I recently went on a trip to my in-law's cottage, and during that time, I still wanted access to my home lab stack. My Proxmox host and the LXCs inside, including a Samba share and Immich photo library, are examples of services that I still needed to be able to reach while being on the other side of the province.

A yard sign opposing a planned data center is displayed along Route 54 in Mount Carmel Township Northumberland County. | Image: Getty Images This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the data center buildout, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedYears before the AI boom threatened local power grids, a small group of protesters set the stage for the battles cropping up across communities today. In 2015, Apple announced plans to build a roughly $1 billion data center in the sleepy town of Athenry, Ireland. The data center's 500-acre site would power Apple's services in Europe, including iTunes, iMessage, and Siri. At th …Read the full story at The Verge.

After years of use, one morning I went to turn on my PC, and I was met with the dreaded blue screen of death sporting a clinical, unforgiving stop code: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. After troubleshooting everything I could, I finally managed to access my PC again via Windows Safe Mode. However, it gave me the shock I needed to double-check my SSD's health, and I realized I wasn't far from total data loss.

When I first started building out my Proxmox environment, creating a full virtual machine for every service felt like the safe choice. Each application got its own operating system, virtual disk, memory allocation, and clearly defined place on the server. It looked organized and, more importantly, felt properly isolated. After a while, though, I had several nearly identical Linux installations running just to support small services that barely used the resources I’d assigned them. Moving most of those workloads into Linux containers, or LXCs, made the waste much harder to ignore, because the same hardware suddenly felt quicker, less crowded, and much easier to maintain.

When people discuss which Linux operating system they prefer, they rightfully focus on the distro itself. It's the beating heart of the system, so it's naturally what people gravitate toward first when recommending a system. However, the desktop environment is also a huge part of it; if the distro is the core, then the desktop environment is what people use to interact with it, and a bad environment can put people off.

The importance of creating redundant copies of essential data was something I learned shortly after putting together my first PC, and my backup-hoarding tendencies only grew once I stepped into the home lab ecosystem. While maintaining regular backups of my server rigs and their virtual guests is pretty simple (I have PBS to thank for that), the situation is a bit different when it comes to my Windows 11 PCs.

I recently wrote about how the RTX 4090 may age better than the GTX 1080 Ti, and one of our readers pointed out something in the comments that I couldn't stop thinking about. It's that the RTX 5080 is the first 80-class GPU in Nvidia's history to fail to beat the previous-generation flagship. When someone puts it that way, you realize just how exceptional the RTX 4090 really was. Either way, it sums up why this generation of Nvidia GPUs feels so strange.

Most people's folder systems are a bit of a mess if we're being honest. You know the feeling of going in there and finding a screenshot from four months ago you meant to do something with, or a note that trails off mid-sentence because past-you gave up. The bigger the folder gets, the less inviting it is to actually go in and sort out. And no productivity app I've tried has actually helped me stay on top of any of it for longer than a week or two.

Dual monitors are a kind of upgrade that feels like an obvious win. What's not to love, after all? Ever since moving to a dual-monitor setup, I have more screen space, better multitasking, fewer Alt+Tab gymnastics, and most importantly, YouTube on the second screen as I work on the primary display. These are all things I looked forward to when I brought a second monitor home. I'd definitely make the same decision again in a heartbeat, but owning two displays has definitely come with a surprising number of little compromises that I never saw coming.

Microsoft's PowerToys suite recently reached version 0.100, and with it came a much smaller installer, now just 272MB instead of 376MB. That's a 28% reduction, so downloading and installing the app is easier than ever. But that's not all Microsoft has been up to.

KDE does an amazing job getting newcomers fully kitted out with the essential apps. When you install Plasma, you also get excellent tools such as KDE Connect, which acts similarly to Microsoft's Windows Your Phone but is open-source. Likewise, Plasma has its own screenshotting tool called Spectacle, which does the job...for the most part.

AI tools have advanced to the point where you don’t even need a coding editor to code anymore. You don’t even have to be coding to code these days. You just need to provide natural-language prompts and tell the AI what you want to build.