My smart home was a mess until I gave it a brain
…Related I monitor my PC with Home Assistant, and it's a bigger deal than I realized From task manager to a fully automated digital nervous system. A smarter home should give…
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Stop upgrading your CPU for media server transcoding; a used GPU does it better
…Modern Intel processors have Intel Quick Sync that supports AV1, has lower power consumption, and handles tone mapping better than older NVENC generations. My old PC doesn’t support modern Quick Sync…
A used office PC is the best media center upgrade I've made in years
…A laptop is not meant to stay plugged in and running all the time, and dealing with battery drain and power management quickly becomes frustrating. So I moved to a NAS, which…
You need these 6 self-hosted tools if you value your privacy
…It supports pretty much every audio, image, and document extension you could ever need, though some of the obscure ones can only be accepted as input files. For folks who’ve got…
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I spent weeks chasing a DisplayPort problem that HDMI solved in seconds
…It has better bandwidth than the HDMI of its era, native VRR before HDMI caught up, and there's no royalty funny business or weird treatment of Linux drivers. When I upgraded…
AMD shipped Nvidia's new AI laptop over a year ago, and the software is finally catching up
…the latest Linux-side quality release focused on inference performance and stability for Instinct GPUs, while AMD’s Radeon and Ryzen documentation separately lists ROCm 7.2.1 support for Radeon RX…
I connected my local LLM to Home Assistant through MCP, and now my smart home manages itself
…And that’s just the apps that natively support LLM integrations. Once I started setting up MCP servers, I was able to integrate LLMs with everything from my NAS OS to my…
I blamed my NAS for slow streaming until I realized what transcoding was actually doing
…I've owned AMD Embedded NAS boxes without hardware support, and some Intel ones as well. I haven't used a Qualcomm NAS for a hot minute, so check for support if…
Running Proxmox on my ASUS NUC 14 Pro Plus taught me where mini PCs still fall short
Jeff Butts May 20, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system…
I change these 5 storage settings on every new PC build, and they prevent headaches later
…Samsung and Crucial both offer bootable ISOs that can update firmware without a working OS, which is the cleanest option if you're willing to deal with the UEFI and secure boot…