Most people set up their home router once, connect their devices, and never open the admin panel again. That works fine until the issues come. The settings covered here aren't complicated to change, and most of them take under five minutes. The difference is that once they're done, your network is faster, more private, and a lot harder to mess with.

I have a habit of keeping all my software and files, regardless of whether I use them regularly. I have a sweet deprecated version of Noteworthy Composer (to run on a VM) and a portable version of Reaper that I've been using for years. The modern web and modern services have made it increasingly difficult (ahem, Amazon, ahem) to preserve software and digital purchases. So I preserve my software as much as possible, the same way someone might preserve their family photo albums.

Many cellular carriers proudly claim to have unlimited data plans, but that's misleading: in many cases, you'll face throttling once you pass a cap. You might have to pay extra to restore the service you expect, and features like hotspot tethering or cellular smartwatches might have their own restrictions.

Sometimes you just want to sit in the garden under the shade of a tree and doom-scroll social media. If you have a small or medium-sized garden, then your mesh Wi-Fi system in your home will probably do a decent job of keeping you connected. Especially if you have one mesh unit just inside a window, like I do!

There are a lot of different mesh router brands, models, and designs. So much so, that it can be daunting to step into the world of mesh routers for the first time.

Every time your system needs to know the IP address of a domain, it uses DNS. When contacting your DNS server, it sends the domain that you’re trying to access in plain text, for anyone in the middle to see. It also means responses can easily be spoofed, so there are clear risks involved.

It seemed like Immich came out of nowhere, but suddenly all my colleagues appear to be using it. I'm not as into self-hosting as some of them, so perhaps that's why I'm surprised, but the more I look into it, the more obvious it seems that this photo management solution is turning into a sleeper hit.

For a long time, Pi-hole was the go-to option for anyone that wanted to use DNS filtering on their home network. It is easy enough to set up on any old laptop, PC, or even a low-power Pi and then connect it to your network.