I’ve been testing compressed vector embeddings for search pipelines for a while now, because the promise is irresistible: save storage and speed up retrieval while keeping relevance high. In practice it’s a balancing act. Below I share hands‑on experiments, the failure modes I’ve seen, and pragmatic rules of thumb for where compression is worth it—and where it isn’t.Why compress...
I spent the last few weeks pushing a Pixel Tablet through a set of pro-photography chores: rapid culling, raw...
I bought a cheap smart plug for my kitchen lamp last month. It was under £50, tucked into a sale, with shiny app...
I spent a month living with the Tilt Five mixed-reality dev kit on my desk, on my coffee table, and — embarrassingly...
I wanted a private, offline note-taking assistant that I could carry around on a cheap, low-power device. The Raspberry...
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 spent a month living with the Tilt Five mixed-reality dev kit on my desk, on my coffee table, and — embarrassingly often — in the middle of the living room carpet while I debugged raycasting math at 2 a.m. The kit is delightful: the holographic glasses are lightweight, the retrofitted...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →
I’ve helped teams evaluate incident management tooling from both an engineering and product perspective, and one question keeps coming up: can we replace PagerDuty with a cheaper alternative without sacrificing reliability or security? The short answer is: yes — in many cases — but it depends...
Read more... →
I’ve spent a lot of time testing biometric systems and threat modelling authentication flows for mobile apps and kiosks. Face biometrics are convenient and increasingly common, but they invite a wide range of “liveness” or spoofing attacks — from simple printed photos to sophisticated...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →
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)...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →
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...
Read more... →