There are plenty of reasons you should try open-source software, including a lively community of contributors and robust features. But there's also the fact that open-source software can save you money, both in terms of providing useful financial management tools, as well as helping you avoid the costs of other premium software.

You can control a lot with a Raspberry Pi around your home. In fact, I'd be surprised if there was something you couldn't wire up to a Pi running Home Assistant and turn smart. But some integrations are more useful than others, and some are more surprising than others.

When Aura Displays reached out about the Triple Boost 14 Pro, I was immediately curious to see what it was about. It's been a while since I've had the chance to test a portable monitor, but I love the idea. A couple of years ago, I reviewed an interesting concept of a dual portable monitor that seemed to be very promising, though it fell short in a few ways. So, I wanted to know how far we've come in that time.

I'm not very good at managing finances and often lose track of how much I've spent throughout the month, usually ending up counting pennies by the end. I've tried a lot of expense trackers to sort out this mess, and while they worked, I never felt comfortable giving them access to my emails and messages.

Xbox Game Pass is one of the most popular subscription services in gaming, offering 100s of games for a monthly fee. That's an overwhelming number of games, with even more getting added throughout 2025 and beyond, but we have collected a handful of special games to give you a place to start. This list includes a combination of indies and AAA, across several different genres. Game Pass has continued to expand its offerings, adding bonus in-game goodies for free-to-play titles like Call of Duty Warzone and adding a selection of retro games to stream. While more excellent games will come to the service in the future, here are seven excellent games on Xbox Game Pass.

Over the past years, gaming has evolved as a storytelling medium to rival film in its nuance and narrative complexity. That has opened the gate for complex, morally gray characters. Joel and Ellie to Lee Everett, Snake, and James Sunderland, we’ve now been conditioned to expect protagonists who are deeply flawed, emotionally scarred, and often one bad day away from becoming the villain.

Last week, Elon Musk’s media tour included telling CBS Sunday Morning he was “disappointed” by the Republican domestic policy bill backed by President Trump. Now, the former White House employee is calling it a “disgusting abomination” and claiming that Congress is making America bankrupt in posts on X on Tuesday.Elon’s problem isn’t the provisions we noted that would strip state legislatures of AI oversight and scale back consumer protection and climate initiatives, while funding increased border surveillance. Instead, he claims, “It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the bill’s tax provisions would increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next decade.Despite Musk continuing and threatening that “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” the White House and other Republican political leaders have not shown much regard for his statements. In a briefing Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “…look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill. It doesn’t change the president’s opinion; this is one big beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it.”Democrats had a different response, as ABC News reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer held up a printout of Musk’s tweets during his press conference following a policy luncheon. Schumer told reporters, “Trump’s buddy says the bill is bad — you can imagine how bad this bill is,” while his counterpart in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, said, “…breaking news: Elon Musk and I agree with each other.” Politico reports that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters he spoke to Musk on Monday for about 20 minutes regarding the bill, and said, “With all due respect, my friend Elon is terribly wrong about the one big, beautiful bill.” In the Senate, Republican Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, “On this particular issue, we have a difference of opinion,” and that he believes Musk is using outdated data.

If you're not looking to go all out with your desktop PC, playing graphically intense games, or doing heavy photo and video editing, the chances are pretty high that you're going to be happy with an affordable mini PC. It's pretty easy to dismiss these products since they're so small, but most models today pack plenty of power that can easily handle most things you throw at it.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices have become central to home labs and small office setups, acting as backup solutions, media servers, self-hosted Docker app platforms, and whatnot. But in the rush to set them up and get them running, we often overlook basic security hygiene. While NAS makers have improved default configurations quite a bit in recent times, we often tend to leave some gaps that could potentially expose our data. Whether you have a branded NAS or an old PC brought back to life with TrueNAS, it’s worth finding and reconsidering the blind spots.

When buying PC components, it's always important to have a balanced build — both overspending and cheaping out on certain parts can hurt your build. And I'm not talking about the CPU or GPU alone; even the storage and CPU cooler demand equal attention. After building several gaming PCs and making some mistakes along the way, I've decided not to use certain PC components ever again. Some of the realizations grew out of hard-learned lessons, while others are simply inevitable reactions to the current PC hardware market.

For a while now, I've wanted to move away from Google services and also test out more open-source and self-hosted software. Immich meets both these goals by being a Google Photos alternative that I can self-host on my own device. In fact, some people argue that Immich is better than Google Photos.

Buying a laptop is becoming more and more like a long-term investment, and that's never been more true in the case of Apple's MacBook. Both the Pro and the Air have been immensely popular choices among working professionals for many years, and while buying new comes with obvious pros, a big con is price. Testing the pre-owned laptop market can be an effective way to get a MacBook at a less eye-watering price, but there are a few pitfalls to watch out for. When I bought my own pre-owned MacBook Pro recently, I took extra care to watch out for these four pitfalls.