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…
#development
99 articles
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…
Three real apps, zero paid APIs. The 2026 free tier audit
I built three small apps in 2025 that use only free-tier APIs (HTTP endpoints that other services expose for programmatic access). One handles lead routing for a friend’s consulting business, one does…
Your smart home devices will outlive the cloud they need
Belkin turned off the Wemo cloud last year. Insteon disappeared overnight in 2023. Google’s Revolv hub got bricked (made permanently nonfunctional through a software update) the same year the company bought it.…
One UI 8.5 finally made DeX worth plugging in for
I have been running Samsung DeX (Samsung’s desktop mode that runs on a phone when you plug it into a display) for about six years on three different Galaxy phones. The first…
I ditched Alexa for a bedside briefing box, fully offline
I have been trying to replace my Alexa morning briefing for two years. The Alexa one was fine for weather and the BBC, but the headline mix was wrong. Too many stories…
Context, not the model, is breaking your Python agents
Half of the agent failures I see in Python projects come from bad context, not a bad model. The other half come from the same thing in a different costume. Context engineering…
Run SuperGrok inside Hermes without an xAPI key
I have been paying for SuperGrok for eight months. I also use Hermes Agent (an open-source AI agent runtime that you can self-host or run on your laptop) for most of my…