标签：#review

The AquaSense X brings self-cleaning technology to pool robots for the first time, but is it worth nearly twice the price of Beatbot’s flagship cleaner?

There’s a new fleet of TVs using new mini and micro RBG display tech, and Samsung’s R95H model isn’t as impressive as it should be.

Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea […]

I built a tool that answers one question: when a website won't load, is it your connection or the site? It runs two checks in parallel — measures your own line in the browser (latency + a 1 MiB download), and probes the target from Cloudflare's edge — then returns one of four verdicts: it's not you, it's you, it's both, or all clear. Demo: https://itsnotyou.site The interesting part isn't the tool, it's that the whole thing — app, ~120 monitored sites with 24h history, SSR status pages, share cards, outage alerts — runs for $0/month plus domains. The one thing that wanted to cost money Everything fit the Workers free plan except a background monitor probing ~120 sites on a tight cadence. As a Worker cron that's ~120 subrequests/run and, done naively, thousands of KV writes/day — which pushes you onto Workers Paid. The real ceiling is KV: 1,000 writes/day. So I split it. The user-facing test stays on Cloudflare — the edge probe still measures from the colo nearest the user, which is the point of edge. But the background sweep moved to a cheap VPS I already had: it probes the roster on a systemd timer and pushes results back into KV over the REST API. Staying under 1,000 KV writes/day One KV key, not key-per-site. All ~120 statuses live in a single blob. Key-per-site at sweep cadence would be millions of writes/month; a single blob is one write per sweep. Widen the cadence. I started at 2 min = 720 writes/day. Cloudflare emailed that I'd hit 50% of the daily limit (the sweep wasn't the only writer). I went to 3 min = 480/day, leaving headroom for share cards and the notify list. Move the hot counter off KV. The anonymous "tests today" counter was the sneaky risk — a traffic spike could exhaust the write budget and stall the status sweep, the one thing you can't let happen. It went to Analytics Engine instead (free, uncapped, separate budget). Now no amount of user traffic can starve the monitor. Reader and writer share code so their rules never drift: the streak/histo

Take on sand, snow, mud, gravel—this is the ebike for all your off-roading adventures.

The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June, in dodgy renders and with an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when Trump Mobile admitted - just two weeks later - that it wouldn't be made in the US. Not even when the company revealed the final phone, first to me […]

I love it when a company challenges itself to make a cheaper version of a beloved product. Xreal's $299 A01 Plus is a stripped-down version of its $449 1S that's light on features but with just enough of the 1S' best qualities. These AR glasses are comfortable, they look good, and the screens are surprisingly […]

This week should have been a celebration for Doom developer id Software. The studio just launched Revelations, a meaty expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages that adds a powerful new weapon and more demonic levels to blast through. Even though I hadn't picked up The Dark Ages for more than a year, it only took […]

The Schlage Sense Pro is a beautiful smart lock. Sleek, discreet, and simple to use, it's Schlage's smartest lock to date. Thanks to ultra-wideband (UWB), it unlocks as I walk up to my front door; I don't need to enter a code or tap my phone or press my finger against it. I've tested several […]

PR volume went up, ticket quality didn't, and the gap got filled with LLMs on both sides of the review: bots reviewing, bots replying, bots occasionally arguing with bots about priorities that only existed in a teammate's head. Our CEO named the actual problem, and it's bigger than code review.

Sony is bringing back the RX10 superzoom camera after a nearly nine-year gap between models. The newly announced RX10 V retains the same 24-600mm equivalent f/2.4-4 Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 25x zoom lens of its last two predecessors, but it has lots of upgrades elsewhere. The new 20.1-megapixel 1-inch-type sensor is a stacked design, allowing up to […]

Provided you have a library of SNES cartridges, the SN Operator is a seamless plug-and-play system for easy ’90s nostalgia.

The Dell 14S represents the new normal of laptop pricing, but it has the quality to back up its cost.

The Amseatec Criss Cross Office Chair gives you room to sit cross-legged, sideways, or however your body actually wants to sit.

The call-order change came back pass-with-risk. I read the recommendation, saw it had a name and a reason, and felt the task close. Then I looked at the row under it. How was this verified: not run. Nobody had run the queue. I had a label. I did not have proof. This is Part 6 of The Contract Think produced a brief. Plan produced a gate. Build executed inside it. Review scored every requirement against a verdict instead of an impression. Review reads the diff and the plan and decides whether one satisfies the other. It does not run the queue. It cannot. Its whole job is judgment about what the code should do. Test is where someone finally checks what the code actually does. I had been treating those two as the same step. They are not. Test asks one question, and a verdict is not the answer For every active requirement, Test asks how it was verified. Command run, manual QA, or a comparison against known-good output. One of those three, or a written reason none of them ran. Not a recommendation. Not a risk level. Evidence. I built the matrix against the plan's requirements and filled in each row. Most had a command behind them. The call-order requirement had nothing. The cell read not run, and it sat directly below a pass-with-risk that already carried a name and a reason. That name had almost been enough for me. A named risk feels handled. It is not. It is a risk with a label on it, waiting for someone to actually look. So I ran the queue Three notifications, all with a real reason to fire within the same tick. The scheduler picked them up and ordered them by priority instead of arrival. Two landed in the sequence the requirement wanted. The third jumped ahead of a lower-priority notification that was still mid-processing. The change worked almost every time. Under one timing condition, it did not. That is the gap a verdict cannot see. Review had marked the requirement partial because the wording left the mechanism open. Running it found a real failure inside the mech

A little robotic switch-flipper has become my sidekick in combating cockroaches. Before I got the SwitchBot Bot Rechargeable, I'd tiptoe through the dark every morning, hoping I wouldn't step on one of those terrible bugs scurrying around as I made my way to the light switch across the room. Now I'm ready for battle before […]

Fi Ultra is the first Starlink-enabled pet tracker you can buy. It expands on GPS and LTE trackers, adding automatic failover to T-Mobile's T-Satellite-branded direct-to-cell service when venturing into cellular dead zones. That lets owners tap into SpaceX's constellation of low Earth orbit Starlink satellites to track their pets anywhere in the US. But it […]

For the last couple weeks, I've been in an extremely lucky position: I've been spending a lot of time playing games on Valve's Steam Machine. We gave the Steam Machine a 6, and I don't disagree with my colleague Sean Hollister's review. But even though I already own a PS5 and an Xbox Series X, […]

It’s hard to say if the pricey LG Micro RGB Evo television is worth shelling out for compared to its cheaper competitors, but you’ll probably enjoy its color-popping display.

I rebuilt aesencryption.net so text AES (128/192/256) runs fully in the browser - the key and plaintext never leave the page. The hard part is staying byte-compatible with common server-side AES libraries (mode, IV, padding, base64 output), so I ship copy-paste equivalents in PHP, Java, Python, Go, Rust, Kotlin and JS. Live tool (mine, free): https://aesencryption.net - feedback on the crypto choices welcome. My own site.