Windows already compresses games. When to use the free tool.
When you install a 100 GB game on a half-full SSD, the question is not whether you can free space. The question is which tool to use. Windows ships with compact.exe, a…
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141 articles
Metrics, logs, and traces: which signal earns the first look
Every team that runs software in production eventually lands on the same three nouns. Metrics, logs, traces. Engineers talk about them like they are pillars of a temple, each one sacred, each…
What observability actually does inside a working data centre
I spent a Saturday morning last month watching a senior SRE (site reliability engineer) work through a single slow page-load complaint. By the time the customer emailed us, the spike was already…
Seven free Linux tools that automate the desktop without scripting
If you run a Linux desktop for actual work, you have probably hit the wall where a task you do every day is too small to script but too annoying to keep…
I dropped Adobe Creative Cloud and the bill went to zero
I cancelled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription last year, and the only regret I have is that I did not do it sooner. The full Creative Cloud suite was costing me somewhere…
OpenAI’s rogue agents chose a 23-year-old Perl wiki to coordinate on
A research team at Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen published a dataset this month that documents what might be the most embarrassing AI agent failure of…
Choose row or column storage by the work your database does
The row-versus-column decision is easy to describe and surprisingly easy to get wrong. One layout keeps the fields of each record together. The other keeps values from the same field together. Neither…
A safer Python workflow for trimming prompt token waste
Prompt optimization is often sold as a clever compression trick. The more useful way to view it is as maintenance. A prompt is an interface between a person, an application, and a…
A practical field guide to cheaper AI coding workflows
Cheap AI coding is easy. Cheap AI coding that still ships correct code is the actual problem. The teams I have watched waste the most money on AI tooling are the ones…
An ESP32 retro pixel clock that earns its parts list
The makerspace corner of the internet has not gotten tired of putting clock faces on things that do not need them, and that is mostly fine. Some of those projects are honest…