Spending weeks living with ten different smart home hubs in my own house changed how I think about value in this category. I set up the same routines on each one. I ran the same automations. I paid close attention to which hubs kept working when my internet dropped and which ones went completely dark. … Read more
I built my first gaming PC with eight USB ports on the case and thought that was plenty. Then I plugged in a mechanical keyboard, a wireless mouse dongle, a headset, a stream deck, a capture card, two controllers, and a webcam — and I was out of ports within a week. That is the … Read more
I plugged a Thunderbolt dock into my Razer Blade 16 on a Tuesday afternoon, expecting a one-cable miracle. By the time I swapped to my second 4K 240Hz monitor and fired up Cyberpunk 2077, I knew these devices had become essential for any serious gaming laptop owner. A great dock turns a portable rig into … Read more
Building a reliable Plex media server starts with picking the right hard drives. I learned this the hard way after losing 3TB of family videos to a dead desktop drive that was never rated for 24/7 operation. After that disaster, I rebuilt my entire Plex NAS using NAS-optimized drives, and three years later every single … Read more
I have tested more JBOD enclosures than I care to admit. After running a home lab with over 200TB of spinning rust for the past four years, I have learned which boxes survive daily use and which ones die taking your data with them. Finding the best JBOD enclosures for data hoarders in is harder … Read more
If you have ever watched a ZFS pool chug through a barrage of sync writes, you already know why the SLOG (Separate intent LOG) matters. I spent the last few months digging through forums, running my own FIO benchmarks, and testing drives pulled from eBay to find the best Optane drives for ZFS SLOG in … Read more
If you’re building a media server in and want the best Intel Arc GPUs for AV1 transcoding, you’re in the right place. I spent the last three months testing Intel Arc cards across Plex, Jellyfin, Unraid, and TrueNAS setups to figure out which ones actually deliver on the AV1 promise. The short answer: Intel’s Arc … Read more
Building a home media server in means deciding how your content gets transcoded. Most streams don’t need transcoding, but the moment a 4K HDR Blu-Ray rip hits a phone on 4G, you need hardware acceleration or the server melts. I spent weeks testing eight graphics cards across Plex and Jellyfin to find which ones actually … Read more
I built my first Plex media server back in 2019 using an old desktop tower, and I learned the hard way that not all hardware handles transcoding the same way. After testing dozens of mini PCs, NAS devices, and barebones kits over the past three years, I have a clear picture of what actually works … Read more
I bolted my first bass shaker to a flimsy office chair in 2019, and I have been chasing better tactile feedback ever since. After running eight different tactile transducers through iRacing, Assetto Corsa, and a couple of test rigs over the past few months, I can tell you which ones actually move the needle and … Read more