XDA

I run my whole media server on a business laptop with no graphics card, and it still transcodes

Shekhar Vaidya — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:00:10 GMT

Most people think of a mini PC, a recent processor, or even a dedicated graphics card when building a media server or a homelab server. I was in the same boat. I was thinking of building a mini-PC based on Intel’s Twin Lake power-efficient CPUs, upgrading from my old Synology NAS. But before pulling the trigger, I took a detour and decided to use an old laptop that was supposed to be recycled soon.

I gave Google Antigravity access to my Obsidian vault, and it fixed years of chaos in a weekend

Nolen Jonker — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:00:10 GMT

Antigravity got most of its early attention as a coding tool. It's Google's answer to Cursor and Windsurf, built on VS Code, aimed at developers who want agents doing the heavy lifting across their editor and terminal instead of typing every line themselves. This is a pretty easy sell if you're a developer. But there's a whole other read on what this tool actually is once you strip that framing away, because file access and terminal access aren't developer-only features. They're just the mechanism, which is useful in a lot of contexts that have nothing to do with shipping code.

These 5 old devices can make better home servers than a Raspberry Pi

Samir Makwana — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:30:10 GMT

Few devices have done more to popularize self-hosting than the Raspberry Pi. Affordable, efficient, and backed by one of the largest communities around, it’s become the default recommendation for lightweight home server projects like Pi-hole and Home Assistant.

I cancelled Claude after 6 months of daily use — here's what went wrong

Anurag Singh — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:00:10 GMT

Competition is more important than ever because if companies like Anthropic get free rein, they won’t hesitate to exploit consumers. We are already seeing that with Claude, whose subscription is almost useless if you are on the $20 plan. Claude applies both five-hour session limits and weekly caps, and longer conversations and extended thinking consume your allowance even faster. Forget using subagents regularly, because they will burn through the limit in no time.

2026 has changed gaming for the worse, gamers just don't realize it yet

Tanveer Singh — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:30:10 GMT

It feels redundant to say that the gaming industry has been deteriorating over the last few years.

I ditched Snap Layouts for a free i3-style tiling manager, and Windows 11 never looked so good

Abhishek Kumar Mishra — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:00:10 GMT

Windows 11 added Snap Layouts and made it easy to organize open windows to some extent. You can hover your cursor over the maximize button, click on any of the suggested layouts, and then snap all the open app windows. This approach works for basic users, but if you compare it to an i3-style tiling manager present on some Linux distributions, the difference is stark. Snap Layouts feels like an immensely toned-down version of tiling managers, and I decided to switch to a dedicated one.

I don't pay for a password manager anymore — I self-host Vaultwarden and get every premium feature free

Korbin Brown — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:30:10 GMT

Password managers are one of the few subscriptions that are easy to justify, because the alternative is a spreadsheet. I paid for Bitwarden without giving it much thought until earlier this year, when I received a renewal notice for double the amount that I'd been paying. Premium got a price hike from $9.99 a year to $19.80, and the Families plan got a small bump from $40 to $47.88.

Your soundbar sounds hollow due to this one misconfigured TV setting

Tanveer Singh — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:00:10 GMT

Audio quality is as important for immersion as video quality. When you invest in an expensive soundbar in the hopes of bypassing your TV's terrible onboard speakers, you expect deep, full, and lossless audio. Even after configuring the settings correctly, however, your soundbar can sound unimpressive. If it's hard to differentiate between the audio from your TV and soundbar, you might need to change the audio format on your TV.

A frustrated gamer built a Raspberry Pi-powered security system to keep their family away from their Steam Deck

Patrick O'Rourke — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:34:30 GMT

A Steam Deck owner was so tired of their family borrowing their handheld and leaving it with a dead battery that they created a ridiculously over-engineered security system for Valve's handheld.

These lightweight editors are faster than VS Code, but Microsoft's 100,000 extensions keep me hostage

Korbin Brown — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:30:10 GMT

Anyone on the prowl for a lightweight alternative to Electron editors has had a lot of options over the last couple of years. The three I've been eyeing are Zed, Helix, and Lapce. All three of them are open source, and they're noticeably snappier than VS Code, especially on machines with modest hardware.