Three weeks ago I lined up five e-readers on the kitchen table and told you to sit tight — a refresh wave was landing in October, and buying anything before it landed was a mistake. The wave made landfall on the first of the month. Amazon rebuilt the entire reading line from the display stack …
Friday, October 23, NVIDIA’s partners start selling a DGX Spark with half the memory. The press line is that this is a lifeline in a brutal RAM market. I have been staring at that sentence for a week, and it does not survive contact with the spec sheet. I do not have the 64GB box …
I have spent twenty-five years reviewing gadgets, and most of them sit still while you use them — phones, laptops, the occasional robot vacuum that panics under the couch. The category that broke that streak this year has two wheels, a battery hiding in the frame, and a motor that turned my eleven-mile commute into …
There’s a house three doors down from mine that glows on random Tuesdays in March. Not holiday lights — the owners took those down sometime during the second Obama administration and never bothered again. This is different: a low, warm wash along the roofline that comes on at dusk every single evening, like the house …
There’s a drawer in my test lab that I’ve started calling the graveyard. Inside it: eleven pairs of wireless earbuds, every one of them dead for the same reason. Not crushed drivers, not frayed cables — dead batteries. Lithium cells that swelled, faded, or simply gave up after two or three years of daily charging …
At 1:47 on a Tuesday morning, my phone buzzed: the Ring Nebula was ready. Forty minutes of exposure, stacked one ten-second frame at a time by a telescope sitting on my patio — alone, untended, under a sky with maybe eleven visible stars and the orange smear of a streetlight two houses down. I padded …
I did something embarrassing last week: I priced a 2TB NVMe drive I’ve been recommending for two years and briefly assumed the retailer had been hacked. The kit that sat at $99 through most of 2023 now carries a sticker north of $350. My first instinct was to wait it out. Then a member of …
When Google euthanized the Coral USB Accelerator last year, I wrote about the workarounds my cameras fell back on — and I was honest about the ceiling. A Raspberry Pi with a Hailo stick can watch two, maybe three streams before it starts dropping frames like a bad phone call. My house runs six cameras, …
The water heater in my basement is seventeen years old, which means it has been living on borrowed time for at least two of them. Every technician who has looked at it says the same thing: “That thing could go tomorrow, or it could go in five years.” What none of them could tell me …
The forecast on my phone said zero percent chance of rain. Eight minutes later, a gutter two feet over my head dumped a month’s worth of water across the patio table, my notes, and a very unimpressed laptop bag. That was the afternoon I finally went looking for where my weather actually comes from. The …