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 how I build a privacy-first smart home hub that...
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Wearables
I’ve spent multiple multi-day trips wearing both a Garmin Epix and an Apple...
Reviews
I’ve been testing the Anker Soundcore Space A40 for a few weeks now and I...
Reviews
If you’re hunting for a phone under £300 that can actually produce...
Reviews
I’m often asked whether you can get real, usable night and even...
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...
I put the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 Pro and Apple AirPods Pro through the kind of real-world tests I care about: sweaty runs, high-intensity interval training, and phone calls where latency and clarity matter. I wanted to know whether Samsung’s latest...
I recently wanted to watch a movie with a friend while keeping the noise down, and my Windows laptop only likes to send audio to one Bluetooth headset at a time. After some testing and a fair bit of trial and error, I found a few reliable ways to...
I’ve spent years running hands-on tests on routers, smart bulbs, cameras and every gadget in between — and one thing always becomes clear: you don’t have to trade off performance to get a secure home Wi‑Fi for smart devices. In this guide...
I stream a lot from my Chromecast with Google TV — it’s compact, responsive, and the UI makes jumping between apps painless. But I also want my streaming to be private and free from obnoxious trackers and ads where possible. Over the years...
Buying a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S24 can be a smart way to get flagship performance without the flagship price—I've done it more than once when testing phones for Wcetesting Co. But “refurbished” covers a wide range of realities:...
I set out to answer a simple but consequential question: can the Raspberry Pi 5 handle 4K transcoding for a home Plex server? After spending a week building a Pi 5 Plex test rig, pushing it with different source files and client scenarios, and...