Technology

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(!).

It's hard to believe it, but the Google Pixel series has been around for nearly 10 years now. The Pixel 11 is just around the corner—and unfortunately for Google, early impressions aren't looking great.

While every 3D printer owner loves the “fun” projects, it’s the ones that make your life easier that have the most impact. These range from repairing household items and making chores easier, to providing cost-effective bespoke storage to help keep your house tidy.

Bear Grylls has a gift that few possess. The popular survivalist knows how to push people beyond what they think is possible. What's even more impressive is that those same people then open up to Grylls with complete honesty, revealing their most vulnerable selves.

Amazon's Kindle dominates the market, but that doesn’t mean that they are the best eReaders. There are other companies who are free to experiment with their products in ways that Amazon will not. The DuRoBo Krono is one of the more intriguing options to come out in the past year, and there is enough uniqueness here to capture even the most devout Kindle reader’s eye.

The days of every Android phone including a microSD card slot are ancient history. Of course, it’s possible to plug external storage into your phone’s USB-C port, and portable SSDs are becoming more common. However, they have one fatal flaw that people love to point out. I wanted to solve it.

When I first picked up a 5070 Ti, I did so with gaming in mind. I didn't anticipate constantly running into the VRAM ceiling.