XDA Developers

Managing a self-hosted server today is a lot of fun. We can use Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby to stream our Blu-ray and DVD collections throughout the house and access them remotely. However, sometimes I miss the simpler days of traditional TV with a guide. With Retro TV projects, I can turn my Jellyfin library into my own TV network — similar to using Tunarr or Ersatz TV for Plex.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Valve's efforts are primarily why Linux gaming is even a thing these days (even if Valve only took the plunge because it really wanted to escape Windows 8). The Proton layer allows developers to continue making titles for Windows only, and for Linux gamers to play those titles with minimal to no problems. Now, a new update to the Steam Beta client makes running Windows games—and, by extension, apps—on Linux a lot easier.

Oliver Sauter (@olivers_tools) has ported Nintendo 64's classic Super Mario 64 to any web browser, complete with multiplayer that supports up to 12 players. If you showed me this latest old-school game port in 1996 when I was 6 years old, I think my mind would have been absolutely blown.

Over the summer, I did what any homelabber would with OpenClaw and gave it its own Proxmox container. I kept the Gateway on loopback, reached it over Tailscale, and bolted a dashboard on top; for a while, I had the agent everyone was talking about. It was great, right up until it needed me again.

I definitely can't say I had a normal route from Windows to Linux. Okay, sure, I started where everyone recommends you start, with Linux Mint. But once I was tired of that, I did research into which distro would be best for me to jump to next. Then, after seeing that the internet was ready to recommend every distro under the sun, I got decision paralysis and decided to just start installing things until something felt right.

ModRetro is back with a new version of its Game Boy-inspired Chromatic, and this time, the handheld is transparent. On top of that, the company has slashed $50 off Chromatic's price, bringing it down to $150 from $200. New transparent colors include Smoke, Green, Purple, and Red.

Most people know their home Wi-Fi network doesn't operate in isolation. Seeing neighboring networks on a network list makes it abundantly clear that your Wi-Fi is co-existing with many neighboring networks, inhabiting the same spectrum. So, when your Wi-Fi network goes awry, you immediately blame your neighbors and re-examine your wireless channels.

There's a boring part to photo editing that doesn't get as much hype as the fun creative bits. Before you get near a color grade or effect, there's usually a batch of shots that need cropping to one ratio, and photos taken on different days still need to look like they came from the same batch. This is exactly what Lightroom is for - it's for doing the same thing over and over to twenty images.

The flash storage inside of every SSD has gotten more expensive quarter-over-quarter for the past year, and the forecasts say it isn't close to being over. This has caused a lot of home lab builders to look towards the enterprise market for storage deals in hopes of scoring a deal. Price is absolutely a valid reason to look for pre-owned hardware of any kind, but enterprise drives come with an additional layer of power-loss protection that can be worth paying for in its own right.

Getting locked out of your OS and being thrown into a boot loop is one of the biggest fears when it comes to personal computing, and when we're talking about Microsoft Windows, there are quite a number of ways you can end up in that awkward place. Maybe it was a bad update, a power-loss event mid-write, or a corrupted boot record. No matter the reason, this specific problem hurts everyone the same.

Generating alerts from my home lab and its related services was always done via Proxmox for me. It was the simplest, included in the OS, and covered what I thought I needed. It generated a notification event, rendered it into an email, and handed it to Postfix, which delivered it in well under a second, but that's exactly the problem. Email isn't the most optimal way to get a notification in front of me—it's accessible through any device, but I have to be looking for it, and the push notificatio

When we think of increasing performance with existing components, we often think about strategies like overclocking, increasing power limits, and replacing an existing cooling solution. While overclocking does have its merits, there's a far easier way to increase performance without potentially sacrificing the longevity of your parts: undervolting.

Every desktop PC I've owned since 2003 has run some version of Microsoft Windows, which means I've lived through Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10, along with the Games for Windows - Live era. For the last four years, I've gamed exclusively on PCs running Windows 11.

I spent my formative years playing my favorite games on an old CRT, and I've gone to great lengths to recapture that feeling in modern playthroughs. There was always something missing, though.

I have an old Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, which makes it a little too capable to leave unused. So I put it to work as a central file server for my family instead of spending money on a dedicated NAS.

I've used my fair share of productivity apps and integrated development environment (IDE) offerings, but I always seem to eventually switch back to Obsidian, especially for documentation and brainstorming. It's my go-to app for creating content and synchronizing data across devices, all thanks to one community plugin called LiveSync. It's such a good plugin that it allows me to save just shy of $100 each year on hosting my vaults on Obsidian's own servers. All I needed was my NAS.

HDMI cables have a strange reputation. One day, the cable you've been using for years works perfectly. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you start seeing tiny white sparkles, brief black screens, flickering, or the dreaded "No Signal" message. Naturally, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the cable itself has finally given up. Sometimes, it actually has, but HDMI cables don't quite "go bad" in the way most of us imagine.

I've made no secret of my feelings toward Adobe products, especially with the ever-rising cost of Creative Cloud, but I also can't deny that Adobe is incredibly good at nearly everything it does. Premiere Pro is no exception. When it comes to video editing, few applications are as widely known or used, but it's far from the only option.

It has been quite a dramatic day over in the KDE community. Earlier today, we reported that a discussion about AI-generated content guidelines devolved into a community fight, ending with the thread creator locking it and asking everyone to take 24 hours to cool off. Now, a sub-community has made itself known, asking for KDE developers to support a full ban on all generative AI.