My smart home was a mess until I gave it a brain
…After dealing with a fragmented setup for a long time, the problem became clear: I lacked a single control layer. Each brand wanted me to stay inside its own app, which meant…
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Claude is still the best agentic coding tool, but Anthropic's tightening grip is the best argument yet for going local
…variant running on consumer hardware with genuinely impressive speeds. Alibaba's Qwen 3.6-27B arrived the same month as a dense workhorse that fits on a single consumer 24 GB GPU…
Home labbers say to ditch your ISP router, but the Fritz Box 7530 has WireGuard, dynamic DNS, and even a media server
…The hardware is modest, but the value is exceptional Especially when it's free Being honest about the hardware, it's not up to much. You either get the Qualcomm SoC or…
This $30 app is the best purchase I've made for my Steam Deck
…The hardware itself is great, sure, but the bedrock of Steam makes it easy to transfer your progress from Windows to Linux without any fuss. Once you start going beyond the Game…
Your network switch is probably the wrong one, and here's how to tell before you buy
…It's only fairly recently that the average household has had access to gigabit-or-above speeds from their ISPs, and consumer hardware is still mostly on gigabit Ethernet. Most PC motherboards…
I replaced ChatGPT with a local model on my gaming PC, and it's beating the cloud where I didn't expect
…Its hardware picks were the right ones for a first-time user, namely an ESP32 DevKit V1, which is the most documented board with no PSRAM flags or quirks to deal with…
Intel's next CPU generation might finally catch up to AMD on something that actually matters
…An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building…
These metal washers are replacing smart home sensors, and they work without a single wire or battery
Jasmine Mannan May 24, 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 connected my local LLM to Home Assistant through MCP, and now my smart home manages itself
Ayush Pande Apr 11, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with…
I turned an old Android phone into a home server, and it’s more useful than my Raspberry Pi
Jasmine Mannan Apr 21, 2026, 8:00 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…