Six Android apps I swapped for open-source, year-one verdict
I have been running a de-Googled Android phone (a phone that has been set up without Google’s apps and services, or with Google’s apps stripped out) for about a year. The de-Googling…
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71 articles
Free legal ebooks: the lending sites that killed my $20 habit
I used to spend $15 to $20 a month on ebooks I would read once and never open again. Then I tried the library apps, the public domain sites, and one or…
Self-hosted passwords make recovery your responsibility
A password vault can look familiar after a move while the work behind it changes hands. In the MakeUseOf account, the author moved from 1Password to Vaultwarden and used Bitwarden clients. Browser…
Decide whether vector search needs a database of its own
A search feature does not need a new database merely because its interface includes an AI model. The useful decision comes earlier: does the product need to find records by meaning, or…
A web host’s AI is useful only when a person can intervene
A hosting customer may notice a site-building assistant or a support chat box. The less visible work described in the source article happens on the provider’s side: predicting demand, spotting hardware trouble,…
The practical test for AI-ready data is a safe handoff
A data platform can have a tidy diagram and still leave a team unsure where a model’s input came from, whether it is current, or who is allowed to act on the…
Docker Compose is easier to maintain when each feature has a job
A Compose file usually becomes difficult for an ordinary reason: the same service settings get copied into several places, startup order gets mistaken for readiness, and tools needed only during development become…
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…
Buying used enterprise SSDs: what to check before you pay
There is a corner of the storage market where the price per terabyte makes new consumer drives look like a rounding error. Pulled enterprise SSDs show up on eBay and at vendors…
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…