Ask any note-taking enthusiast about their favorite app, and the name Obsidian is bound to pop up in the conversation every now and again. In addition to its vast plugin collection, Obsidian includes a ton of tools to organize your notes and customize every aspect of the note-taking app. Plus, it’s compatible with multiple backup options, so you don’t have to worry about losing access to your precious notes.

Hard drives and SSDs have a habit of failing at inopportune moments (although when is a good time for storage to fail?), underscoring how important having a regular backup strategy is for keeping your data safe. While there are plenty of backup programs available, from specialized server backup solutions for VMs to solutions for single programs, the professional world tends to lean on open-source backup solutions.

I'd be lying if I said I never wished to have an RTX 4090 (or a 4080 Super) in my gaming PC. In fact, I was sure I'd upgrade from my RTX 3080 to the RTX 5080 this year, but that dream stands ruined for now. High-end and flagship GPUs are some of the most coveted components by PC gamers, and garner the most hype because of it. It's also the reason scalpers make merry during every GPU launch, but, well, scalpers gonna scalp.

For a whole generation of Brazilian kids, the Nintendo Entertainment System was never called that. It was the Phantom System — a console released by Brazilian electronics company Gradiente in 1989. It came in a shell originally designed for the Atari 7800, used a Sega Mega Drive controller, and played both NES and Famicom cartridges. The motherboard was reverse-engineered in-house and didn’t use any of Nintendo’s proprietary chips. It wasn’t licensed. It wasn’t official. But in Brazil, it was the NES.

Although they’re typically associated with file-sharing and backup tasks, operating systems designed for Network-Attached Storage servers can tackle a variety of other workloads. Home Assistant is one such project that offers a neat way to monitor, manage, and automate smart gadgets and IoT paraphernalia in your living space.

We all have our favorite video game franchise that regularly gives us polished titles filled with hours of fun and unforgettable moments. But sometimes, even the most beloved series can crash and burn with just one bad release. Whether it's through poor decisions, technical disasters, or just missing the mark completely, some games have seriously damaged their franchises. From Duke Nukem Forever to Mass Effect: Andromeda, these games are reminders of how quickly things can go wrong for a gaming franchise.

Zuck bought himself a position of honor at Trump’s inauguration. | Image: Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg — having spent months cozying up to President Donald Trump — will now be looking to reap the benefits as European tech regulators bear down on Meta. The EU is expected to impose fines against the social media giant any day now, having preliminarily ruled in July 2024 that Facebook and Instagram’s “pay or consent” advertising model violates the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).Zuckerberg was swift to congratulate Trump following the election results in November, making several journeys to Mar-a-Lago, tithing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, and embedding himself as one of several wealthy US tech leaders to foster an oligarchy around the President. Meta’s policies have also evolved to embrace Trump’s playbook, having appointed UFC CEO and noted Trump supporter, Dana White, to its board, alongside ditching third-party fact-checkers and disbanding the Meta diversity team.Under the DMA and Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU can financially penalize Meta up to ten percent of its annual revenue — $16 billion based on the company’s 2024 earnings — for failing to comply with regulatory requirements that Zuckerberg has accused of “institutionalizing censorship” across social media platforms. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta is worried that the expected DMA ruling against Meta’s “pay or consent” model could impact its European revenue, which accounts for almost a quarter of its overall earnings, by forcing the company to allow European users to limit personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram for free.Zuckerberg has already voiced his distaste for EU regulations, having called for Trump to prevent the EU from fining American tech companies over antitrust violations in January. The Wall Street Journal reports that Zuckerberg has also directed Meta executives in recent weeks to push US trade officials to help the company fight against the anticipated EU fine. Zuckerberg himself paid a visit to Washington in February to beg officials for help.The EU is under pressure to scale back penalties against US tech companies or risk further retaliation atop of the tariffs that have already been threatened by the Trump administration. We’ll see how effective Zuck’s bootlicking has been when the EU renders its imminent decision.

I have always been on the hunt for the perfect digital workspace. I want to create a place where ideas seamlessly connect, information is easily retrievable, and productivity flows effortlessly. Like many, I tried countless note-taking apps and PKM systems, each promising to be the answer. Yet, something always felt missing.

Adobe has been the industry standard for years because few other free programs can measure up. One of those solid competitors is Photopea, which offers many similar tools with the same capabilities for free. But its true strength lies in its hidden capabilities; a handful of advanced tools that put the program on par with Photoshop. I think these tools deserve to be spotlighted.

Every time I see “mAh” on a consumer product, I cringe. Megahertz are starting to bruise, too. That’s because the most critical components of portable gadgets — batteries and processors — should really be measured in watts: it’s the one common spec that gives you a real idea of what your device can do.With watts, you can tell how much literal power is under the hood — how much energy is provided by your battery and how much is coursing through your chip. Watts determine whether there’s enough cooling to let that processor run free, instead of overheating and throttling prematurely. Watts can even tell you how much battery life you have left, based on the watt-hours (Wh) of battery remaining and the wattage at which your device is draining. You can do it all with elementary school math — so why aren’t watts everywhere? Consumers are regularly exposed to wattage measurements when buying light bulbs or reading their power bills. But many gadget manufacturers insist on measuring their batteries in milliamp-hours and their chip speed in megahertz or gigahertz, neither of which are a good measure of a device’s true power. The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to exampl …Read the full story at The Verge.

I run Windows 11 on most of my devices these days because I use a few creative programs daily that don't have a Linux alternative. That wasn't always the case, though, and for many years, I dual-booted Linux and Windows on my laptop. I truly believed it was the best of both worlds, being able to switch between the two operating systems with a simple reboot, and when I had issues, I wrote them off as my incomplete knowledge or user error.

Buying a giant battery for the next blackout or off-grid adventure can be daunting, especially when hundreds or even thousands of dollars are on the line. Get it wrong and you’ve either spent too much money for something you’ll never use or discover that you didn’t buy enough capacity to keep your most important devices running. To get it right, you need to become intimate with the watt-hour (Wh).The watt-hour is a measure of capacity, or how much electrical energy a battery stores. If you know how much power — measured in watts — your devices consume, then the Wh rating of a battery lets you quickly calculate how long those devices will run. For example, a typical LED light bulb requires about 10W to illuminate. So a 1000Wh (1kWh) battery can run that bulb for 100 hours because Wh divided by watts gives you the time.For context, the average US home consumes about 889kWh per month, or about 29.2kWh per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. During a blackout, you’d need about $15,000 worth of batteries on hand to keep it running for just one day (based on a rough average of 50 cents per Wh of battery capacity). But that’d be silly because you …Read the full story at The Verge.