Technology posts

Amazon Kindle review: I wish I'd bought one years ago
 -  An e-reader post in 2025? It feels like most readers who would be interested in devices like the Amazon Kindle were sold on the idea a long time ago. But some - like myself - held on to physical books, preferring the printed word and taking a defiant stand against...
AI chatbots are kicking journalism while it's down
 -  Where do you go when you need to find information online? For decades, my answer to that question would have been Google, but in the past few years I’ve increasingly turned to ChatGPT and other AI services, which - generally speaking - uncover niche information more quickly and reliably. But...
Agentic AI could be the catalyst for safer autonomy
 -  Granting artificial intelligence (AI) access to tools capable of taking real-world actions might fill you with a sense of dread - arguably it should. Given the number of inaccuracies most AI models confidently assert as truth, it feels prudent to maintain a watchful human eye over AI-powered workflows. But agentic...
Bluesky's nearly there, but it won't replace X just yet
 -  Bluesky was an indirect product of Elon Musk’s controversial 2022 Twitter takeover, pitched as a decentralised, user-first alternative to the site that became X. Originally a side project funded by Twitter itself, its new goal is to stand on its own two feet as a more open, interoperable social network....
Humanising AI encourages intellectual lethargy
 -  I recently stumbled upon a Hacker News thread around a series of X posts about ChatGPT’s o3 model. Researchers noted that it “frequently fabricates actions it never took, and then elaborately justifies those actions when confronted”, in one case claiming to have received an incorrect result by running code on...
Fixing weak WiFi and slow speeds on my home network
 -  I moved to a new home late last year, and immediately faced a whole range of connectivity issues. For a techie like myself, reliant on a functional network both for work and for fun, that was a big problem. So I implemented a few different solutions to find a fix...
Using winget to automate software deployment to a new laptop
 -  I got my first new laptop in six years this week! The new hardware is definitely exciting, but reviews aren’t really my thing, so while I’ll inevitably tweet about how the Microsoft Surface Laptop fares, that’s not the purpose of this post. This is more about the mundane job of...
Installing Splunk Free in a virtual machine for log analysis
 -  Splunk is considered the gold standard for analysis of event logs and other data, but unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organisation that pays for it, it can be difficult to get practical experience in how to run searches, build dashboards, and otherwise dissect data using its query...
Introducing Backutil: A Python‐based Windows backup utility
 -  Back in the spring, I decided that 2020 would be the year I would finally see a coding project through to completion. A recent work project shone a light on backup and recovery, and I realised that I should probably be a bit more consistent with my own backups from...
The best cyber security and technology books I read during 2020
 -  One of the few upsides of the whole 2020 situation is that I’ve had a lot more time to read. Periods that I would usually have spent commuting, out with friends, or cramming in chores between getting home and going to bed became downtime that I could devote to good...

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Thinking about

Digital journalism
Coincidentally, in the space of a week I encountered both Zach Seward's article about Quartz and Craig Mod's excellent podcasts with Tim Ferriss. Both evoked fond memories of my time in journalism and the buzz surrounding digital journalism and media in the 2010s

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