Isaacman has flown into orbit twice on all-private astronaut missions. | Image: Getty President Donald Trump has once again picked tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to be the next NASA Administrator, five months after pulling the initial nomination he made last year. Isaacman, an Elon Musk ally and commercial astronaut who has travelled into orbit twice as a civilian aboard SpaceX rockets, was reportedly withdrawn from consideration over previous political donations to Democrats, a day after Musk stepped away from the White House in May.“I am pleased to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of NASA,” Trump announced on Truth Social. “Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era.”The President did not acknowledge his former nomination of Isaacman, but did praise US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for his work serving as interim NASA chief since July. Likewise, Isaacman also doesn’t reference his previous consideration in his X post thanking Trump, saying it “will be an honor to serve my country under your leadership.”“The support from the space-loving community has been overwhelming,” said Isaacman. “I am not sure how I earned the trust of so many, but I will do everything I can to live up to those expectations.”Isaacman has donated more than $1 million to pro-Trump organizations in recent weeks, and Bloomberg reports that he has met with the President several times in person to discuss leadership plans for NASA. If Isaacman’s latest nomination is confirmed, he’ll assume command over a diminished version of the space agency, which has lost thousands of employees since July and faces enormous budget cuts that threaten to terminate two planned Mars missions.

After moving from Windows to Linux, I learned the hard way that breaking my operating system is just part of the learning process. I think I've had to reinstall Fedora KDE like three times now, simply because I was adventurous and wanted to see if I could set up a dual-boot with GRUB (I couldn't).

In recent years, we've seen significant improvements in upscaling and frame generation technologies, such as DLSS, XeSS, and FSR. Not too long ago, most of us would treat them as experimental features that we'd rather avoid unless we were absolutely desperate for more frames. After all, the softness, ghosting, and motion artifacts were hard to ignore, and you'd almost always notice the visual trade-offs the moment you started moving the camera. It used to be so bad that I'd rather game at native resolution with sub-60 FPS than settle for subpar image quality.

We all have to deal with PDFs every day. Whether you're dealing with work papers, reports, or contracts, having a good PDF tool is something you just can't avoid. For a long time, the self-hosted tool Stirling PDF was my favorite. It was fast and seemed like the perfect private choice for my workflow. But then, when questions about its tracking came up, it broke the trust of many users. I knew I had to find something else. I was worried about switching, but I quickly found a newer, better tool that respects my privacy and makes my work easier.

I've reviewed a few monitors in my day, and LG makes some of my favorites on the market. In fact, after reviewing the company's LG UltraWide 49WQ95C a couple of years ago, I ended up splurging and buying it for myself, and it's been my main workstation monitor ever since.

The era of gaming we're all living in right now is... strange, to say the very least. For all the talk we've had about "next-gen gaming", it's remarkable just how much we still cling to the past. When a franchise from the PS2 or Xbox era, or even the PS3/360 era makes a comeback, it's way more likely that it will be with a remaster or a remake rather than a fresh sequel. Sure, I get it. Nostalgia sells, after all. Resident Evil 2 proved it. Dead Space absolutely nailed it, and even Halo is now back in the headlines with Campaign Evolved, bringing Master Chief to an entirely new generation.

Being able to trust the hardware I bring into my home is incredibly important, especially so when that hardware is networking-related. I've seen many who were surprised at my usage of the YuanLey 6-port switch, with accusations of spyware being flung about baselessly. I had been monitoring the switch since the day I bought it, noticing nothing untoward, and I've already decompiled the most recent firmware for it, too.

Smart TVs and home labs may not seem like they have much in common, but you'd be surprised. Your home lab can take advantage of a smart TV as a lab dashboard in place of a more traditional monitor or as a lab status monitor, but the reverse is also true. Your smart TV can absolutely benefit from your home lab in a number of different ways.

The first-person shooter genre has many points of great change throughout gaming history. The Doom games laid the foundation and established what the genre could be, while the Halo series brought a new evolution of FPS games to home consoles in a big way. But the first-person shooter genre underwent another major shift that not only impacted games in the early 2000s, it changed the way most titles would approach online multiplayer in the years that followed. The game responsible for that was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and gaming would never be the same after it released.

I'll admit it: I'm the person who cancels streaming services the moment I'm not using them. The wake-up call came when a client casually mentioned they were spending over $200 monthly on productivity subscriptions. We audited their setup together, and within an hour, we'd identified six "ghost apps," what I like to call premium tools they barely touched that had free alternatives doing the same job, sometimes better.

It's all too easy to think you need a desktop PC to get the best experience, but that's just not true anymore. Sure, you won't be able to use flagship graphics cards without an eGPU enclosure, but that doesn't mean you can't game. APUs like Strix Halo and iGPUs generally have gotten very good and are enough for all but the most demanding titles.

I usually don't care about high RAM usage on my PC, since 32GB is enough for gaming as well as multitasking. The other day, however, I noticed suspiciously high RAM usage in Task Manager: 85–90%. At first, I thought it might just be allocated RAM, and not the amount actually in use, but this percentage was still higher than ever. Plus, I had been experiencing occasional lags while typing and switching browser tabs. The numbers didn't make sense either — all my browser windows accounted for around 12GB of RAM, but what about the other 15GB? The background programs couldn't explain this insanely high figure. When nothing else helped, I decided to use the oldest trick in the book, and I realized I should have done that in the first place.