The Smart Home Wi-Fi Trap: Are We All Being Conned by Convenience?
I spent way too much time scrolling through a social media thread this morning about setting up smart home gear for a beginner. You know how it goes. Someone asks…
Privacy & Security
The Great Smartphone Digital ID Panic: Separating Fact from Fiction
You may have seen the social media posts in the past 24 hours, “The UK Government announces that all the UK phones will require digital ID proof. This means that…
Why Big Tech’s War on Game Servers Should Terrify Every Home Lab Enthusiast
Coming across the video “They’re Banning Your Home Servers” from creator Loyal Moses discussing the California legislative battle over the “Protect Our Games Act” (AB 1921) immediately caught my eye,…
I Added Analytics to the Blog: Here’s Exactly What I’m Collecting
I’ve spent years shouting about privacy. And now, I’ve installed a tracker. I know. The irony is thick enough to cut, and the hypocrisy probably looks huge from where you’re…
The Great VPN Humiliation: Why the Government Actually Backed Down
If you woke up on 15 July feeling a strange sense of relief, you aren’t alone. After months of posturing, rhetoric, and vaguely defined threats toward privacy tools, the UK…
From GrapheneOS to iodéOS: finding a de-Googled phone that works for me
A few months ago I finally got around to switching my Google Pixel over to GrapheneOS. The install was refreshingly painless, the bootloader re-locked without complaint, and the web installer…
The Great Betrayal: Why I Put Windows Back on My Handheld
I’ve done something I genuinely thought I’d never do again: I installed Windows as the primary OS on my main handheld device, my ROG Ally X. To be clear, my…
The Vicious Circle: Beyond the Political Theatre
Watching a Prime Minister resign in a flurry of headlines is a classic British distraction. While the news cycle fixates on who’s moving into Number 10, the laws they actually…
The Exit Strategy: Life After the Social Media Ban
I’ve spent the morning staring at the news, and I’m honestly just exhausted by it. The UK government is basically banking on us being too comfortable to move. They’re betting…
Atomic Arch: The AUR Infostealer Incident
We use the AUR for the convenience of native builds without the restrictive containers or overhead of Flatpaks and Snaps. However, that integration comes with a significant security trade-off: we’re…