8 AI apps worth paying for in 2026 (and which ones to skip)
Most AI app roundups read the same way. They list twenty tools, give each one a paragraph that sounds like marketing copy, and leave you no closer to knowing which one to…
#llm
22 articles
Six ways to test an open port without installing telnet on Linux
You stood up a service, opened a firewall rule, or wired up a reverse proxy. Now you want to know if a specific port is actually reachable from where you are. The…
KOReader plus an LLM turned my old Kindle into my favorite reader
I have a Kindle 4 that was obsolete when the Obama administration was still young. The battery is shot, the bezels are thick, and it does not have a touchscreen. I have…
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…
When local models stopped being news, the real work began
Two years ago, running a local language model meant downloading 4-bit quantized weights (a compressed version of a model where the numbers that represent how strong each connection between neurons is have…
Past your first Python projects? Here’s what to learn next
I have been writing about Python for a while, and I get a version of this question every week. Someone is six months into learning Python, has built a few small projects,…
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…
My smart TV has never touched Wi-Fi, and I still stream everything
I have not connected my smart TV to my home network in three years. I do not mean I sometimes forget. I mean the TV has never had the Wi-Fi password typed…
Seven viral ChatGPT image prompts, ranked by what holds up
I spent a weekend running the most-shared ChatGPT image prompts against GPT Image 2 (OpenAI’s current flagship image model, released earlier in 2026) and found something the viral posts leave out. About…