XDA

I put a temperature sensor in every room, and my thermostat had been lying about my house for years

Joe Rice-Jones — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 18:00:22 GMT

My smart thermostat was one of the first devices I added to my smart home, a 3rd-gen Nest Learning Thermostat at launch. It moved with me from that apartment to a house, and I thought it was doing a great job. So I've fixed other things in my smart home, like getting power delivery sorted and adding controls to Home Assistant for centralized ease of use.

I tried OpenClaw and Perplexity Computer, but ChatGPT Dots finally feels like a personal assistant

Mahnoor Faisal — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:30:22 GMT

We've reached a pretty dystopian point where people will casually say they asked "Chat" a question, and everyone around them knows exactly who they're talking about. Not a friend, not a colleague, but an AI chatbot. Somehow, we've gone from Googling everything to treating ChatGPT like that one friend who knows a little bit about everything.

Claude blamed my RTX 5080’s VRAM for crashes, but the real culprit was far more surprising

Ty Sherback — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 17:00:24 GMT

For about three months, my PC had a nasty crashing habit that I could not nail down. Games would crash, but not consistently, and not in a way I could reproduce. I had a couple of blue-screens at idle and under load, and since I never experienced a total crash on Linux, I attributed them to Windows bugginess. And as far as the frequency goes, it wasn't enough to be bothersome, until a couple of weeks ago.

The beginner-friendly Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer is at its lowest price ever

XDA Deals Desk — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:31:48 GMT

3D printing has moved far beyond the tinkering-heavy days of DIY kits, and the Bambu Lab P1S is a big reason why. This enclosed, CoreXY printer brings high-speed printing and automatic calibration to a price point that actually makes sense for beginners and hobbyists alike. With the ability to get you from idea to finished piece in just 15 minutes, it's a perfect introduction to 3D printing.

I tried an Android Auto alternative that's rough around the edges, but it won me over

Dhruv Bhutani — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:30:24 GMT

Android Auto is a must-have for everything from navigation to playing my favorite music and podcasts in the car. Unfortunately, it also puts Google at the center of that experience. Lately, Google has been getting pretty restrictive about what I can do with my car's infotainment system. If I want to use a different navigation or streaming app, it can be a pretty big hurdle. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that someone is trying to circumvent that.

I turned spare ESP32 boards into motion sensors for rooms using a free open-source project without a single sensor

Samir Makwana — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:00:21 GMT

Most of the ESP32-based DIY smart home devices require a list of sensor modules, but you don’t always have to buy them. I wanted to deploy motion sensors in every room, and I hoped I could skip PIR modules on each ESP32.

I let an AI agent migrate my notes from three different apps into Obsidian, and nothing got lost

Patrick Hearn — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:31:21 GMT

Moving between note-taking apps isn't an easy decision, especially since many don't offer a way to transfer your notes between them. Apple Notes is one of the worst offenders on that front. I have eight years of notes stored in Apple Notes, and yet I can't easily bulk export them. I also have notes in other apps, like Evernote and Google Keep. I wanted to gather all of my assorted notes from over the years into a single Obsidian vault, but I didn't want to do it myself. And while Obsidian does have the outstanding Importer plugin, I wanted to automatically sort and add tags to the imported notes based on their content.

I turned this open-source app into my ultimate productivity hub, and it's completely free, private, and powerful

Parth Shah — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:01:22 GMT

The idea of having a single app for all my productivity needs sounds interesting. I have experimented with Notion, Microsoft 365, Capacities, Anytype, and other tools, but none of them checked every box.

Stop buying USB Wi-Fi adapters for your PC

Tanveer Singh — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:31:23 GMT

Ethernet should always be the default choice when it's available, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, you don't want to go to the trouble of routing a LAN cable to your PC, and you don't have onboard Wi-Fi either. All you need is a dependable Wi-Fi adapter that can take you online, handle the demands of your job, and not flake out during online gaming. If you started your journey with USB Wi-Fi adapters, you know all of that is too much to ask for. USB wireless adapters are usually riddled with too many faults to count, and it's just easier to pick an internal PCIe adapter instead. On the off chance you weren't aware of how much they suck, here's a complete breakdown to help you always look the other way.

I moved my Windows user folders to a second drive, and reinstalling Windows stopped being scary

Kazim Alvi — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:00:21 GMT

If you are a long-time Windows user, you must have been in one of those situations where a complete reinstall seems like the only viable solution. I agree, Windows has several built-in troubleshooting tools now, but there are still times when even the in-place or repair upgrade fails to work. After being in the situation a couple of times, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and moving the Windows user folders was the first thing I did.