Blogroll

You might think that storage is expensive and scarce today, but kids these days have no idea what it is like to scrounge every kilobyte you can. Which is why a floppy disk hack from the early '90s promising twice your data seemed too good to be true. In a lot of cases, it was.

If you store your 3D printer filament on a shelf or out in the open, chances are you’re storing it wrong. If you live in a very dry climate, that might be fine, but for those in more humid environments, the moisture in the air is likely what’s ruining your 3D printing projects—here’s how to fix it.

What I've learned over the last 15+ years of paying internet bills is that it doesn't matter what kind of gear you have, how many devices you run, or which settings you've optimized. Ultimately, if your internet service provider (ISP) is bad, you'll never have a stable connection.

How often do you replace your phone? For over a decade, I've been on a two-year cycle on a phone contract. With my last phone, and iPhone 14 Pro, I lengthened that to three years. Now my three years are up, but I don't feel any need to upgrade to a new phone.

When your smart home goes down, all those clever automations that make your life easier stop working. There are some handy tricks that homelab users often use that help keep Home Assistant running or minimize the impact if it does go down.

Want to do more with the Linux terminal? You might not instinctively put videos and the command line together, but with FFmpeg you can actually do a lot with a video file just by typing a simple command in your terminal.

Your physical Ethernet port has lasted the test of time despite slowly getting phased out. Lots of modern laptops and smaller PCs don't even have this familiar connector anymore, and some people may not know what Ethernet is. This can make people think a wired connection is just old news, something slow and clunky from the dial-up days. We will show you that your computer's often-ignored Ethernet port is actually a hidden Swiss Army knife. It can make dedicated high-speed links for moving files between devices, give power to remote equipment, and let you set up advanced networks way beyond just getting online.

Twin Peaks remains one of the most iconic television shows of all time, marking a major cultural shift and creative transition in TV between the 1980s and 1990s. The show took the familiar formula of the classic murder mystery that was popular at the time and flipped it on its head by purposefully obscuring the murderer and blending unexpected elements of surrealism and horror into it.

Pennsylvania has become the latest state to propose legislation to fight dynamic pricing.

The state's Senate Bill 1205 would prohibit "unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce," namely, promoting or engaging in dynamic pricing. In the bill, dynamic pricing refers to changing the prices of essential goods or services within a 24-hour period based on demand or other factors, including the use of artificial intelligence.

Dynamic pricing is a practice that's become more common among retailers in recent years. Wendy's walked back the decision to engage in it in 2024 after backlash, but apps like Uber have "surged" prices during busier times for a while now.

A similar practice is surveillance pricing, which uses customers' behaviors and characteristics to set different costs for the same items. And algorithmic pricing uses data — sometimes generalized data, such as when demand is highest, and other times personalized data, such as one's demographic — to determine cost.

In November, New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act went into effect. This law requires most businesses that engage in algorithmic pricing to have a clear disclaimer near the price stating, "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA."

Other states considering legislation concerning surveillance pricing are Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, according to the Arizona Capitol Times.

In December, food delivery service Instacart ended its controversial price tests following a Consumer Reports investigation that found that it priced the same products differently for different customers, sometimes as much as 23 percent. But that hasn't stopped the likes of Sony from experimenting with dynamic pricing.

Android phones have a lot in common with computers. They have a file system, support for keyboards and mice, advanced multitasking, and even a full-fledged desktop mode. One thing Android doesn’t have, however, is a native clipboard. Thankfully, Gboard can fix that.

Linux is famously customizable, and when you hear its perks discussed, you'll usually see mentions of "flexibility" and "personalization" in the conversation. Despite those strengths, I've gotten tired of customizing my Linux PCs.

Arch Linux has a reputation for being brutally hard to install and maintain. That reputation isn’t wrong—but don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s the final boss of Linux distributions. Here are three distros that are a lot harder than Arch—reserved for truly advanced users who deeply understand how Linux works.

There are plenty of problems with using smart bulbs in your home. One of the most frustrating things is that if the light switch is off, your smart bulb won't work at all. Smart switches solve this problem, but there are some things smart bulbs can give you that smart switches can't.

Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite genres (big surprise), but for most of my life the movies in these genres always felt like they had less substance than the SF&F books I devoured over the years.

Indonesia just announced a ban on social media for anyone under 16, following a similar ban in Australia.

On Friday, Indonesia's minister of communication and digital affairs, Meutya Hafid, said in a speech shared online that the ban will begin on March 28. The rationale, according to a translation by the New York Times, is due to perceived threats of pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and social media addiction.

On March 28, children's accounts on "high-risk" platforms — including X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Roblox, and livestreaming app Bigo Live — will begin to be deactivated. There aren't many details about how this will take place.

The announcement comes after Indonesia lifted a ban on Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok at the start of February. The country initially blocked Grok due to safety concerns and said it will continue to monitor its guardrails.

This is also happening after Australia banned social media for children under 16 last year. Elsewhere, such as in the U.S. and UK, age-verification laws have been enacted in an attempt to restrict minors' access to content "harmful to minors," namely pornography. A landmark trial about social media addiction is also underway in the U.S.

These days, it takes a special trick to silence a noisy hard drive (HDD). And if not for this unfortunate patent war and lawsuit, we may have had a proper solution that could have kept our HDDs quiet, or at least quieter.

Memory card slots on flagship phones are a thing of the past and are unlikely to return. So if you want extra storage on your phone, your main option is to choose a higher capacity when you first buy it. But I go a different way. I still buy the base model, and then expand the storage by plugging in an external SSD. It might sound strange, but it actually works pretty well.

The best way to learn stats and data science is to actually do it. And to do it, you need datasets. One good place to find them is Kaggle. Here's how I find, download, and explore Kaggle datasets.

In my role as a content creator, I’ve tested more apps, platforms, and tools in the name of productivity than I care to count. For my daily work, I rely on open-source tools that help me move faster and get more done. They’re fast, flexible, and have no subscriptions or fees.

Do you own a powerful GPU but barely use it anymore? Are you feeling guilty of watching expensive hardware sit idle? Well, you don't need to play video games to get your money's worth from your GPU. Here are five ways I've repurposed my RTX GPU after quitting PC gaming—and they've genuinely improved how I work and live.