Blogroll

Time is a valuable asset. As someone who writes about entertainment for a living, I spend much of my time watching the latest movies that will dominate conversation in the coming weeks. When I do have a free moment, I try not to waste my time watching poorly reviewed movies or three-hour movies.

Photoshop's "Remove background" tool is great, but it comes with a pretty steep price. To use it, you need an active subscription.

The Rock 5 family of single-board computers (SBCs) includes multiple members, four of which are built on the RK3588. The RK3588 is very capable as SBC CPUs go—it has four "performance" cores running at 2.4Ghz, another four efficiency cores running at 1.8GHz, a decent GPU, and a 6 TOPs NPU.

I've always found resume writing to be a headache, and it's only gotten worse. There are ATS (Applicant Tracking System) tools scanning for keywords, design conventions I'm no longer up to date on, endless advice about mirroring the language of the job posting—and who knows what else. It's a lot to keep track of for a document I neither enjoy writing nor have much experience creating. I also don't have much incentive to get better at it, since I land most jobs through social outreach or referrals.

.Most people celebrated when Microsoft loosened its grip on Windows updates. The forced restarts were annoying, the timing was always wrong, and it felt like your computer was making decisions that belonged to you. I get it, but the more I think about what mandatory updates were actually doing, the harder it is to feel good about losing them.

I've had my Kindle 4 for more than a decade, and for most of that time I used the stock Kindle software. When Amazon announced it was dropping support for this model, I decided to jailbreak it. I wish I'd done it sooner, as the Kindle has become far more useful; I've found several ways that I can use it with Home Assistant, and you can find old Kindles on secondhand marketplaces for as little as $25.

Samsung is a leader in Android features and UI options, but that hasn't stopped it from continuing to up its customization game. If you're a seasoned Samsung owner, you probably know about the Good Lock app. It's a suite of tools that took me by surprise, especially when it broke Android’s own rules to deliver better experiences. Learning more about these buried apps and their features can drastically alter your device.

Losing your only charging cable in the middle of a long drive is the kind of thing that makes reasonable people take impulsive risks. Buying a charging cord from a gas station is one of the worst decisions you can make. Some of them are a legitimate security threat, and the ones that aren't can still do real damage to your hardware over time.

The whole point of running a home server is being able to reach your files, media, dashboards, and other self-hosted services whenever you need them. Unfortunately, the easiest way to use remote access is also the riskiest one: through port forwarding.

A sound system isn't a cheap proposition, and if you're going to spend the money, you don't want any regrets a year or two down the road. Rather than buying a soundbar, you should piece together your own system—it'll age better and offer better performance.

Emissions regulations, electrification, and ever-stricter fuel economy standards have forced manufacturers to downsize their engines or abandon internal combustion altogether. Even Ferrari has an EV now. The days of the V12 engine are numbered. But they aren’t over, thanks to Zenvo.

Home Assistant is the best smart home platform in almost every way. The problem is that it has a bit of a reputation for being overly complex, which can put a lot of people off. But the project is actively focused on improving the user experience, prioritizing user-friendliness to increase adoption.

We typically think of a smartwatch as an extension to a phone, but there’s no reason it can’t be a useful companion for a computer, too. I was able to set up a simple automation to launch apps on my desktop from my Galaxy Watch—and I did it with two apps I already had installed.

I love streaming services. I see them as an affordable way to watch movies, and when those movies rotate away, I can stream something new.

There was an age where partitioning drives was not only common, but encouraged. But PCs have changed a lot in the past few years. Nowadays, while partitioning is still an option, I'd argue that 90% of users probably shouldn't.

If you've ever dual-booted a PC, you've probably noticed a pretty marked difference between how quickly apps launch on Linux compared to Windows. On Linux, everything seems to snap open instantly, while on Windows there is a perceptible hesitation. Installing Linux on an old PC only exaggerates that even more.

Pull the plug on your internet connection and your Amazon Echo suddenly seems useless. But there's a difference between Alexa being offline and Alexa being completely switched off. I took my Echo offline to find out what still works and what doesn't.

There was a time when AIO (All-In-One) liquid coolers were the perfect middle ground between expensive and complex custom loops and loud and ineffective air coolers. No matter which AIO you chose, it was probably better than most air coolers you could have used in the same build.

Excel has changed dramatically since I first started using it. Microsoft has added features like AI tools, dynamic arrays, Power Query improvements, Python integration, and many new functions—but one of the first "advanced" features I learned is still one of the tools I use most. Setting up Custom Lists only takes a few minutes, yet it quietly saves me time every time I enter or sort recurring data.

The Raspberry Pi may have fallen out of favor among homelabbers and hobbyists for its high price-to-performance ratio, but the single-board computer still has some compelling use cases. Detecting earthquakes and other seismic activity is up there with the best of them.