Hands-on reviews and teardowns — real testing, real gotchas, honest verdicts (including "not fully evaluated yet" when that's the truth).
A capable, open Klipper printer that ships as a small end-of-life Linux server with a published default password and a trust-everything network posture — and exactly what to lock down before it joins your network.
3D PrintingSecurityWhat it actually contacts on the internet on every launch, verified by a packet capture scoped precisely to its own process ID — plus a real, currently unpatched CVE found in its bundled FFmpeg.
3D PrintingSecurityWhat PBS gets right, a retention-policy setting that quietly deleted the one backup a real recovery needed, and why interrupting the wrong command is worse than a clean cancel.
Self-HostingBackupsWhat's genuinely solid about DigitalOcean droplets, a recurring SSH reliability quirk never root-caused, and the real access-control primitive that matters more than a tunnel.
CloudSelf-HostingThree separate root causes behind the same recurring autoscaling bug, a real database mistake made fixing one of them, and an honest verdict on why the deployment was retired.
Self-HostingRetrospectiveA genuine swap-thrashing incident, and a real LXC gotcha where a load-average reading turned out to belong to the host, not the container.
Self-HostingEmailA login bug that silently breaks mobile access after account creation, and a near-miss where the migration itself almost cost 145GB of real family photos.
Self-HostingPhotosWhat Checkmk gets right at real scale, and several sharp, non-obvious ways it can report "everything's fine" while something important — like whether anyone actually gets alerted — silently isn't.
Self-HostingMonitoringWhat Pi-hole actually buys you over a router's built-in content filtering, a real gotcha where the router silently intercepts DNS before Pi-hole ever sees it, and a health-check finding that changed how I trust a "working" container.
Self-HostingNetworkingA static security teardown of the Tangem hardware wallet's Android app: decompiled, checked for TLS/crypto issues, and traced through its WalletConnect signing flow. No physical card in hand yet.
CryptoSecurity