One Android toggle buried my notification chaos
I have used Android for over a decade. Notifications are why I stayed. iPhone notifications are a joke by comparison. For years, my tray was clean, the apps I cared about floated…
#productivity
90 articles
Seven Ubuntu tweaks I run on every fresh install
I have installed Ubuntu on at least thirty machines in the last three years. Laptops for clients, a few home lab machines, two of my own. The first thing I do on…
Three open-source whiteboards with no account and no server
Whiteboard tools have multiplied over the last three years, and most of them require an account, send your data to a server, or both. The three below do neither. They are self-hostable,…
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…
Windows 11 search is broken. Here is the free fix that actually works
I have been running a fresh Windows 11 install on a test box for about three weeks now, and the first thing that drove me up the wall was the search box.…
GLM-5.2 from Z.ai may be the strongest open weights text model now
A new open weights model from Chinese AI lab Z.ai dropped on June 16th under an MIT license, and the early benchmarks suggest it deserves attention. GLM-5.2 (the latest in the GLM…
Schedule one-off Linux jobs with at and stop abusing cron
I used to write cron entries for things that should have been one-shot jobs. A temporary firewall rule for a vendor. A service restart at 2 AM. A reminder to pull a…
Dinky replaced three Mac compression apps in my dock
I was running ImageOptim for images, HandBrake for video, and a paid PDF tool for shrinking documents. That is three apps to install, three menus in my dock, and three different mental…
My 2014 ProBook is more repairable than anything made since
I still own an HP ProBook 640 G1 from 2014. It is not a museum piece. It runs Windows 11, it has been opened more times than my two newer laptops combined,…