My go-to is a flash drive with Ventoy and then System Rescue CD and a few other ISOs (Antivirus scanner (Desinfec’t), Windows installer, Linux installer, etc.) on it. But I’m mostly using System Rescue CD and it can be installed directly to USB, too, if you want. Not really for novice users, though, as it boots into the Linux command line. But there’s X11 with GParted and other graphical tools available.
https://feeds.leonid.codes/hacker_news.rss or https://hnrss.org/frontpage for Hacker News are great to get an overview about what’s happening. And then specific sites I like to follow, e.g. MacStories. Most websites still have an RSS feed albeit sometimes hidden very well.