XDA Developers

The ThinkNode M5 got me into Meshtastic, and after carrying one around for a few weeks I started looking at what else could plug into the same network. Most of the answers point you at more dedicated nodes, which makes sense, but it also means committing to another single-purpose device sitting on a shelf if the mesh in your area never quite materializes. Elecrow sent me the CrowPanel Advance for Meshtastic for review recently, and that's exactly why it clicked: it's a Meshtastic node that doesn

The older I get, the more I realize that gaming has become one of the most powerful marketing terms in tech. Slap a few RGB strips onto something, add a black-and-red color scheme, throw in words like "pro" or "esports-ready," and suddenly people become willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing an experience that often doesn't meaningfully improve their games at all. In fact, sometimes, it actually makes things worse.

Since last year, I’ve been building my smart home using Home Assistant. The journey has been rewarding, and Thread was the last hurdle. So far, my Apple TV 4K has served as the accidental Thread Border Router. To move away from Apple’s HomeKit, I turned a Raspberry Pi 4 into an OpenThread Border Router.

Like many of us these days, I often have Claude Code running on some task or another while I'm doing other things. It's not quite my whole workflow (yet), but I'm enjoying seeing what it can do and vibe coding a few little bits and pieces that I haven't found another program to do. Claude Design is my fav new thing, because my design skills are non-existent, even if I can describe what I want fairly well.

As much as I adore self-hosted services, I still have to use cloud platforms for mission-critical services. For example, I don't plan to run Email servers locally anytime soon, as their overly complicated setup process and constant maintenance issues make them worse than cloud-based email providers.

The world of tech is often dominated by huge corporations constantly finding new ways to monetize their users, whether it's by directly charging users or by collecting and potentially selling their data. But in the midst of all that, there are a ton of fully free, open-source apps that can help you in your everyday life without those downsides. And there's a very good chance you've never heard of them.

When Anthropic dropped Claude Code, the tech world collectively lost its mind. Developers rushed to the terminal and treated the new command-line agent like the second coming of productivity. But as a tech writer who tests these platforms daily, I will let you in on a secret: I didn’t keep my $20 Pro subscription active for the developer hype.

Claude has been open on my screen pretty much all day for a while now. I've got it hooked up to Figma, Canva, and Affinity, I use it for research and design, and a few weeks ago I connected it to my Obsidian vault through the filesystem connector - which turned out to be way simpler than I'd assumed. No MCP setup needed, just point it at the vault folder path. Claude could now browse my notes, sort files into folders, and clean things up on request, all from within the chat space.

It finally happens: a smart plug goes offline, and you're not sure which one. You open your router dashboard and you're greeted by a list of devices with names like "ESP_88bc," "Android_4f91," and three separate entries that just say "Amazon Echo." You know one of those plugs controls the lamp in the office, but which IP address belongs to which physical device is anybody's guess. What should take two minutes turns into twenty, and you haven't even touched a cable yet. Your gear can be the smart

Some home lab services earn a dangerous reputation for being simple. You install them, point them at the right devices, confirm the dashboard loads, and then mentally file them under “handled.” That sounds comforting, especially when your home lab already has enough blinking lights, dashboards, containers, and mystery alerts demanding attention. The problem is that the services most often described as “set and forget” are usually the ones quietly sitting closest to the foundation.

My bookmarks are usually a mess because when I’m researching, the last thing I worry about is how neatly I organize them. I could be researching Obsidian and bookmarking its various features, then trying to connect the main ideas they share. So instead of erasing the folder, I moved it to NotebookLM to make sense out of it all. I thought I was going to get something I wouldn’t be able to work with, but I got a research partner who actually helps me make sense of it.

I think one of my most annoying grievances with Windows 11 is its right-click menus. For some reason, when moving from Windows 10 to 11, some right-click options remained, some got stuffed into a "Show more options" menu, and others still just flat-out didn't appear until you used the legacy right-click menu.

It's easy to assume that, if a program goes open-source, it's 100% safe to download. After all, if it were malicious, people would spot the bad code. Unfortunately, hackers do have ways to hijack supply chains and inject files that look identical in terms of the code, but still contain some nasty malware in the binaries themselves.

A

Building a Network-Attached Storage server from old hardware is the best way to repurpose systems that would otherwise gather dust into reliable backup solutions. While you could go for weaker systems released over a decade ago, most DIY NAS setups typically involve x86 machines capable of supporting at least a handful of storage drives.

After dedicating the better part of 2025 to rolling out Copilot across everything it owns, Microsoft is now on a huge quest to address Windows' major pain points in 2026. There's even a reported name for this initiative: Windows K2. It sounds like a new version of the OS, but in reality, it's the company's push to improve the OS they already have in a bid to regain user trust.

I was a very early adopter of the AM4 platform because, at the time, I was part of AMD's influencer team, received pre-release hardware, and was physically at the Zen launch event. At the time, it was a huge jump from the older Intel platform I'd been using, which had DDR3, PCIe 2.0, and a short expected lifespan because of Intel's release cadence. I used that hardware until very recently, and only upgraded when my daily tasks felt slower to accomplish.

I’ve been trying to build websites for quite some time now. The first website I built was a tech blog that I started as a passion project back in 2019. After that, I tried building a portfolio website, a few tools, and some other small projects, but I never really succeeded in getting things to the point I wanted. It usually takes a lot of effort just to get a site up and running.

My Linux journey started with Ubuntu as a test operating system. I played around with hypervisors to get any Linux or alternative OS working. Back then, it wasn't about learning it but simply discovering what a Windows alternative looks like. Slowly, it became a part of my college curriculum, and I used it on both college and personal computers. But today's Ubuntu is wildly different from what I tried 11 years ago. Its design, feature set, and overall package try to appeal to a bigger audience.

When Google first announced Gemini integration inside Google Maps, I honestly thought it was just another AI feature companies add because every app now needs “AI.” I expected a chatbot inside Maps and nothing more.