Hands-on experience with AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools I actually use
Use Proton for Windows games on Steam. Use Bottles for everything else: Office, Adobe apps, business tools, non-Steam games. Both run on Wine, which maps Windows API calls to Linux without a virtual machine. DXVK and VKD3D-Proton handle the DirectX side. Wine 11.0 closes most of the remaining gap to native Windows.
This guide covers the full stack in 2026: what each piece does, how to set up Proton and Bottles, how to tune DirectX translation, and what still breaks.
Pool and hot tub chemistry can swing from safe to damaging in a few hours. A paper strip you dip once a week will not catch it. The fix is cheap: a waterproof ESPHome sensor built around an ESP32 , reading water temperature, pH, and ORP, piped into Home Assistant for pump schedules, chemical alerts, and cover reminders. A full setup runs under $80. It replaces guesswork with a live dashboard and push alerts that fire before your heater corrodes.
CSS subgrid lets a nested grid inherit its parent’s track sizes. Child elements inside nested components line up with the parent layout. No flat HTML, no JavaScript height math, no hardcoded min-heights. It shipped in every major browser by late 2023, sits at about 92% global usage, and is safe on any modern web project today.
Ever fought a card grid where the buttons won’t line up because one card has a longer description? Subgrid is the fix you’ve been waiting for.
Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19, 2026. The fast, lower-cost tier scored 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and, by Google’s own measure, generates output about 4 times faster than other frontier models. Flash is available today across the Gemini app, Search, and the API. Gemini 3.5 Pro is confirmed for next month.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is Google’s new fast, lower-cost tier of the Gemini 3.5 family. It was announced and made generally available on May 19, 2026, according to the Google announcement post . The “Flash” name has always meant a model tuned for speed and price.
For most developers wanting hands-on RISC-V in 2026, the StarFive VisionFive 2 at $65 for the 8GB model is the most practical entry point. It runs Debian 13 (Trixie) on the JH7110 quad-core SiFive U74 at 1.5GHz, ships with an Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU that now has mainline Mesa Vulkan drivers, supports Docker and NVMe via kernel 6.6+ LTS, and delivers roughly 60-70% of a Raspberry Pi 4’s single-threaded speed. That gap is smaller than you might expect when the goal is learning RISC-V toolchain internals. The ecosystem here has matured enough that you spend time writing code, not fighting drivers.
Cursor Composer 2.5 is an incremental upgrade over Composer 2, not a new model. Both run on Moonshot’s open-source Kimi K2.5 checkpoint, so the entire difference is training. Composer 2.5 learned from 25x more synthetic coding tasks plus targeted reinforcement learning. Standard pricing holds at $0.50 per million input tokens.
Composer 2.5 is Cursor’s in-house coding model and the direct successor to Composer 2. It runs inside the Cursor editor, which slots into a crowded field of AI coding tools . The model is built for sustained work, not just quick one-shot answers.
