XDA

You, too, can make this web server that runs off six ESP32s working together

Simon Batt — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:03:09 GMT

You can do a lot with a single ESP32, but what if you got six of them working in tandem? Well, as one tinkerer has shown us, you can host a website off them. Not just a regular server, though; a server that can detect when a blade goes down and automatically recover itself in three seconds. And the best part is, it's all open-source.

Linux is now adopting a CPU requirement Windows already demands, but don't worry, it's not TPM 2.0

Simon Batt — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:19:58 GMT

When Microsoft demanded that PCs installing or upgrading to Windows 11 required a CPU that supported TPM 2.0, some people (including myself) made the jump to Linux to keep our older systems ticking over.

Ubuntu is growing faster on Windows than on Linux, and it could soon become its biggest user base

Simon Batt — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 06:00:15 GMT

So, good news for Linux fans: it seems the 'year of Linux' may finally be upon us. The bad news is, the year of Linux may not happen on Linux. A past interview with a member of Canonical reveals that the number of people installing Ubuntu in a Linux environment on Windows is rapidly outpacing native Ubuntu installs, and it may one day become the biggest market share.

The Steam Deck dominates handhelds, but the market it owns is tinier than you think

Joe Rice-Jones — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:10 GMT

My Steam Deck has survived three years of me trying to replace it while loading as many odd software packages as I could. I’ve tested the challengers, tried the alternative operating systems, and realized I prefer playing some games on another device. It’s no secret that the Steam Deck changed how I approach gaming, and I’d assumed the sales figures would match my excitement level. I was wrong, at least about the sales figures and the size of the PC gaming handheld market.

This Immich fork does what Google Photos still can't

Dhruv Bhutani — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:00:10 GMT

Switching over to Immich was one of the best self-hosting decisions I made. It gives me the convenience of Google Photos while giving me full ownership of my data by running on my NAS. It's got all the essential features like face recognition, albums, and search, and it works well enough that I don't need to look elsewhere. But as good as it is, Immich isn't perfect.

Ripping my Blu-rays was the best upgrade I ever made to my Plex server

Jasmine Mannan — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:00:10 GMT

For many self-hosted media server owners, downloading compressed 1080p and 4K web rips is enough to call it a day. The server works, the library looks pretty, and storage demands stay low. However, when doing an A/B comparison, loading up an uncompressed 4K Blu-ray remux on a proper home theater setup with an OLED display reveals that commercial streaming platforms and web rips compress away a significant amount of the raw data.

These 4 self-hosted LLMs run surprisingly well on integrated graphics

Yash Patel — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:30:10 GMT

Running AI models locally sounds like something that requires a powerful gaming PC with an expensive NVIDIA GPU. That's what I thought too, until I started experimenting with the integrated graphics on my Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3. My testing setup included an AMD Ryzen 7 5000 Series processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and AMD Radeon Graphics.

Task Scheduler lied to me for months, so I moved everything to WSL cron

Korbin Brown — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:00:10 GMT

I'd been running a nightly file sync on my desktop through Windows' Task Scheduler for a few months. One afternoon, I went looking for an older version of a document and found that the newest file in my backup folder was several weeks old. Task Scheduler still listed the job and showed it as enabled. It even reported that the last run (last night) had finished successfully.

HDMI 2.2 cables are here, but the hardware that needs them won't arrive for years

Samarveer Singh — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:30:10 GMT

At CES 2026, HDMI 2.2 looked every bit like the future — we saw a 500Hz gaming monitor showing off impossibly smooth motion, and the shiny new Ultra96 cables from Elka that sat right beside it made us all want them immediately. For everyone watching, that demo was enough to make them wonder just how far behind their own setups had fallen.

I stopped uploading sensitive documents to Claude after finding a self-hosted tool that handles them just as well

Nolen Jonker — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:00:10 GMT

Uploading personal documents to cloud chatbots is pretty normalized, but that doesn't mean that you don't feel a little pause before doing it. You know that your private information is "somewhere out there" now, but because we can't see what's actually happening, it's easy to sweep it under the rug.