XDA

I ditched my motherboard's fan presets and built my own curve, and the difference is massive

Ty Sherback — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:00:22 GMT

Motherboard defaults are built so that users get up and running as easily as possible. They're safe, reliable, and give your system the best chance to boot and continue to function properly, but they're not optimal. This includes fan curves, which are often forgotten about among the other more tangible ways to increase performance through the BIOS. Changing them using the built-in options can seem like a shortcut to a quieter, more performant PC, but they're also imperfect. By spending just a few minutes building a custom curve, my PC has become quieter and cooler, and it's something anyone can do.

Claude Code with a local LLM running offline is the hybrid setup I didn't know I needed

Joe Rice-Jones — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:00:31 GMT

I've been using Claude Code for all kinds of things lately, but I'm always worried about my token usage, even on the Max plan. Especially with Opus 4.7, where my allocation seems to get burned through on simple tasks it used to handle quickly. I've also been moving into locally hosting LLMs, after getting a couple of DGX Spark units from Asus to play with, which has enabled me to run much larger models, and hence more capable ones.

Linux 7.1 finally fixes a 2-year-old Steam Deck OLED audio issue

Simon Batt — Sun, 03 May 2026 04:48:50 GMT

If you've owned a Steam Deck OLED for a few years, you may have noticed that the Linux 6.8 kernel messed with its audio probe. It happened late in 2023, and for years, people were waiting for a patch to be released for it. As it turns out, the lack of any updates wasn't due to nobody caring, but because the problem required some delicate care to ensure it didn't break everything else in the process.

Ask Jeeves just shut down after 29 years, and nobody noticed

Simon Batt — Sun, 03 May 2026 04:08:26 GMT

In the tech business, you sometimes have a weird moment where you learn that a service is being discontinued, and your first reaction is "Wait, that was still a thing?" For instance, around this time last year, we caught wind that AOL was finally stopping its dial-up service, and I grimace to think what watching a modern-day YouTube video would be like over a 56k modem.

I replaced my Raspberry Pis with $5 ESP32s for smart home projects, and they do everything I need

Ayush Pande — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:21 GMT

Despite being a fan of the Raspberry Pi as a teenager, I'm starting to grow disillusioned with this single-board computer family. After all, rival boards, especially those based on the x86 architecture, have gotten significantly cheaper over the years, while the mainline RPi SBCs have crept up in pricing without offering tangible benefits in DIY projects. While I still have a collection of Raspberry Pi systems I’ve bought over the years, I’ve stopped buying them after the RAM shortage drove their prices to the red zone, and switched to old thin clients for server experiments.

I went back to native resolution for a week, but Nvidia's DLSS still made it feel like the wrong choice

Samarveer Singh — Sat, 02 May 2026 23:01:21 GMT

I've been gaming ever since this century started, and I spent the first two decades gaming at native resolution. In 2020, however, I bought an RTX 2070 Super, and ever since then, I've been a believer in Nvidia's DLSS technology. It started off shaky, as all things tend to do, but today, DLSS is inarguably the strongest and most popular rendering technique in video games.

I vibe-coded a tiny CLI tool in 15 minutes, and it helped me stop subscriptions I was too lazy to cancel

Yash Patel — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:00:21 GMT

For the longest time, I avoided vibe coding. Not because I didn’t understand it, but because I didn’t trust it. As someone with a software development background, I’m used to structure that includes clear requirements, planned architecture, and predictable outputs. Vibe coding felt like the opposite of that. Just prompting an AI and building as you go? It sounded messy. A bit like skipping the thinking part and jumping straight to execution.

Microsoft's best workflow tools are free, but you won't find all of them installed on Windows

Korbin Brown — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:30:21 GMT

Windows comes with a fair share of tools, but some of Microsoft's best apps require an extra download to install. It's not until I reinstall Windows that I realize which of these tools are missing from a fresh system. Seeing as they're released by Microsoft, it's natural to assume that Windows already comes with all the publisher's most useful utilities, but it doesn't.

I dropped my DDR5 down a speed tier, and the performance difference was basically nothing

Hamlin Rozario — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:00:22 GMT

When I first upgraded to the 9800X3D, I had to settle for a 32GB DDR5-6400 CL32 kit because RAM prices were soaring at the time. But when prices dipped slightly toward the end of March, triggered by Google's TurboQuant announcement, I decided to pick up another 32GB kit, assuming it was just a temporary drop before they went back up again. Even though 32GB is still the sweet spot for gaming, I like having the extra headroom when I'm doing several things side-by-side on my multi-monitor setup.

I tested Gemini Notebooks and Claude Projects side by side, and one didn't make the cut

Nolen Jonker — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:30:22 GMT

Claude Projects has been part of my workflow for a while now, I don't think I can imagine not using it at this point. When something gets reliable enough, you just build around it and forget to question it. I use it to keep long-running research contexts alive, and to run design briefs without re-explaining the background every time I open a new chat, just to name a few. It's a boring tool in the best way.