to see what I thought of them. Here's how I rank the top models from Thingiverse.

Congratulations, you made it to the weekend! The Canadian rock band Loverboy knew what they were talking about when they sang, "Everybody's working for the weekend." So many people use the weekends for some rest and relaxation after a long work week. If you're spending some time on the couch, stream a show that you can finish before Monday rolls around.

You may have read the term "force-canceling subwoofers" in the specification sheets of some sort of device like a laptop or Bluetooth speaker, but what does that mean? Is this just another cool-sounding marketing term, or is this subwoofer design worth paying for?

What if you could replace your huge desktop PC with a mini PC that's a fraction of the size and costs a fraction of the price?

Cantonese is spoken by more than 80 million people on Earth, and also evidently by one nonexistent actress who lives inside the computer.

The southeastern Chinese dialect made a surprise appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, a talk show hosted by British TV personality Piers Morgan. Morgan was "interviewing" Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated actress who has become more or less synonymous with AI-generated performers over the past year or so.

During the interview, after being asked a question by very-much-real actor Tom Conti, Norwood glitched out mid-sentence and switched from English to Cantonese.

After the brief bit of Cantonese (which I cannot personally translate for you), Morgan asked the AI what went wrong, and the AI offered a response in the correct language.

"It seems I had a little hiccup there … sometimes my wires get a bit crossed," the AI program said. "That was a bit of a curveball even for me. It’s usually a pretty smooth ride, but sometimes these things happen."

Norwood was created by a production group called Particle6. The co-founder of Particle6, Eline van der Velden, gave something of an explanation to Deadline.

"Tilly can be a bit of a show-off — I’m guessing she just wanted to show her language skills as most of her interviews to date have been in English," van der Velden said. "She is autonomous after all."

Perhaps they should reconsider the autonomous part.

Netflix has had no shortage of big shows this year, but a few have clearly pulled ahead of the rest. From returning favorites to new mysteries that quickly found an audience, some titles have managed to turn strong debuts into millions of views within just a few months.

In a world of on-demand content, I have been longing for some nostalgia, so I decided to turn my Plex server into a TV station. Accessible on my local network, and even remotely, I can now "tune in" to a custom-curated TV station, commercials and all. Here's how I did it.

Many of us choose to believe that the things we put in our house will outlast us, and the same is true of smart home devices. The truth is that some of these devices have much shorter lifespans than we’re comfortable admitting.

Smart doorbells have evolved into high-tech security tools, but Wi-Fi and battery-powered models often bring headaches like weak signals and constant charging. Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) doorbells offer a more reliable, secure, and hassle-free alternative—perfect for anyone seeking a smarter upgrade.

Android 17 has been available for a couple of months, and it’s been rolled out to many of the most recent devices. This is sneakily one of the best updates Google has rolled out in recent years. Make sure you’re taking advantage of all the new features.

Most people have a drawer somewhere in their house filled with cables, adapters, and small gadgets they haven't touched in months. Don't let the spring cleaning mood take you from your PC and convince you to throw it all out during a cleanup. There are very few things that are actually too outdated to keep. Some of that gear isn't obsolete; it's just waiting for the moment you actually need it.

It's easy to think that big, unilateral, seemingly bone-headed (Apple would say "brave") decisions are only made by big closed-source OS vendors like Microsoft and Apple. If only!

Look, I'll be the first to blame my ISP whenever possible. (In my defense, I have ISP-inflicted trust issues, so I have a bit of an excuse there). But sometimes, the ISP should be allowed to say: "It's not me, it's you."

I'm one of those people who really cares about how datasets are laid out in Excel. That's partly because I'm a bit obsessive, but it's mainly because getting the structure right makes my life much easier down the line. I've lost count of how many times I've had to reshape an imported or received dataset, but Excel for Microsoft 365 gives me a surprisingly easy way to do it.