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 remember the first time I had to migrate an authentication system for a business unit: months of planning, frantic late-night debugging, and a growing pile of post-it notes stuck to the monitor. Passwords were everywhere—hard-coded in scripts, reused across subsystems, and guarded by brittle...
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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 to stop sending data to cloud services while keeping — and sometimes improving — the convenience I actually want. If you care about privacy, security, and resilience, you can...
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I test a lot of tiny devices—fitness bands, smart rings, and the occasional prototype smartwatch—and one question always comes up: how do you meaningfully evaluate on-device AI when battery life is the limiting factor? It’s tempting to point to a single number (inference time, mAh drained)...
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When I started exploring padel as a complementary sport to my usual tech reviews and gadget testing, I quickly realised that choosing the right padel racket in the UK is as much about fit and feel as it is about raw specs. If you're searching for padel racket uk, this article is meant to take you...
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Keeping a large language model (LLM) healthy in production feels a bit like tending a high-maintenance houseplant: ignore it for too long and it wilts, water it too much and you drown it. In the last few years I’ve watched teams move from “deploy and forget” to continuous monitoring and...
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I’ve spent the last few weeks alternating between my living room, a noisy coffee shop, and a shared office desk, testing several budget AI noise-cancelling earbuds against my long-time reference: the Sony WH-1000XM4. The question I wanted to answer was simple but practical: can cheap AI earbuds...
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Fine-tuning GPT-style models on proprietary customer data is one of those tasks that promises huge value—better, more contextual outputs; fewer hallucinations for domain-specific prompts; and a competitive edge in automation and support. It’s also a task that can easily turn into a data leak or...
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I used to dread the monthly cloud bill email. A spike in egress charges would arrive like clockwork after a product launch, blamed on "unexpected traffic" or "downloads from Region X." Over the years I've helped several engineering teams rework their multicloud topology so that customer-facing apps...
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Buying an enterprise AI observability tool is one of those decisions that looks simple on a feature sheet and quickly becomes painful in production. I’ve sat in more vendor demos than I’d like to admit, built my own ad‑hoc monitoring stacks, and seen observability gaps turn into customer...
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I’ve spent the past year benchmarking vector databases as part of larger semantic search projects, and one thing became quickly clear: choosing a vector database is less about raw recall numbers and more about trade-offs between usability, latency, and price. In this article I’ll walk you...
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