Windows has been having a slew of weird bugs recently. We've seen the Windows Recovery Environment break, the Task Manager spawning more Task Managers when you close it, and pretty much all the core systems showing faults. But I'd argue that none of them is as strange as a bug that's causing people to play hide-and-seek with their login buttons.

Luckily I don’t do research-heavy work that often. I’m studying design and most of the materials are already curated, and most of my tech articles aren’t that research-heavy either since they’re topics I already know. But now and then, I hit those projects where I do need to dig, and that’s where things start getting messy. I end up with 50 open tabs and notes across ten different platforms that I’ll “sort later”. So I wanted to narrow down my system to just a handful of tools that I can easily keep track of, and that can also speedrun the research process.

I've spent years paying for Adobe's tools, mostly because there are no real alternatives that can comprehensively match the feature set. And while several open-source alternatives have come close, there's one feature that still has me reaching for Photoshop. That's background removal. As a journalist on the internet, writing about tech, it's a feature I use all too often, and every time I've switched to an offline editor or a free service, I run into one of three problems. Either the output quality was bad, or the process was painfully slow, or the service wanted me to upload my personal photos to a remote, and frankly, dubious-looking server. None of those trade-offs worked for me, especially when privacy is critical. I didn't want my photos used for training an AI model or sold to data brokers. But lately, Adobe's hefty subscription fee has been weighing heavily on me, and I decided it was time to find an alternative solution.

Ask any smart home enthusiast about their platform of choice, and you’re bound to hear great things about Home Assistant. After all, it’s compatible with most of the popular smart devices, and the ones that don’t outright work with HASS tend to have a community-created integration or two. You’ve got easy-to-create dashboards to organize your collection of gizmos, alongside a dedicated logbook for keeping track of the status changes in your smart home.

In case you missed it, Microsoft caused some outcry a little while ago after it announced that it would increase the cost of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription plan by 50%. People quickly learned that if you didn't purchase your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate through Microsoft and instead purchased gift cards at stores, you could still pick them up at the old price, something that GameStop even advertised it would do.

Comic book fans will have something fun to look forward to when Marvel Cosmic Invasion finally drops onto consoles and PC in December. The game is a side-scrolling brawler with multiple Marvel Comics heroes teaming up against a common threat. But unlike other Marvel games that have taken a more modern approach in recent years, the developer Tribute Games is bringing things back to the 90s era of these superheroes. Those that remember watching many of the Marvel animated shows of the decade will recognize a lot of what this Marvel team-up is looking to accomplish.

The enthusiast in me loves learning about and hosting new services all the time. However, more than the thrill of self-hosting, it is the cost savings over commercial subscription services that are a big reason why I got into this hobby. Over the last year or so, I've canceled a wide range of services without a second thought. The private, locally-hosted alternatives were good enough, and this includes streaming services, premium note-taking options, productivity enhancement tools, and, of course, backup services.

The world of technology changes in strange ways, doesn't it? Once billed as the one OS you shouldn't game on, we're now seeing Linux act as the beating heart for powerful gaming systems such as SteamOS and Bazzite. Gaming on Linux is no longer a joke; in fact, some gamers discovered that Linux handheld gaming can sometimes beat Windows 11 now.

What's better than an array of colorful lights on your wall? A smart array of colorful lights on your wall, that's what. While 'dumb' devices tend to follow only their preset patterns, hooking up the lights to a smart home system unlocks a ton of potential. Now you can make them react, signal, and notify based on conditions that you set, and it's half the fun of planning a smart home system.

If you're a PC enthusiast with any amount of expendable income, you know how difficult it is to ignore the itch to upgrade, even if everything you have is already sufficient. 2025 was a year in which I probably didn't need to upgrade anything. My system ran most things quite well, and I had very little to complain about otherwise. I've made a lot of hardware moves over the years that have been pretty transformative for my PC experience, but I've also made a ton that could be considered a lateral move—maybe even a downgrade. Not every upgrade I made this year fell into the first category, but these 4 made a huge difference in my day-to-day work and play.

I'm always on the lookout for the perfect note-taking tool. I've gone hands-on with practically every tool I hear people raving about, and the sad part is that there’s little variety. The tools are either overbloated with features that simply aren’t necessary, or they’re so barebones that you end up wishing for just a bit more.

Despite the impressive processing capabilities of the newer Raspberry Pi boards, certain demanding projects remain out of their reach. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a mere Raspberry Pi SBC to run dozens of virtual machines on Proxmox. Nor would you expect this pint-sized machine to run high-capacity HDDs in RAID 10 and share the storage pool at 10GbE speeds.