Devices
What is actually inside a smartwatch, and why the battery is the whole design
Every decision in a wearable — screen, sensors, radios, thickness — is downstream of a cell the size of a coin.
Tech Behind Things — How the ordinary machinery actually works
Devices
Why your phone slows down, and which explanation is actually true
Several real mechanisms get collapsed into one conspiracy. Separating them explains what you can fix and what you cannot.
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Networks
Wi-Fi is a shared medium, and that explains most of your problems
Wireless networking is not a pipe. It is a room where everyone has to take turns speaking, and the rules are stricter than they…
Networks
Your packets do not take the route you think they do
The path between you and a website is decided by commercial agreements as much as by geography.
Power & Batteries
Battery percentage is an estimate, and a fairly rough one
Your device does not measure charge directly. It infers it, and the inference drifts.
Power & Batteries
USB-C solved the connector and not the confusion
One port now carries a dozen incompatible capability sets. The shape is standard; almost nothing else is.
Software
Why software gets slower on the same hardware
Every layer added for developer productivity costs something at runtime. The costs are individually reasonable and cumulatively…
Software
File formats decide whether your files outlive the software
Choosing a format is a preservation decision disguised as a save dialog.
Home Tech
Smart home standards keep fighting, and your house is the battlefield
Devices that will not talk to each other are the visible result of an unresolved commercial dispute about who owns the home.
Devices
All devices →Devices
Why your phone slows down, and which explanation is actually true
Several real mechanisms get collapsed into one conspiracy. Separating them explains what you can fix and what you cannot.
Devices
What is actually inside a smartwatch, and why the battery is the whole design
Every decision in a wearable — screen, sensors, radios, thickness — is downstream of a cell the size of a coin.
Devices
Your phone camera is mostly software, and that is not cheating
The sensor is smaller than a fingernail. Almost everything that makes the picture look good happens in the fraction of a second…
Devices
What a higher refresh rate actually buys you
The number describes how often the screen redraws, which is only one of the delays between your finger and a response.
Networks
All networks →Networks
Wi-Fi is a shared medium, and that explains most of your problems
Wireless networking is not a pipe. It is a room where everyone has to take turns speaking, and the rules are stricter than they…
Networks
Your packets do not take the route you think they do
The path between you and a website is decided by commercial agreements as much as by geography.
Networks
Why 5G often feels exactly like 4G
The label covers several different radio bands with wildly different behaviour, and most people are connected to the least exciting…
Networks
DNS decides far more than which address you reach
The name resolution step happens before any connection and quietly controls performance, filtering and a good deal of privacy.
Power & Batteries
All power & batteries →Power & Batteries
Battery percentage is an estimate, and a fairly rough one
Your device does not measure charge directly. It infers it, and the inference drifts.
Power & Batteries
USB-C solved the connector and not the confusion
One port now carries a dozen incompatible capability sets. The shape is standard; almost nothing else is.
Power & Batteries
Wireless charging wastes energy as heat, and the heat is the real cost
Inductive charging trades a measurable amount of efficiency for convenience, and the losses land inside the device next to the…
Power & Batteries
Why the last twenty per cent of a charge takes so long
Charging a lithium cell has two distinct phases, and only the first one is fast. The slowdown is chemistry, not throttling for its…
Software
All software →Software
Why software gets slower on the same hardware
Every layer added for developer productivity costs something at runtime. The costs are individually reasonable and cumulatively…
Software
File formats decide whether your files outlive the software
Choosing a format is a preservation decision disguised as a save dialog.
Software
Why your device stops getting updates long before it stops working
Support ends because a chain of suppliers stops publishing code, not because the hardware became incapable.
Software
Sync is not a backup, and the difference shows up on your worst day
A service that mirrors your files faithfully will mirror a deletion or an encryption just as faithfully.
Home Tech
All home tech →Home Tech
Smart home standards keep fighting, and your house is the battlefield
Devices that will not talk to each other are the visible result of an unresolved commercial dispute about who owns the home.
Home Tech
How a robot vacuum decides where it has already been
Navigation in a cheap consumer device is a genuinely hard problem, solved differently at different price points.
Home Tech
A fridge does not make cold, it moves heat somewhere else
The whole appliance is a pump that carries heat out of an insulated box, which explains the warm back panel and the noise.
Home Tech
How an induction hob heats the pan and not the surface
A changing magnetic field induces currents inside the metal of the pan, which is why the glass stays cool and why some pans do…
Data & Privacy
All data & privacy →
Data & Privacy
What a website knows about you before you click anything
Identification does not require cookies any more. Understanding what replaced them explains why blocking cookies changed so little.
Data & Privacy
End-to-end encryption: what it protects and what it never did
The contents of your messages and the fact that you sent them are two different secrets, and only one is usually covered.
Data & Privacy
Why a website cannot tell you your own password
A correctly built service never stores what you typed, only a one-way transformation of it, and that design decides what a breach…
Data & Privacy
What an app permission actually grants, and for how long
Permission prompts describe a category, not a specific action, and the gap between those two is where most surprises live.