XDA Developers

If you spend any time at all in a NAS or homelab forum, you'll walk away with the impression that using ECC memory with ZFS is a sacred commandment. This recommendation is repeated to the point that it starts to sound more like a requirement than advice, and newcomers are left thinking that a non-ECC build is basically a data-loss machine waiting to corrupt their data. I don't think that's true, despite being a victim myself of memory-related file corruption in the past.

It's hard to overstate just how many things Android Auto gets right. I use it every day for navigation, music calls, and occasional voice commands as well. But for all the good things about it, Android Auto has a few limitations. When I have a few minutes to spare, I would like to get a bit of entertainment in. Or if I'm waiting for someone, or even just stuck in traffic, the large high-resolution display in my car is just begging to be used for entertainment, but Google won't allow me.

Power over Ethernet is one of those things you never really think you need until you give it a try. We've had some fantastic experiences with the technology, transforming our home networks into versatile networks that can not only push data, but also power to important hardware that can enhance the overall experience. You can add wireless access points, cameras, displays, and more, without having to run an additional line of power to any of these devices.

You don't always have to spend a ton of money to get a great experience. This Asus RTX 5070 OC graphics card is a great example, offering the perfect balance of price and performance. The only problem is that this card hasn't been at its MSRP for quite some time, making it a harder choice if you're looking to upgrade. We've seen the card go as high as $760, which is a no-go in our books. But we're now seeing it drop to just $570, which is a much more reasonable price.

Between Google locking down the Android ecosystem and certain apps getting extremely sensitive (I’m looking at you, banking services) to rooted devices, I’ve started using Android Debug Bridge when I need to tweak certain aspects of my smartphones that I otherwise couldn’t without rooting my pocket-sized companion. Removing bloatware is one of these tasks, especially with all the junk that manufacturers add to their smartphones.

Claude Code and Codex get the most attention right now, and I can understand why. They are powerful, familiar, and easy to recommend. But the coding tool that has surprised me the most lately is Devin Desktop. Instead of treating AI coding like a side panel or a smarter autocomplete box, Devin Desktop feels built around modern development. I went in expecting another coding assistant. I came away thinking Devin Desktop might be the sleeper tool everyone is underestimating.

Wi-Fi was never really engineered to handle the high density, low payload overhead of an entire smart home ecosystem. Flooding a network with 40-plus micro devices, each constantly demanding local IP addresses, broadcasting discovery pings, and holding persistent TCP connections, can exhaust your router's RAM and CPU cycle overhead. By migrating your automation grid onto a dedicated local Zigbee mesh, you aren't just improving your smart home's response times.

Ask any casual user about their preferred operating system for everyday tasks, and you’ll typically hear them mention Windows or macOS. These days, Linux has been gaining prominence as well, so you might even hear Ubuntu, Fedora, or other distros crop up in the conversation every now and then. Once you step into the server side of things, you’ll start seeing Linux distributions and virtualization platforms a lot more often.

Depending on the model you choose, you can run local inference on pretty much any device you have access to. And they're good at it now, whether that's a 9B Qwen variant or a tiny quantized version of Gemma to run on your phone. But when you want to get into the development of AI or run larger models, the price of entry skyrockets. Enter the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, which is a relatively low-cost mini PC built around the Strix Halo APU and 128GB of LPDDR5x memory.

What's great about Claude, beyond incredibly capable models and competitive features, is the community built around the tool. You'll not only find an extremely receptive community that's almost always sharing new workflow tips and ways they've been using the tool, but the people working day in and day out on actually shipping the tool are always eager to share how they use it themselves.