While tech giants kept building bloated media apps, a scrappy open-source project called VideoLan quietly ate their lunch by ...

To break the digital landlord-tenant relationship, I invested in a Synology DS925+ NAS ... my computer's slowest HDD. Watching anything on my home theater projector involved a digital bucket brigade.

I've now been using this all-flash mini PC as my NAS for about a month, and I'm not going back to having noisy spinning drives in the room where I'm supposed to be productive. That larger unit is now ...