I turned my dusty Chromecast into a $250 smart home hub replacement
Jasmine Mannan Apr 12, 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…
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VS Code is slowly becoming an operating system, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing
…VS Code today includes a file explorer, terminal, extension marketplace, UI framework, remote access layer, and increasingly, AI tooling. This reduces friction and makes workflows easier to manage across machines and environments…
I ran Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5 for the same local tasks, and one pulled miles ahead
…Want to stay in the loop with the latest in AI? The XDA AI Insider newsletter drops weekly with deep dives, tool recommendations, and hands-on coverage you won't find anywhere…
I tried Gemini's Daily Brief, and my morning app-hopping is over
…For that price, you get 200 GB of cloud storage and 2x higher Gemini usage limits than the free plan, so the price isn’t really just for Daily Brief. But if…
I've been running some of the biggest open-weight LLMs for free on Nvidia's cloud
…There are presumably rate limits somewhere, and you have to trust Nvidia with the request, but it works . I've been using it through my own coding harness for weeks now to…
Free Claude and Perplexity almost killed my ChatGPT Plus subscription
…Related I tested Claude's two biggest competitors because of its usage limits, and one banned my account I don't really know why, though. Research testing was largely a wash All…
After a year of self-hosting LLMs, I realized the real bottleneck isn’t the GPU
…error to a cleaner local AI workflow. Bottleneck is often the operator, not the machine My self-hosting LLM journey taught me one thing: the biggest limitation isn’t the model or…
Your old GPU can still run big LLMs – you just need the right tweaks
…However, mixture-of-experts models like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and GPT-OSS-20B have an ace up their sleeve when it comes to running them on limited hardware. Rather than moving…
I started using Claude Design and haven't opened Adobe or Figma since
…usage, Claude has pretty much become my go-to chatbot beyond design too. It's now where most of my research and synthesis and brainstorming happens, my all-in-one AI. So…
This e-reader beat my Kindle in ways that have nothing to do with the screen
…But the interesting thing to me is that my normal usage is mostly use cases that the company doesn't advertise, and I think they make this a more compelling device. About…