My entire home lab cost less than a new GPU, and it does more for me too
…When the time comes to add another drive, slot in an HBA card for more SATA connectivity, or expand RAM to handle more VMs, your old gaming PC probably has the room…
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Mesh Wi-Fi is causing the exact problems it promised to solve
Jasmine Mannan May 3, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
Google just made Gemini and NotebookLM the same tool, here's what that actually changes
…that applies as much to their AI products as to anything else. NotebookLM was oddly siloed from Gemini despite making natural sense as a connected product. Notebooks doesn't reinvent either tool…
The best smart home upgrade I ever made cost $5 and required zero apps
Jasmine Mannan May 19, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
I replaced cloud LLMs with local models running off a Proxmox LXC, and the performance trade-off was worth it
…After migrating through a bunch of setups, I’ve honed in on a local LLM server running on my old Proxmox workstation, and it works surprisingly well for everything from simple prompting…
Home Assistant slows down over time, but there's a nuclear option most people don't realize
Jasmine Mannan Jun 9, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
I finally see why everyone removes Windows bloatware - here's my complete removal list
…Microsoft's AI chatbot, Copilot, is again an unnecessary addition to Windows for users who rely on web-based AI tools . And the worst part is, you have two: Copilot and Microsoft…
Your router's parental controls are security theater, and here's the firewall rule that actually works
Jasmine Mannan May 24, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
Curtain automation is fun, but the weird smart home projects are where things get really useful
Jasmine Mannan Apr 25, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Jasmine is Software and PC Hardware Author at XDA with years of tech reporting experience ranging from AI chatbots right down to gaming…
I replaced NotebookLM with this free tool that uses my local LLMs
…speech facility isn’t available for Ollama or OpenAI-compatible (not to be confused with native OpenAI) models, but it’s entirely possible to connect TTS tools to Open Notebook via the…