Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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The 2026 Software List: 110 Applications I Actually Run
Four years ago I published a list of twenty. Nine of them are still here — and the other ninety-odd arrived to keep them company.
In September 2022 I wrote 20 Must Have Software Applications for Every PC. Dashlane, Chrome, Microsoft Office, Kaspersky, PuTTY, TeamViewer. It was a list of things you install on a laptop or desktop.
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8 Tokens a Second
Eight tokens a second. That is the number that ended my experiment with running AI locally, and it is the reason my personal AI stack now sits on someone else’s GPUs.
I did not want that outcome. I run a homelab specifically because I like owning the thing that does the work. But after a few months of trying, the honest answer is that local inference did not earn its place, and the reasons are more interesting than “it was slow”.
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TP-Link M8550 Review: A 3.4 Gbps Router on a 107 Mbps Network
A very good mobile 5G router will not save you from a spectrum-poor carrier. I tested two different SIMs and the results were surprising .
I bought a TP-Link M8550 to give myself a working internet connection at a desk where the wired option isn’t mine to control. It’s a battery-powered 5G hotspot with Wi-Fi 6E, a touchscreen, a gigabit Ethernet port and a S$455 price tag.
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The Pi That Can’t Run a Browser
A 2012 Raspberry Pi, a 320×240 touchscreen, and four things that failed silently while reporting success.
I have a dashboard. It runs in a container, it pulls from five services, and it lives at a URL. Which means I see it when I go and look at it, which is less often than I intended when I built the thing.
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Eight Months on CachyOS
It has broken my audio, refused to speak to my Bluetooth chip, and eaten thirteen seconds of my life every time I opened a settings window. It’s still my favourite operating system.
I run CachyOS on two machines, and they could hardly be less alike. gilgalad is a current all-AMD desktop that does photo work, gaming, and local AI. feanor is a second-hand ThinkPad X13 I found on a shelf in Japan for ¥45,800, whose CPU shipped in 2020. It’s my travel machine, and it’s also the one that carries my backups out of the house.