Nathan Reynolds

I built my first gaming PC back in 2017 and immediately wondered how much electricity it was pulling from the wall. That curiosity led me down a rabbit hole of plug-in watt meters, clamp-on circuit sensors, and software dashboards. After testing dozens of devices over the years, I learned that not all power meters are … Read more

Finding the best smart plugs for home lab power monitoring changed how I run my rack. Once I could see live wattage on every server, switch, and workstation, my power bill stopped being a monthly guessing game. A smart plug with energy monitoring is a WiFi, Zigbee, or Matter outlet adapter that measures the current … Read more

I lost 47 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 saves to a failed PS5 last year. That painful experience is exactly why I started testing the best external drive for backing up console saves — and why I never go without a dedicated backup drive again. Console manufacturers push cloud saves hard, and for good reason. … Read more

A retro game streaming server is an always-on home machine that runs emulated classic games and streams them to any device on your network – phones, tablets, smart TVs, or laptops. Think of it as your private Netflix for cartridges you already own, powered by tools like EmulatorJS, RetroArch, and Apollo. After spending three months … Read more

I spent the last three months rebuilding my retro gaming setup around a dedicated NAS instead of a stack of external drives, and I lost count of the ROMs I almost permanently lost when a portable HDD slipped off my desk last winter. That single failure pushed me to dig into NAS enclosures specifically built … Read more

If you have ever set up a couch co-op night with four PCs and watched your ping spike every time someone alt-tabbed to download a patch, you already know why the best low-latency switch for a LAN party setup matters more than your router does. Wireless feels fine until a friend misses a headshot because … Read more

Running a Valheim dedicated server 24/7 from your own hardware is one of the most rewarding ways to keep a Viking world alive for your friends. I have hosted Valheim worlds on everything from a $340 mini PC to a 28-core enterprise server, and I have learned that picking the right hardware changes how your … Read more

I have been running a Steam Cache on my home server for years, and the single upgrade that moved the needle the most was replacing the mechanical drives with a dedicated SSD cache. When I first set up Lansweeper’s open-source Steam caching setup, downloads crawled and family members queued up for the same 80GB games … Read more

If you run Pi-hole and still see ads popping up on your smart TV, chances are a device on your network is bypassing your ad-blocker entirely. Many IoT devices, streaming sticks, and even smartphones ship with hardcoded DNS servers like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 baked into their firmware. When that happens, your Pi-hole DNS sinkhole never … Read more

If you have switched to Wayland and suddenly started seeing horizontal lines, flickering windows, or stuttering fullscreen video, your NVIDIA driver is the likely culprit. I have spent the last several months troubleshooting this exact issue across GNOME, KDE Plasma, and Sway, and I am going to walk you through what actually works in . … Read more