In April, Elon Musk began backing away from his role as head of DOGE. By June, he was more or less fully gone from DC. In his wake, he left a power vacuum and significant ill will that has apparently led to the dissolution of DOGE eight months before its charter expires. To call Musk’s DC tenure contentious would be an understatement. As a man accustomed to getting what he wants and functioning as a powerful executive, he swept through Washington with a figurative chainsaw, slashing budgets, firing workers, and making audacious power grabs. Musk’s brash behavior angered government employees and alienated would-be allies, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Eventually, the bad blood reached a fever pitch, and Musk had a minor physical altercation with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Politico details the stunning fallout. By late May, DOGE and Musk had lost favor with President Trump, and White House aides began pushing back more forcefully against the fledgling government agency. When Musk was officially given a farewell by the White House on May 30th, it also pushed out his right-hand man, Steve Davis.But Davis, an engineer who had worked closely with Musk for over 20 years, including at DOGE, simply refused to leave. He stepped in to try and take the reins, but this didn’t sit well with many of the remaining DOGE staffers. But others remained loyal, essentially splitting the department in two. When those uncomfortable with Davis’ leadership, given that he was no longer a government employee, tried to plan for DOGE’s future without him, Davis accused them of staging a coup. The White House quickly rooted out his loyalists, putting an end to Davis’ brief attempt to consolidate control in less than two weeks. What followed was a series of restructurings, changes in leadership, and ultimately, the end of DOGE as a centralized organization. When Reuters reached out to the White House to ask about the status of DOGE earlier this month, it was told, “that doesn’t exist.” Musk rode into Washington with big ambitions of slashing government spending by trillions of dollars. Instead, during his brief time in DC, government spending actually increased, and he left behind many burned bridges.

When you try out a browser, you immediately start using the most popular features. You also learn how to use the ones you depend on the most, but then get caught up in your usual routine and stop exploring what else they can do. Comet browser has great functions that I use every day, such as Spaces for organizing tabs and multitasking, and a Voice assistant.

My smart home had a problem. No, it wasn't the myriad of devices from different manufacturers, although that was making it worse. It was that every device on my home network was implicitly trusted once I took the steps to connect it, leaving my home with any number of unpatched or unreported security holes. The more I learned about cybersecurity, the less I liked the idea, and that got me thinking about solutions.

2025 has been all about automations. Everyone keeps talking about how you can automate one thing or another using tools like n8n, Zapier, Huginn, or Make. But people forget how easy it is to automate almost anything with good old Python (no, really). I run tiny scripts on my Mac and Windows machines to handle tasks that would normally eat up hours during the week, and I genuinely save a lot of time because of them.

Ever since Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced, I’ve been thinking about what’s next for Halo as a franchise. There’s the high-level stuff, like the long-rumored multiplayer-only game or a brand-new Halo title that features both a robust campaign and sizeable multiplayer offerings. That said, there are some smaller-scale steps Halo Studios could take to regain some goodwill.

Since most Single-Board Computers ship without any SSDs, eMMC modules, or boot drives, it falls upon you to pick the ideal storage accessory for your project-making companion. Modern tinkering boards rely primarily on microSD cards for housing everything from the OS files to project data, so these tiny cards are deeply intertwined in the SBC ecosystem.

There are few better feelings than a group chat with your friends blowing up randomly, each person adding joke after joke, and you can’t help but laugh at the chaos. Over the years, I've inevitably had a bunch of these chats.

I think every tinkerer wishes to have their own BMO. There's something about a cute, animated robot that can follow you around that resonates strongly with Raspberry Pi hobbyists. It's likely why we see people occasionally make their own takes on BMO, with each project making the little digital companion do something unique.

I need a break from Call of Duty’s most popular two series. While the Black Ops and Modern Warfare series are home to some of the best games bearing the Call of Duty name, they both feel played out at this point. Following Black Ops 7’s disappointing launch and some discouraging rumors that next year’s game is yet another Modern Warfare game, I’m starting to feel burnt out by these series.

For years, “future-proofing” has been one of those ideas that gets thrown around constantly in PC building circles. Spend more now, the logic goes, and your rig will last longer. You’ll avoid participating in expensive upgrade cycles, sometimes dodge teething issues, and even save some money in the long run.

Ever since the Steam Machine got announced, there has been one question on everyone's minds: how much is it going to cost? As exciting as new Valve hardware is, the price will seriously make or break the device's popularity and could either catapult it into gaming history or send it the way of the 2015 Steam Machine.

The Windows XP era is now a part of history, and you can't get it from the official sources to run on your main PC. You shouldn't, even if it's become available, but it's always fun to go down memory lane and try things that spark nostalgia. We at XDA love to install retro Windows operating systems like Windows XP, but only on a virtual machine.