I stopped opening ports to reach my smart home and you should too
My Home Assistant install used to live behind a port forward on my router. So did my NAS, my printer, and a long-forgotten Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole. Every one of those was…
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48 articles
Stop paying for Windows cleanup and learn Sysinternals
I have removed more paid “PC cleanup” suites from family computers than I have installed. The pattern is familiar: a yearly subscription, a red warning badge, and a dashboard that claims the…
I stopped losing newsletters to my inbox. One Zap fixed it.
I subscribe to maybe thirty newsletters. I read maybe five of them properly. The other twenty-five just pile up in my Gmail until I open one with a subject line I half-remember…
Four Scheme tools for building small static websites
Scheme is not where most people start when they need a website. That is exactly why these four static site generators are interesting. They treat publishing as a programming problem, not as…
TiDB gave me a distributed MySQL on my laptop in fifteen minutes
I have been the person explaining to a junior engineer why their beautifully normalised MySQL schema will not survive Black Friday, and I have been the junior engineer who built that schema…
Six Jellyfin settings that turned my media server around
I paid for Plex Pass for about six years before the math stopped working. Hardware transcoding (using your server’s graphics card to convert video formats on the fly) was the feature that…
Mozilla is rebuilding its fellowship program in public
Mozilla (the nonprofit behind Firefox) is rethinking the program that has trained a decade of public-interest technologists, and the rewrite is happening in the open. The fellowship itself, with its 200-plus alumni…
What Europe’s tech sovereignty package actually does
The European Commission published its European Technological Sovereignty Package in mid-2026, and most of the English-language coverage I have read has either skipped the substance or framed it as a procurement tweak.…
My 2019 RTX 2070 Super replaced every AI subscription I had
I run a GeForce RTX 2070 Super on my desk, and it has been quietly handling every local AI workload I have thrown at it for the last six months. The card…
Tailscale on Linux, the VPN that skips the certificate headache
Tailscale is a VPN built on top of WireGuard (a kernel-level encrypted tunnel protocol) that replaces the certificate and key-management parts with identity-based authentication. You install it on a server, you install…