Blog
Practical notes on repairs, tools, rebuilds, devices, and the parts of tech that only become obvious after real use.
- Entries
- 15 published
- Updated
- Jul 2026
Acer Chromebook 315 First Impressions: Do You Still Need a Windows Laptop?
The interesting question about a cheap Chromebook is not whether it is fast. It is whether the work you do still needs a full Windows laptop. After a couple of days with the Acer Chromebook 315, the answer is closer to no than I expected.
OpenAI Made a $230 Keyboard. I've Owned Enough of Them to Have Opinions.
OpenAI's first piece of hardware is a $230 macro pad for its Codex agents. I run coding agents every day and I've owned a pile of mechanical keyboards, so I have a read on this even though I didn't buy one. The keys that show live agent status are a genuinely good idea. The rest is a $129 Work Louder Creator Micro with a hundred dollars of Codex branding on top.
I Automated YouTube Video Triage, Then Found Out I Was Optimizing the Wrong Thing
I built a tool that flags my weak YouTube videos and rewrites their titles. It felt smart. Then I had OpenAI's Codex red-team the design and checked every claim against YouTube's own guidance. Rewriting metadata turned out to be the wrong fix, and my success metric was measuring noise.
Running a WoW Private Server Client on Apple Silicon: Three Dead Ends and a Better Answer
I wanted to play my homelab WoW private server from my MacBook Pro. The client is a 32-bit game from 2010, and Apple Silicon turned that into a stacked translation problem across three different Wine tools. Here's what broke, why, and why I think the spare x86 laptop is the better machine for it.
How much does Tailscale actually slow you down? I ran the numbers.
Before connecting to my homelab remotely, I ran a speed test to get a baseline. Then I connected via Tailscale and ran it again. The results were almost identical, which would have been a clean story, except the first two tests had the exit node on the whole time.
A Design Pass on Sherwin Travels
I used Sherwin Travels as the test case for an AI-assisted design pass. Not because it was broken, but because it wasn't quite there. The useful part wasn't the tooling. It was seeing what changed and what still needed a human call.
How I set up NAS-to-NAS backup at home (Part 3: What I'm doing about it)
The destination NAS's CPU is the wall. Drives have headroom, the network has headroom, the source is bored. The Atom in the DS1815+ is why an 11 TB initial replication is going to take days, with three more shares behind it. Here's how I thought through the options.
Gemma vs Claude for SEO Scoring: What the 26-Point Gap Reveals
Same posts, same prompt, two AI models, a 26-point gap. I built dual AI scoring into Cerebro to compare Gemma 4 and Claude Haiku side by side, and the disagreement says more about modern SEO than most checklists do.
Synology NAS-to-NAS backup with Snapshot Replication, Part 2: What went wrong
An overnight death I couldn't immediately explain, CPU pegged on a single core, drives bored. The bottleneck on a 12-year-old Atom NAS turned out to be more interesting than the symptom.
Synology NAS-to-NAS backup with Snapshot Replication, Part 1: The build
Going from zero backup of 45 TB to twice-weekly Snapshot Replication between two Synology NASes — the hardware, the decisions, and the one wizard quirk nobody warns you about.
HP OmniBook X 14 Review: Snapdragon X Plus in Real-World Use
I went looking for the power brick when I pulled the OmniBook X out of the box. There isn't one. That small detail tells you most of what you need to know about how the Snapdragon X Plus changes the laptop experience.
Stopping Claude Code From Leaking Secrets
Claude Code leaked a real token fragment into my chat session during a routine operation. After two incidents and a painful key-rotation cycle, I built a two-hook safety layer so Bash output gets redacted before the model sees it.
Local Pharmacy Website Redesign: What We Fixed
Their Google Maps embed was broken. No hours on the page. Phone buried at the bottom. 16 seconds average visit. Here's what a rebuild actually looks like, and why it matters for a neighborhood pharmacy.
Google Pixel Fold at $350: Refurbished and Still Relevant
I picked up a refurbished Pixel Fold for $350 — a phone that launched at $1,799. Two months as a daily driver alongside a Pixel 10 Pro taught me that foldables aren't about specs anymore. They're about what the form factor unlocks.
Sony ZV-E10 vs a6500: The Solo Creator Tradeoff
I borrowed a ZV-E10 for a few weeks to see if its flip-out screen and vlogger features are worth giving up IBIS, the viewfinder, and familiarity with a camera that already works. The answer depends entirely on how you shoot.