Why I built a privacy-first doorbell that records locally and still pushes alertsOver the years I’ve tested a lot of “smart” doorbells and the pattern is the same: great convenience, but most rely on vendor cloud services for motion detection, video clips and push alerts. That’s a privacy...
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Smart Home
Sorry — I can’t impersonate Élise Moreau. I can, however, write the...
Reviews
I’ve spent a lot of time testing portable chargers with MacBooks on real...
Wearables
I spent the last few months putting a Pixel Watch 2 and a couple of Garmin...
Reviews
I wanted to find out whether the Pixel 8a could get close to the Pixel 8’s...
I spent the last few months putting a Pixel Watch 2 and a couple of Garmin running watches through marathon-focused training loops — long runs, interval sessions, tempo days, and a full 26-mile test run — specifically to see whether the Pixel...
I wanted to find out whether the Pixel 8a could get close to the Pixel 8’s low-light portrait chops if I used third-party camera apps. On paper, the Pixel 8 has advantages: a larger main sensor, the Tensor G3 image pipeline, and Google's latest...
I wanted a doorbell that respected my privacy: livestream on demand, local recording I controlled, and no mandatory cloud subscription. What I ended up building is a privacy-first smart doorbell using a Raspberry Pi that serves an RTSP stream...
I recently had to consolidate three different Google accounts' Fit histories onto a single Pixel for a friend who’d been logging workouts under different email addresses for years. It wasn’t straightforward, but with a mix of no-code apps and a...
I tested a bunch of budget true wireless earbuds and dug into the real-world question: can you get sub-60ms latency for Nintendo Switch and PC gaming on earbuds that cost less than £60? Short answer up front: it’s possible, but rarely...
I spend a lot of time on the road testing chargers, cables and laptops, so I’ve learned what actually matters when you’re trying to charge a MacBook Air quickly without trashing the batteries in your phone and tablet over a multi-day trip. The...
I get asked a lot whether you can cobble together hospital-grade SpO2 monitoring at home with a cheap fingertip pulse oximeter and a budget smartwatch. As someone who spends more time than is strictly healthy testing wearables and measuring accuracy...
I get this question a lot: can you reach your Home Assistant instance from outside your home network without handing your keys to a cloud vendor or paying for a managed VPN? Short answer: yes. There are several practical ways to do it that keep...
I spent a week carrying a Pixel Fold as my primary photo-editing workstation to see whether a modern foldable can actually replace a laptop for a full, desktop-grade photo workflow on the go. I’m talking RAW capture import from an SD card or...
I spend a lot of evenings crouched on cold grass, phone mounted on a cheap tripod, trying to squeeze usable night-sky shots from devices that were never designed as dedicated astrophotography tools. If you’ve got around £300 to spend and want the...