Every Mac comes with a firewall, and it is switched off. This post explains what that firewall does, why turning it on is a small but free win, when a second firewall for outgoing traffic is worth installing, and why on a work Mac the decision is not yours.
A laptop with 16–32 GB of memory can answer questions about your own notes, code and unfinished ideas, and none of your data leaves the computer. Choosing the model is the easy part. Two other things decide whether the answers are useful: how much memory the model has, and how well it finds the right pages of your files. Without them, it just guesses, and it sounds sure even when it is wrong.
Umami is a small, open-source tool that counts the visits to your website without cookies and without storing who the visitors are. This post explains how it works, what it measures, how to run it, and where its limits are.
I had seventeen live websites on seven domains, most of them on GitHub Pages, and no way to know whether anyone had ever visited them. Choosing a tracker turned out to depend on consent law and ad blockers much more than on features.
Most people's digital security is a single point of failure with extra steps. Locking it down — password manager, two-factor authentication, recovery codes, tested backups — is a weekend project, not a lifestyle.
Virtual Private Network (VPN) marketing has done an incredible job convincing people that a single subscription makes them anonymous, secure, and untouchable. "Military-grade encryption." "No logs." "Total privacy." The reality is far messier: a VPN is a useful tool for a narrow set of problems, but as a privacy solution it has structural weaknesses that no amount of marketing can fix.
Every browser ships with a "private" or "incognito" mode, and most people have a fuzzy sense that it's "the one that doesn't save history." That's true, but it undersells what's happening and oversells the privacy. Here's what actually changes when you open a private tab, and — just as important — what doesn't.
I wanted to know which posts people actually read — without dropping a tracking cookie on someone the moment they land. This is how the blog runs Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on a static Docusaurus site while keeping it completely off until you opt in.