Wiring a house for ethernet? Five build-order decisions you’ll regret.
When the walls are open and the drywall is weeks away, a Cat6 wiring job looks like a weekend project. The work itself is not hard. The hard part is that almost…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
I dropped most desktop apps for browser tools, and I regret waiting
I used to install an app for every new task. My PC got crowded with software I barely opened, and I never questioned it. Then a few browser-based tools got good enough…
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…
How to actually measure your CDN from the Linux command line
A fast load time on the laptop you happen to be sitting in front of is not evidence that your content delivery network (CDN) is working for the rest of the planet.…