Ayush Pande

Unlike SSDs, which can have radically different form factors and interface options, HDDs don’t have that many distinctions. Aside from the size difference between 2.5 and 3.5-inch hard drives, RPM is often the most important statistic that sets two hard drives apart. Or so you might think, until you encounter SMR and CMR variants of the same HDD.

If you’re worried about the privacy of your online activities, a Virtual Private Network will serve as a worthwhile addition to your software suite. Unfortunately, cheap VPNs are infamous for selling user data, while their premium counterparts tend to have high subscription fees.

Monitor your living space with the help of a self-hosted ZoneMinder server

Having spent weeks with CasaOS and Nextcloud, here are three reasons why I always pick the former for my private cloud needs

With the sudden emergence of x86_64 emulators, running smartphone apps on Windows may seem like old news. However, Android emulators are still chugging along just fine, and we've even seen new faces like the Google Play Games Emulator crop up in recent times. There's also BlueStacks, MeMU Play, and a handful of old veterans that have helped countless PC users emulate their favorite Android applications over the years.

As a (self-proclaimed) connoisseur of RPGs, I’ve spent a long time scouring for ways to enhance immersion in my virtual adventures. Playing Skyrim in VR continues to amaze me to this day, and developer Praydog’s Unreal Engine VR Injector mod was a sight for sore eyes (pun intended) after years of stagnation in the PC VR landscape. Unfortunately, full-fledged D&D titles often get the short end of the stick, as there aren’t that many cool ways you can enjoy them.

Intel’s mobile-grade CPUs are typically found in NAS devices and entry-level mini-PCs. But there are a handful of SBC manufacturers that rely on x86 processors instead of ARM or RISC-V chips. If you're active in the SBC scene, you may recognize LattePanda and Odroid as developers of consumer-oriented x86 boards that cost a lot more than your average single-board computer.

Unlike their Type-2 counterparts, Type-1 hypervisors aren’t held back by the host OS, making them perfect when you want to run some virtual machines at their full potential. Besides providing high performance in your virtualization tasks, bare metal hypervisors also allow you to interface PCIe devices to your VMs.

Ever since its debut in 2012, the Raspberry Pi series has dominated the SBC industry. While many challengers have appeared over the years, none could match the affordable and beginner-friendly nature of the Raspberry Pi family. For instance, certain manufacturers cram as much horsepower as possible into their boards, leading to the SBCs costing way more than their Raspberry Pi rivals. Meanwhile, other budget-oriented devices tend to fall flat in the software and OS compatibility departments.

Backed by a thriving community of developers and tinkerers, there’s no shortage of fun projects you can build with a Raspberry Pi. From affordable weather stations and Flask web servers to makeshift NAS and personal clouds, the Raspberry Pi boards are perfect companions for DIY enthusiasts.