Whether you’re hiking a mountain trail, flying overseas, or camping off-grid, having the right tech can make or break your trip. Good travel gear is lightweight, multipurpose, and durable. The focus here is convenience, entertainment, and peace of mind without overstuffing your bag. These are eight essential pieces of tech that should be in your backpack for any adventure.

When shopping for new storage drives, you can choose between a hard disk drive (HDD) and a solid-state drive (SSD). Both have advantages and drawbacks for storing data inside PCs, servers, network-attached storage (NAS), and other hardware. I needed to expand (and replace) my storage pool in my primary storage device, and I ended up opting for a few 16TB HDDs rather than moving into 2025 with an all-SSD array.

Just one day after Elon Musk’s public departure from his role as a White House employee, the Trump Administration pulled its nomination of Musk ally Jared Isaacman to become the new NASA Administrator. First reported earlier on Saturday by Semafor, citing anonymous sources, the move has been confirmed by White House spokesperson Liz Huston. The New York Times reports, based on three unnamed sources, that Trump “told associates he intended to yank Mr. Isaacman’s nomination after learning that he had donated to prominent Democrats,” including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and CEO of a payments company, Shift4, has purchased several spaceflights from Musk’s SpaceX. He flew on the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, and again last year on Polaris Dawn, completing the first commercial spacewalk. As noted by Space.com, the White House also released an in-depth version of its NASA budget request for 2026 on Friday, proposing to cut its funding by nearly one-quarter, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion, with funding for science programs dropping by 47 percent. In a statement released Friday, The Planetary Society called the budget justification “an extinction-level event for the space agency’s most productive, successful, and broadly supported activity: science,” that “wastes billions in prior taxpayer investment and slams the brakes on future exploration.”Now, without Isaacman in place, Ars Technica quotes an unnamed former senior NASA leader who said the request is “just a going-out-of-business mode.” In a statement emailed to media outlets including NBC, Huston wrote, “It’s essential that the next leader of NASA is in complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda and a replacement will be announced directly by President Trump soon.” Despite being unable to confirm to the Senate whether Musk had been a part of his job interview, he had appeared set for an approval vote to replace former Florida Senator Bill Nelson. According to the NYT, Isaacman was informed of the decision on Friday and declined to comment when reached by phone.

For as customizable as the Steam Deck is, it's surprisingly light on UI customization options. You can pick up different start-up animations and change the color of your keyboard — given you've bought designs through the Steam rewards program — but not much beyond that. Thankfully, the community has pushed things further. I've been using the CSS Loader plugin for the better part of two years on my Steam Deck OLED, and it gives me unfettered access to poke, prod, and break the Steam Deck's user interface in any way I see fit.

Writing about PC hardware every day, some things can slip through the cracks when it comes to implementing them on my own PC. One of these is storage, or more specifically, how to protect your data from an SSD that's going bad (or was a poor choice in the first place). Recently, I had an old SSD fail overnight, taking all the data of my secondary PC with it. Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the warning signs, nor did I have any backups. Suffice it to say that you should learn from my mistakes instead of making your own.

Whether you find yourself travelling abroad for pleasure or business, you'll likely interact with a server or two. This could be for streaming media, writing up a document or two, loading up your passwords and account credentials, or even backing up your mobile devices and freeing up some space. What if I told you that it's possible to self-host much of what you'd likely use while away from home? Here are some of the best self-hosted apps I use while away — and you can too!

SpaceX lost contact with Starship after its launch on March 6, 2025. | Image: AFP via Getty ImagesWith yet another failed Starship test this week, in which the ambitious heavy rocket exploded once again, you might reasonably suspect that luck has finally run out for SpaceX. But this degree of failure during a development process isn't actually unusual, according to Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert with the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, especially when you're testing new space technology as complex as a large rocket. However, the Starship tests are meaningfully different from the slow, steady pace of development that we've come to expect from the space sector."The reason a lot of people perceive this to be unusual is that this is not the typical way that we have historically tested rockets," Whitman Cobb says.Historically speaking, space agencies like NASA or legacy aerospace companies like United Launch Alliance (ULA) have taken their time with rocket development and have not tested until they were confident in a successful outcome. That's still the case today with major NASA projects like the development of the Space Launch System (SLS), which has now dragged on for over a decade. "They will take as long as they need to to make sure that the rocket …Read the full story at The Verge.

Just like the PC ecosystem, the NAS landscape is teeming with cool operating systems, each adding some unique functionality to your storage server. But once you fall down the slippery slope of NAS distros, you’ll come across operating systems that ship with premium licenses. And I don’t just mean distributions that require a paid subscription to unlock all features either; there are a couple of operating systems that won’t work unless you drop some dough on a license.

Home automation is more powerful than ever, and choosing the right platform can make or break your smart home experience. I’ve worked with both Home Assistant and Hubitat and found that while Hubitat has its merits, Home Assistant consistently offers more control, flexibility, and long-term satisfaction. Whether you’re new to smart home tech or you’ve been deep in Zigbee and MQTT for years, here’s why I think Home Assistant is the better choice.

Windows 11 is a powerful operating system, but like its predecessors, it requires awareness of privacy and security. There are features you should disable and stop using if you are concerned about privacy. Data on Windows can be shared or harvested in several ways, but you can prevent these actions from happening. Unless you want to create a local account (which becomes more difficult with each update), you can improve your Windows privacy by avoiding these features.

Personally, I've never really used photo mode in a video game. Okay, sure, I've booted it up in a few games, moved the camera around, fiddled with the filters and all that, but I never stop in front of a beautiful scene and think "Man, I hope this game has a photo mode to capture this moment." Maybe I'm just a grouchy curmudgeon.

Storage drives don't last forever, even if we wish they would. Hard drives and SSDs can last a long time if used carefully, but they'll eventually wear out and fail. Unlike hard drives, which give audible warning signs, solid-state drives can fail without any visible or audible warning signs, but sometimes you get lucky and notice issues before the drive dies.