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…
#reading
36 articles
Linux text one-liners that still hold up in 2026, mostly
I have a confession. The first time I ran a word-frequency pipeline against a man page, I shipped numbers that were off by a factor of three. The output looked plausible. The…
Seven free Linux tools that automate the desktop without scripting
If you run a Linux desktop for actual work, you have probably hit the wall where a task you do every day is too small to script but too annoying to keep…
Where Windows 11 hides its per-event sound picker dialog
Windows 11 is louder than most people want it to be. The default event sounds are fine for a fresh install, and they get old fast. There is also a wider problem…
Seven free climate and weather data tools I have used
Climate science runs on data. A single weather station records temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed every minute. A satellite records dozens of channels across the electromagnetic spectrum, every few seconds, for…
Sixteen free Linux screenshot tools I keep coming back to
The first thing I install on a fresh Linux box is something to take screenshots with. Not because I write about software for a living, although that is part of it, but…
Picking the right Bluetooth manager for your Linux desktop
Linux Bluetooth support is rarely the thing that breaks. BlueZ has shipped in the kernel for years, and most modern distributions will pair a phone or headset the moment you click the…
Kindle’s page turn animation is a tiny fix for a real reading problem
There is a moment when you finish a chapter on a screen and your brain does not register that anything finished. You tap, the words change, the chapter number ticks up, and…
What smartphone portrait mode actually does to your photo
Smartphones do not blur backgrounds the way a camera does. They fake it after the fact, with depth maps, segmentation networks, and a blur kernel that simulates a wider aperture than the…
Three touchpad settings that fix a stuck left-click problem
My touchpad started treating every tap as a left-click last week. Not “mostly left-click with occasional right-click.” Every single tap. Open a folder, get a left-click. Right-click on a file to rename…