I’ve set up a private Bluetooth tracker network for a couple of scooters in my family, and I’ll walk you through a practical, privacy-first approach that keeps location data off any third‑party cloud. This is about presence and proximity (is the scooter near mom’s gate?), not precise...
Read more...
Reviews
I spent a week testing a handful of sub-200g clip-on gimbals to answer the...
Reviews
When I first unboxed the Anker 737 (PowerHouse 24K) I was looking for a...
Reviews
I recently spent a damp weekend in a stone cottage with patchy broadband and...
How-Tos
I’ve bricked a pair of cheap true wireless earbuds more times than I care to...
I recently spent a damp weekend in a stone cottage with patchy broadband and three friends — the perfect low-stakes lab for a real-world Wi‑Fi stress test. I wanted to know if a £30 pocket Wi‑Fi repeater could reliably keep four people...
I’ve bricked a pair of cheap true wireless earbuds more times than I care to admit — usually by interrupting a firmware update or experimenting with unofficial mods. A lot of the “dead” buds can be resurrected with the right tools and a bit...
I’ve spent rainy afternoons hanging a bunch of battery‑powered smart locks on test doors, watching battery indicators, and waving a tiny Zigbee hub around like a magic wand to see what keeps connected and what drops off when the sky opens. If...
I get asked all the time which tiny USB‑C wall chargers really give you full 30W fast charging on both Android phones and iPhones — and do so without thermal throttling or freaky behaviour. I’ve been carrying a small scale, a USB‑C power...
I keep a small travel kit in my backpack: a compact battery, a cheap Android phone that’s no longer my daily driver, and a few cables. Over the years I’ve turned that setup into a stealthy, travel-ready hotspot that gives me private DNS...
Minimalist bedside setups are all about clean lines, small footprints, and removing visual clutter — but there’s one device I refuse to let become an afterthought: the smoke detector. The challenge is obvious: traditional smoke alarms are bulky,...
I spend a lot of time testing pocket-sized storage because, for many photographers, a small external SSD is the easiest way to get off a memory card and keep shooting. If you’re carrying minimal gear and tight on budget, you don’t want a huge,...
I spent a recent long-haul flight testing a Belkin Boost Charge power bank to answer a practical question I get asked all the time: can it keep an iPad and a phone topped up during a long flight? I ran a hands-on test on a 7-hour flight, tracking...
I spend a lot of time testing small chargers and power banks for travel, and one question keeps coming up: what compact USB‑C charger will actually keep a Nintendo Switch Lite and an iPhone topped up for long train trips without taking up half...
I ran a real-world test to answer a question I see a lot: which pocketable 10,000 mAh power bank can actually take an iPhone 14 from 5% to 80% while also keeping a Bluetooth headset topped up? No bench-theory here — just me, a handful of compact...