I recently spent an afternoon putting a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S24 through a full hardware checklist before deciding whether to buy it. If you’re considering a refurbished flagship—especially one as sought-after as the S24—you want to be sure it behaves like new and isn’t hiding any...
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How-to
I spend a lot of time testing GPS performance on running devices because...
Reviews
I carried a Pixel Fold in my backpack for a week and, as someone who lives for...
How-to
I’m going to walk you through how I built a fully local smart home voice...
How-to
I get this question a lot in comments and DMs: “How can I get multi-room,...
I’m going to walk you through how I built a fully local smart home voice assistant that controls Zigbee lights while keeping cameras and other sensitive devices offline. This isn’t about a single-brand “plug-and-play” solution — it’s...
I get this question a lot in comments and DMs: “How can I get multi-room, lossless Spotify on my Sonos system if my upload bandwidth is tiny and I don’t want to pay for additional services?” I’ve tested Sonos setups in labs and real homes,...
I often get asked whether it's realistic to build a home monitoring setup that gives clinically useful SpO2 and respiratory metrics without spending a lot of money. The short answer I give people is: yes — but with important caveats. In this...
I’ve been building and testing smart home setups for years, and one thing keeps coming up: you can have a convenient, voice-controlled home without handing every event, camera feed, or sensor ping to Big Tech. In this guide I’ll walk you through...
I’ve spent multiple multi-day trips wearing both a Garmin Epix and an Apple Watch Ultra, and I still get asked: which is the better choice for adventure tracking? There’s no single answer that fits everyone, but from the perspective of someone...
I’ve been testing the Anker Soundcore Space A40 for a few weeks now and I kept asking myself the same question every time I switched from phone to gym to gaming rig: can these truly stack up against the Apple AirPods Pro when it comes to low...
If you’re hunting for a phone under £300 that can actually produce convincing night and even basic astrophotography shots, you’ve probably noticed the market is noisy. Flagship phones have tall claims and huge budgets for computational...
I’m often asked whether you can get real, usable night and even astrophotography shots from a midrange Android phone without relying on heavy computational processing. Short answer: yes — but only if you choose the right hardware and adopt a...
I’ve been building privacy-first smart home setups for years, and one pattern keeps coming back: you can have tightly integrated Zigbee and Z-Wave devices without handing control or metadata to a cloud service — including voice control. In this...
I recently needed to run a small set of Windows-only apps on a Chromebook for a client project. The catch: I wanted the whole workflow to work offline, be as secure as possible, and not kill battery life. After testing multiple approaches, I settled...