I wanted a private, offline note-taking assistant that I could carry around on a cheap, low-power device. The Raspberry Pi 5—when paired with the right model and software—lets you do exactly that: run a local language model that summarizes, tags, and searches your notes without ever sending data to the cloud. I built one, iterated a few times, and in this article I’ll walk you through the...
I’ve helped teams evaluate incident management tooling from both an engineering and product perspective, and one...
I’ve spent a lot of time testing biometric systems and threat modelling authentication flows for mobile apps and...
I remember the first time I had to migrate an authentication system for a business unit: months of planning, frantic...
I’ve been living with a privacy-first smart home setup for a couple of years now, and every week I find one more way...
I test a lot of tiny devices—fitness bands, smart rings, and the occasional prototype smartwatch—and one question...
When I started exploring padel as a complementary sport to my usual tech reviews and gadget testing, I quickly realised...
I’ve been tracking the slow, steady shift toward passwordless authentication for years now — testing products, probing security claims, and watching organizations wrestle with the trade-offs. Passwordless is no longer a futuristic checkbox; for many enterprises it’s a practical way to reduce...
Read more... →
I’ve spent years testing AI tools, writing about their quirks, and helping teams pick the right tech that actually fits their day-to-day work. Choosing an AI assistant for your team isn’t just about picking the model with the highest benchmark — it’s about matching capabilities to workflow,...
Read more... →
I want developer pipelines that are secure, fast, and simple to understand. Over the years I’ve seen teams over-engineer CI/CD so much that it becomes the riskiest part of their product: secrets scattered in variables, build steps that run as privileged, and complex umbrella scripts no one dares...
Read more... →
I’ve spent years building and securing cloud-native apps, and one lesson keeps coming back: even a single small virtual machine (VM) exposed to the internet can become your weakest link if you don’t harden it. This guide walks you through a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to hardening a small...
Read more... →
I get asked a lot: can you trust OpenAI’s API with sensitive business data? As someone who tests and writes about cloud services and security, my short answer is: “it depends.” But that’s not very useful on its own. Below I walk through a practical, evidence-based risk checklist you can use...
Read more... →
I’ve spent years helping teams balance two competing forces: keeping cloud bills from spiralling out of control while preserving — or even improving — application performance. It sounds like a compromise in principle, but with the right measurement and a practical checklist you can achieve...
Read more... →
I spent a week traveling for work with only a pair of budget earbuds in my bag. No expensive over-ears, no backup wired headset — just a compact case, a USB-C cable, and whatever the manufacturer promised on the box. The experiment was simple: treat those earbuds like my only audio tool for...
Read more... →
I’d been waiting to put a Pixel Tablet through its paces because I keep thinking about the same question I hear from readers and fellow creators: “Is the new Pixel Tablet worth it for creative pros on a budget?” I tested it for a week as my primary sketching, photo-editing, note-taking and...
Read more... →
I’ve been tracking multimodal AI closely for several years now — not just as a technologist, but as someone who builds product narratives and tests real prototypes. Multimodal models that combine text, images, audio, and even code are no longer research curiosities: they’re tools that reshape...
Read more... →