Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Every smart home device has a hidden second question. Not whether it works with Alexa. Whether it still works when your internet drops. This is the smart home offline test, and it has a checkable answer. The answer is different for almost every product, and the marketing does not help. A device that advertises “works … Read more
You pay $20 a month for an AI chatbot. Then one afternoon it stops working the way it did that morning. There is no warning. There is no extra bill. The AI chatbot limit has arrived. What changed is the usage limit. Every major AI subscription has one, including the paid tiers. Hitting it does … Read more
Microsoft will retire SMS verification for work and school accounts on February 1, 2027. Voice callbacks go away at the same time. If you sign in with a code texted to your phone today, that method stops working on that date, and Microsoft says there is no opt-out. Most coverage of this got the consequence … Read more
A two-bay NAS with two 4TB drives costs about $450. Google One charges $120 a year for 2TB. Run both for five years and the NAS wins. Run them for two and it loses. Almost every NAS vs cloud storage comparison stops at that sentence and picks a side, which is why the advice online … Read more
An iPhone with the free 5GB of iCloud storage fills up in about three weeks. The alert appears at the worst possible moment, usually while you are taking a photo or restoring a backup. It never explains what is eating the space. Most people respond by paying $0.99 a month for 50GB. That works, and … Read more
The average American household spends more on subscriptions than it thinks, and the size of that gap depends on which study you read. One widely cited 2026 survey puts the figure at $111 a month. Another puts it at $219. Perceived spending, in the same research, lands somewhere between $86 and $111. That disagreement is … Read more
The most-reviewed pair of smart glasses on Amazon’s US store last month was not made by Meta. It was a Chinese model that sells for under $50 and has no camera at all. Meta owns close to 84% of the global market for display-less smart glasses. That figure comes from Counterpoint Research, and it has … Read more
Most Wi-Fi 7 advice online ends with “it depends.” That is useless when you are standing in a store looking at price tags. The honest answer is narrower than the marketing suggests, and you can work out whether a Wi-Fi 7 router is worth buying for your household in about five minutes. No speed test … Read more
Apple Intelligence has been shipping for close to two years. That is long enough to stop being a promise and start being a feature set. The interesting question is no longer whether it exists. It is which parts you notice on a normal day. The short answer is that the boring features work well and … Read more
A UL logo on a Chinese e-bike listing costs the seller nothing to add. The file number behind that logo is what costs money, and you can check it yourself in about two minutes. The standard you want is UL 2849. It covers the whole electrical system. The battery, the charger and the controller, tested … Read more