Nathan Reynolds

Your old APC UPS unit still hums along during brownouts, but last week it started chirping. That repeating beep is the unit’s way of telling you the internal sealed lead acid battery has failed. After three to five years of service, every UPS battery needs replacement, and finding the right APC UPS battery replacement for … Read more

If you’ve ever stood at your front door fumbling with a laggy WiFi doorbell app, you already understand why the best PoE doorbell camera for Home Assistant matters. A wired Ethernet doorbell gives you a rock-solid connection, power over a single cable, and a direct path into Home Assistant for automations that actually respond in … Read more

If you have ever lost a temperature reading because your Home Assistant server sits two rooms away from the sensor, you already know the pain a Bluetooth proxy solves. After testing eight candidates over six weeks across a 1,800 sq ft home, our team found that the best Bluetooth proxy device for Home Assistant can … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight different Zigbee vibration sensors on a front-load Samsung washing machine in my laundry room, which sits a full floor away from my living room. Missed laundry loads were driving our family crazy, and I was determined to find a sensor that reliably triggered a Home Assistant alert … Read more

I have spent the last three months testing Linux laptops with a stack of notebooks, terminals, and IDEs spread across our team’s testing lab. We installed Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint on every machine we could get our hands on to see which ones actually work for student life. Finding the best lightweight Linux … Read more

I spent the last three months running daily workloads on ten different Linux laptops, and the firmware story surprised me. The best Linux laptop with open-source firmware in is no longer a niche category reserved for Purism or specialty shops. Mainstream brands now ship machines with Linux pre-installed that pair well with coreboot replacements and … Read more

After testing 8 laptops with Fedora 41 across development, container work, and daily productivity, I can tell you the best AMD Ryzen laptop for Fedora depends on what you actually run daily. AMD’s open-source AMDGPU driver and robust kernel support make Ryzen processors a natural fit for Fedora, but not every model ships with compatible … Read more

If you stare at code for eight hours a day, reflections on a glossy screen are not just annoying; they cause real eye fatigue. After testing dozens of machines over the past two months, our team narrowed the field to the eight best Linux laptop with a matte display for coding options worth your money … Read more

Building a Plex server in a small form factor case is a different kind of puzzle. You need hardware transcoding power, but a full-size GeForce card simply will not fit between the PCIe slots and the drive cage. After spending three months testing eight low-profile GPUs in everything from a Dell OptiPlex 7040 to a … Read more

Finding the best 4K monitor for a Linux coding setup is harder than it should be. Most monitor reviews ignore Linux entirely, leaving you to discover Wayland refresh rate bugs, USB-C power delivery quirks, and fractional scaling nightmares the hard way. I spent the last three months running eight different 4K monitors on Ubuntu 24.04, … Read more