Quick Links I love gaming on my PC because there’s a wider selection of games, and I have a desktop that is more powerful than any console on the market. Despite this, I exclusively play games using a controller and avoid using my keyboard and mouse. That may sound blasphemous, but I have some good reasoning. 1The Pinky Problem I remember the days when my fingers could dance on the keyboard like a virtuoso pianist, pinky poised over Ctrl, thumb on the Space bar, the rest gliding effortlessly....

Summary Moving home is stressful and time-consuming, and starting your smart home setup from scratch only adds to the list of things to do. Despite this, I’m grabbing the bull by the horns and taking the opportunity to build a more customized, flexible, and powerful setup. I’m Rejecting the Easy Approach The easiest approach would be to fool my devices into not realizing they’ve moved home. Give the new wireless router the same SSID and password as the old one, label each room with the same name, and put the same devices in each....

You don’t need to be a programmer to use Linux. It isn’t as technically daunting as people make it out to be. In reality, it’s super user-friendly, highly customizable, and offers many unique features to enhance your workflow, whether you’re a techie or not. Do You Need to Be a Programmer to Use Linux? The misconception that Linux is only for programmers stems from its early days—back in the 1990s when Linux was primarily targeted at programmers and technically skilled users who could contribute to its development....

Windows 11 has been around for a long time now, but plenty of people have stuck with Windows 10 instead. Microsoft has been offering continuous support for Windows 10 over the years, but that will soon end. If you don’t upgrade to 11 before support ends, your computer might be at risk. Why Microsoft Ending Support for Windows 10 Matters Let’s talk about why Windows 10 users will face a problem just because Windows 10 support from Microsoft goes away....

Microsoft has published a new interview with the head of Windows, Pavan Davuluri, where he shared some interesting details about how Windows is going to change in the future. He wants Windows to more closely integrate with AI technology, unsuprisingly. Davuluri said that computing will become “more ambient, more pervasive, continue to span form factors, and certainly become more multi-modal in the arc of time”. This means that the operating system is going to fundamentally change and will begin to prioritize new ways of interacting with your computer, like with your voice and by having the OS understand what’s on your screen at all times....

Summary Everyone has a favorite game or two that they just can’t get enough of. Even after playing through the main story and all the side quests, you just don’t want the game to end. Yearning for more, you turn to the modding scene, where modpacks promise a transformative experience in just a few clicks. What Are Modpacks? Modpacks (or “collections”) are relatively large collections of mods consolidated into a single package that makes it easy for players to install whole lists of mods at once....

Summary TheMotorola Razr (2024)flip phone has an interesting form factor and great features. It will be a hit with selfie-takers who want the highest-resolution images. Still, it feels like a phone that’s at least a generation away from fulfilling the promise of flip phones. I’m a fan of tablet-style flip phones, but even after using this new Razr, I’m still not sold on the clamshell design. During my testing, I found myself wishing I was using a traditional slab-style phone for some tasks....

Summary Now that massive TVs are relatively affordable, the draw of a projector is to create an even bigger image with a much smaller footprint. TheNomvdic P1000 4K UHD Home Projectordoes just that with up to a 180-inch 4K display in a compact and portable package. Best of all, it has a high enough brightness level to be used almost any time of the day. Nomvdic P1000 4K UHD Home Projector The fusion of 4K UHD resolution, 2,300 ANSI lumens, 125% Rec....

Microsoft has yet to release an Xbox Cloud Gaming app for iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. So, OneCast is solving the problem with its v3.0 update, available today. OneCasthas been around since 2018 and remains one of the best ways to stream Xbox games on Apple devices. That said, up until now, OneCast was exclusively a console-to-client solution—it supported local console streaming, it supported remote console streaming, but it couldn’t tap into Xbox Cloud Gaming....

Plex says that its updated app experience, which is slowly rolling out to users on select platforms, will not offer Watch Together functionality. However, the browser-based Plex web player will continue supporting Watch Together. Introduced in 2020, PlexWatch Togetherallows you to host remote viewing parties with friends or family. It automatically syncs the progress of a movie or show across multiple devices, and it ensures that all users can control the shared stream—if one user pauses the video to take a bathroom break, then the video will pause for every viewer in the party....

Summary Typically, Proton’s products are pretty useful. This one, though, I’m not sure what to think of it. Proton is the latest company to join the AI bandwagon with a new AI assistant—and really, I’m not sure anyone needs this. Proton has just announced Lumo, a new “privacy-first” AI assistant. It’s just like your regular, run-of-the-mill AI assistants, but it sticks to Proton’s strict privacy and security standards. The company states it maintains no server-side logs of user conversations—chat histories are stored on the user’s device using zero-access encryption, a security model already employed across Proton’s suite of products....

Apple’s migration to its own ARM-based silicon for Macs from x86 Intel chips has been a wild success. Apple managed to make chips that perform even better than the Intel chips the company was putting on its older MacBooks. But the PC world has largely stuck to x86, with a few sporadic ARM laptops here and there. Qualcomm wants to solve this once and for all and has now released the Snapdragon X Elite chip — which the company is pitching as an Apple Silicon killer....

Quick Links I was ready to purchase a new camera earlier this year, upgrading from my Sony a6500/a6000 setup that I’ve been running for several years. I chose to “upgrade” to a seven-year-old camera, but why? Can a 2018 Camera Still Be Good in 2025? While, in the world of tech, seven years can be like a lifetime, the world of cameras isn’t quite that way. Have there been advancements in camera technology since 2018?...