The 10-minute security sweep I run on my 19 smart devices every year
The number that got me was nineteen. That is how many devices on my home network had a reachable port, a cloud account, or a Bluetooth radio at the end of last…
#office suite
12 articles
Hard drive errors: how to triage before you lose the data
A failing drive rarely announces itself with a single dramatic crash. More often it whispers for weeks: a file that will not open, a save that takes five seconds longer than 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…
Eleven Linux distros new users should actually try in 2026
I have installed Linux on at least thirty different machines over the last fifteen years. Old office desktops, retired family laptops, hand-me-down servers, a couple of cloud VMs, and one stubborn ThinkPad…
Cloud document management: structure on top of your storage
Cloud document management is a system that adds structure and control to your cloud storage. The storage part is easy: any of the big three (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive) or a privacy-leaning…
OpenVPN Access Server: bridging home lab to AWS, no duct tape
I run a small lab in my office that talks to a few EC2 instances in eu-west-1, and until last month the connection was a constant source of friction. SSH keys scp’d…
Incognito doesn’t hide you, and the one that does costs you
Incognito windows are a false sense of security. Your ISP can still see what you am doing, and the websites you visit still fingerprint your browser. Incognito clears your local history. That…
OnlyOffice 9.3 finally treats PDF editing as a first-class job
I have been editing PDFs on Linux for about twelve years. Most of those years were bad. The good tools were paid, the free tools were limited, and the workarounds involved piping…
Word still won’t duplicate a page, so here’s what actually works
Word does not have a “Duplicate Page” button. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The closest thing is a series of workarounds that range from “select and copy” (the obvious…
Xubuntu 26.04 LTS, reviewed by someone who keeps it installed
Xubuntu 26.04 LTS: Best New Features Xubuntu 26.04 LTS (codenamed “Resolute Raccoon,” a long-term-support release of the lightweight Ubuntu flavor that uses the Xfce desktop environment instead of GNOME) shipped on April…