XDA

Someone just released a SteamOS gaming PC before Valve even shipped its own

Simon Batt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:52:41 GMT

When the Steam Machine arrived, everyone, understandably, focused on the hardware and the price. After all, the Steam Machine will live and die on how powerful it is and how much it costs, so people were very interested in both elements.

You, too, can build this ESP32 plane tracker to keep an eye on the skies

Simon Batt — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:55:45 GMT

If you're into aviation and tinkering with devices, the past few weeks have been a goldmine for you. We previously saw a Raspberry Pi project that turned your ceiling into a sky tracker, followed closely by a project that added the fame functionality to a tidy desk device. Now, a few weeks later, we've seen a third aviation-based DIY project hit the market, and the funny part is, it didn't begin its life as a flight tracker.

The Steam client was hurting PC gaming on Android — Valve's VR headset accidentally solved it

Adam Conway — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:23 GMT

Playing Windows games on an Android phone has gone from being a party trick to a practical reality at some point in the last few years. Most of the credit goes to Winlator and the open-source stack underneath it: namely Wine, Box64, DXVK, and an increasingly mature set of community GPU drivers. Apps like GameHub and GameNative built consumer-friendly launchers on top of that same stack, and for a lot of people, the experience is now good enough to be a genuine alternative to the likes of the Steam Deck. It doesn't help that GameHub has been marred by controversy, either.

DDR6 and those flat CAMM2 sticks are coming, but with memory prices, the timing is brutal

Tanveer Singh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 23:00:22 GMT

Many of you are probably still using DDR4 RAM, but DDR6 RAM is already on the horizon. Poised to surpass even the blazing-fast speeds of DDR5 memory, DDR6 promises 8,800–17,600 MT/s speeds, thanks to a new 4 x 24-bit sub-channel architecture instead of the 2 x 32-bit seen on DDR5 memory. With higher frequencies come greater signal stability challenges, which is why the familiar DIMMs are going away, making way for flat CAMM2 sticks. These modules will be bolted onto the motherboard, lying parallel instead of the perpendicular layout we've been seeing for decades. With server deployment targeted for 2027 and consumer adoption soon after, the ongoing memory shortage couldn't have come at a worse moment. The 2028–2029 window that was planned for DDR6's consumer rollout might not hold anymore, considering the stratospheric prices will only conflate the already sky-high launch prices of this new technology. More memory-efficient LLMs could bring down enterprise memory demand, but that isn't guaranteed to lower RAM prices.

SwarmUI does what Midjourney costs $30 a month for, and it runs on my own hardware

Joe Rice-Jones — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:00:22 GMT

I'm not here to argue about the controversies surrounding image or video generation handled by generative AI models. Artists should be paid for their work, end of. But if you're going to use LLMs and their ilk, running the tools locally is the way to go. It keeps your data private, lets you generate images that commercial tools won't let you, and you don't have to pay a monthly subscription fee.

I ignored storage discipline in Proxmox until a restore actually mattered

Jeff Butts — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:30:22 GMT

GPU passthrough is the Proxmox trick everyone wants to talk about first. It makes for better screenshots, better forum posts, and a much more exciting project than naming storage pools or cleaning up old backups. I get the appeal, because passing a GPU into a Windows VM feels like the moment your little server finally starts showing off. But after you’ve lived with Proxmox for more than a weekend, storage is the part that decides whether the whole setup feels dependable or exhausting.

Building an all-AMD gaming PC is the best value choice in this PC hardware hellscape

Tanveer Singh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:00:22 GMT

It might not be the best idea to build a gaming PC in this market, especially one with all-new parts. RAM and SSD prices haven't come down, GPU prices are also inflated, and the future doesn't look hopeful either. However, that might be exactly why you'd want to build a PC right now. If enterprise demand and hardware prices are only set to go up from here, the best time to buy might be right now. With online sales going on, you might even get some components at or near MSRP — it sucks that that's where we are today. After scanning CPU and GPU prices, I've concluded that if you have the budget for a $1500 gaming PC, an all-AMD gaming build provides the best bang for the buck. Many AM5 CPUs are selling for all-time low prices, and the RX 90 series GPUs are currently sitting at attractive prices, too, compared to Nvidia's RTX 50 series cards. If you want a powerful and modern rig capable of both 1440p and 4K gaming for the next 3–4 years, this all-AMD PC is one of your best bets.

NotebookLM turned my YouTube playlist into a searchable knowledge base, and I stopped watching videos entirely

Mahnoor Faisal — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:30:22 GMT

Before "just ChatGPT it" was a thing, my first stop for answers wasn't Google. It was YouTube. Watching someone demonstrate how to do something just clicked in a way that a wall of text never did. That probably sounds ironic coming from a writer whose job is writing the kind of stuff people are supposed to read instead of skipping to a video, but I know I speak for the majority when I admit a quick video almost always wins.

Upscaling has become an excuse for lazy game optimization, and we're all paying the price

Jasmine Mannan — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:00:22 GMT

The current state of hardware is so great that we've actually hit a ceiling. We have flagship graphics cards that are exponentially faster than the hardware of a decade ago. Yet when a brand-new AAA game releases and you launch it at ultra settings, it struggles to maintain a consistent 60fps at native 1440p or 4K.

I ditched my paid wiki for DokuWiki in a Docker container, and my documentation finally makes sense

Dhruv Bhutani — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:30:22 GMT

I've lost count of the number of note-taking apps that I've used. From dabbling in SimpleNote to using Notion as a database for my notes, and, of course, the basics like Google Keep. Some have been great for collecting ideas, and others had an excellent interface. Elsewhere, a few promised to organize everything for me, but you know how that story goes.