XDA

Half my automations don't live in Home Assistant anymore, and my smart home is better for it

Jasmine Mannan — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:01:18 GMT

The ultimate stage of smart home engineering isn't writing more complex server scripts. It is distributing your system logic down to the physical endpoints. By migrating device loops to local Zigbee binding clusters and to on-device ESPHome native automation blocks, your home becomes a resilient mesh network. Home Assistant turns a fragile single point of failure into a relaxed high-level coordinator. Home Assistant shouldn't be the mechanical engine that physically connects a light switch to a bulb. It should instead be the data aggregator and dashboard viewer, with low-level, instantaneous automation handled by the on-device microcontrollers and direct radio mesh communications. This creates an air-gapped, zero-latency house that behaves like a real, resilient utility rather than a finicky server project.

I paid for Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot for a month, but only one justified the subscription

Parth Shah — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:31:19 GMT

Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot all promise to save time, sharpen my work, and make everyday tasks feel effortless. But when each one wants a recurring payment, the real question is: which one actually deserves a place on my credit card bill?

The RX 9070 XT almost had my money, but one Nvidia feature changed my mind

Abhinav Raj — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:00:19 GMT

When I think of the RX 9070 XT, I see it as the first AMD GPU in a long time that has made me question my decades-old loyalty to Nvidia. I recently spent a few hours with one for a blind upscaler test, and it left me with no doubts about AMD's silicon. The raster performance is excellent to build upon, the efficiency is undeniable, and even at currently inflated market rates, it undercuts its closest Nvidia competitor by a margin that makes you second-guess your conviction at the check-out counter.

I used Perplexity to tame my Outlook inbox, and never looked back

Brian Burgess — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:00:19 GMT

While a lot of communication these days is done in team chat rooms like Asana or Microsoft Teams, or via text and chats, email is still an essential part of workflows. Most email clients these days, like Microsoft Outlook, come with built-in tools to make managing the mess of emails easier, but your inbox can still become overwhelming. Not to mention the calendar events, reminders, and more.

This lovely Raspberry Pi e-ink project shows you birds that have been spotted in your area

Simon Batt — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:01:18 GMT

Do you know what kind of birds reside around your area? If not, it's surprisingly easy to find out these days. You don't even need to leave your seat, as there are plenty of resources out there for bird watchers to log and share sightings where you live.

A Microsoft engineer revealed Windows 95's smart way for spotting installers: It just guessed

Simon Batt — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:33:09 GMT

Back in the early days of Windows 95, the developers had to deploy some clever fixes to get the operating system to work properly. One of its developers had a problem: it wanted to make sure that software installers never overwrote a file with an older version. To do that, it had to detect that a software installer was running in the first place. So, how did it do that? Easy; it guessed.

Linux 7.2 will now run even better on your Sega Dreamcast

Simon Batt — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 05:53:07 GMT

The funny thing about following Linux development is that you learn that the kernel is compatible with more hardware than you originally thought it was. And I'm not talking about the kernel happening to work well with specific devices, but that there's specific code within Linux that specifically targets it.

My Linux laptop runs better now that I treat it like a server

Joe Rice-Jones — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:22 GMT

My home lab servers basically never break, and my laptop used to all the time. That's bugged me for years because my servers are always on, run more varied software, and serve more users (okay, one user, but he's very demanding). They also get far less attention day to day, but that was the very reason they survived. The difference wasn't the hardware or the distro. It was that my Proxmox boxes were maintained on a schedule, and my laptop got updated whenever the notification icon annoyed me enough to click it.

I lost 4TB of files in a single SSD failure, and now I understand why a NAS should come first

Jasmine Mannan — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:01:21 GMT

The sinking feeling of waking up to an unresponsive computer is one I cannot describe. I hit the power button, and instead of my desktop loading, I was greeted by an inaccessible boot device prompt. My massive high-capacity primary SSD died without warning, instantly vaporizing 4TB worth of files, including critical documents, years of local project data, setup archives, and workspace history.

Gemma 4 E4B is small enough to run anywhere, but powerful enough to handle typical LLM workloads

Ayush Pande — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:00:22 GMT

Choosing the right locally-deployed large language model can be a bit of a hassle. Bulky LLMs, for example, can deliver accurate results, but you’ll need decent hardware to get them up and running. I use Mixture-of-Experts models for most of my LLM-heavy tasks, but even with their optimized nature, I can’t use MoE offloading to run 35B clankers on iGPU-laden systems with less than 8GB of memory.