XDA

You can now legally rip your Wii, GameCube, and Xbox games using a Blu-ray drive

Patrick O'Rourke — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:04:43 GMT

A new tool has dropped that allows users to rip proprietary optical media for a wide range of retro consoles, including the GameCube, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, and more, allowing you to back up your games without delving into the murky waters of piracy.

DLAA is what I keep recommending over DLSS, but almost nobody uses it

Hamlin Rozario — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:00:21 GMT

In the last few years, DLSS is becoming one of the settings most gamers instinctively look for whenever they launch a demanding AAA title, especially if it features an open-world setting and supports ray tracing. After all, Nvidia has improved DLSS to the point where the upscaled image looks almost as good as native while boosting your frame rates. So there's really no reason not to take advantage of it.

Most people stop at Pi-hole, but Unbound is the privacy upgrade your home network actually needs

João Carrasqueira — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:30:22 GMT

Pi-hole is one of the best upgrades you can make to your home network if you have a device capable of self-hosting it. There are other alternatives, of course, like AdGuard Home, but Pi-hole has a very easy-to-understand UI that makes it one of the better options out there.

DriftGuard aims to make gamepad strick drift a thing of the past

Patrick O'Rourke — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:07:56 GMT

If you're a gamer, it's likely you've encountered Xbox gamepad stick drift at some point. Maybe you were playing Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 back in the day, only to find the Master Chief was suddenly leaning to the left a bit, resulting in you getting popped by a suicidal, plasms grenade-wielding grunt? Perhaps more recently, your car in Forza Horizon 6 suddenly started veering to the right?

I built an app with Claude Design and Google Opal, and only one actually finished it

Nolen Jonker — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:00:20 GMT

There's something genuinely fun about vibe-coding tools, even when you're not building anything serious with them. Watching an idea turn into something clickable in minutes is one of the better parts of my week as someone who's still finding their feet in design. It scratches that "I wonder if this would work" itch without needing to understand how the wiring underneath actually works yet. These tools are why I keep poking at ideas I'd otherwise jot down and forget.

Your SSD has a hidden lifespan counter, and most people ignore it until it's too late

Tanveer Singh — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:00:21 GMT

On the cusp of the much-awaited transition from spinning drives to SSDs, we were told that the latter did not have moving parts. SSDs were not only much faster, but also immune to mechanical failure. Unlike the 5-year lifespan of hard drives, SSDs boast double that, often more. However, the SSD running inside your PC right now isn't guaranteed to last for years and years. It might not fail due to mechanical issues, but even flash storage has a limited lifespan. Once you have written enough data onto your SSD, it becomes a read-only drive. You should start arranging a replacement much before this actually happens. Your operating system doesn't make this readily apparent, though. Keeping an occasional eye on your SSD's health is your responsibility, and it's about much more than just the percentage of lifespan remaining.

After adding my entire Blu-ray library to Jellyfin, physical discs feel obsolete

Patrick Hearn — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:30:22 GMT

I've recently begun revisiting my physical media library, and in the course of doing so, I've started digitizing them. While I appreciate the more limited selection that my personal library holds, I don't love swapping discs. What can I say — streaming has spoiled me, at least in that respect. But now that I've made that shift, it kind of feels pointless to keep physical discs around.

You can build a Steam Machine right now, but Valve's optimization is the part worth waiting for

Rich Edmonds — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:00:22 GMT

There's discourse currently happening surrounding the upcoming Steam Machine, the brand-new console from Valve. It's whether what is essentially a small compact PC is worth waiting for, or if it's actually better to build a custom system and run either Steam OS or Steam Big Picture. The Steam Deck revolutionized the gaming handheld market by offering an alternative to Nintendo's Switch, running Linux. It continues to sell well and performs solidly with countless titles, thanks to the huge work continuing with Proton.

Adobe Acrobat costs $15 a month, but BentoPDF does everything locally without a subscription

Abhishek Kumar Mishra — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:30:21 GMT

Browsers can view PDF files, but annotating them is an entirely different ball game. Chrome cannot do much beyond basic viewing, and Firefox has some level of annotation support by adding signatures. If you need to do anything beyond it, you can either purchase an Adobe Acrobat subscription or look for free web tools or self-hosted tools. I had some important tasks related to a PDF document of some files related to land records, and free tools couldn't do much. I purchased the Adobe Acrobat subscription for that task, but later realized that a self-hosted PDF editor is a far better option for me.

Home Assistant finally replaced Google Home when I stopped trusting the cloud with my smart home

Samir Makwana — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:00:22 GMT

I never really gave Google Home a fair shot. After picking up a Google Home Mini and a couple of smart bulbs, I tried to get them working together for a month. Then I quietly gave up on the whole smart home idea. Not because Google Home was bad, but every device needed Google’s servers to work, including the automations.