I was tinkering with an Aiworth E36 digital voice recorder the other night. Nothing serious. Just one of those “what does this thing actually do?” moments.
The documenation and packaging market it as a Professional Digital Audio Recorder, and, well, it records WAV and MP3 files. But, that got me thinking…
If this little device can record an MP3 and has the ability to play back recordings, it can probably play any MP3 file so long as the bitrate doesn’t exceed the capablilites of the device.
Have you ever found yourself digging through old notes, saved Post-its, and a graveyard of past emails trying to locate that one critical piece of information about a server or system you maybe touch twice a year? I know I have. And while I genuinely pride myself on being able to recall detailed technical things in chronological order such as dates, configs, decisions… you know, the works, I’m fully aware that relying on my own memory is not a documentation strategy. It’s a liability waiting to materialize at the worst possible moment.
It’s 2025. And let’s be real — online privacy is still treated more like an upsell than a right. I started caring about digital privacy back in 2014 when I realized just how much metadata could say about you, even when your actual content was encrypted.A VPN, I found, wasn’t a magic shield — it was a rerouting trick. A sleight-of-hand for your internet traffic. The ads scream “Get a VPN and you’re protected,” but the reality depends entirely on what you’re trying to accomplish.
The first time I tried to fix the reduced water flow on our kitchen sink, I was feeling confident. I took everything apart like a seasoned IT pro diving into a misbehaving service—cleaned out every bit of debris I could find. It felt like progress. But then, after I reassembled it all? It was worse. Like “no internet connection but all the lights are green” worse.
Back in 2019, I was searching for an automated way to sync photos from our phones—something seamless that my wife and I could rely on. I started experimenting with AWS and stumbled across OwnCloud, a solution I had heard of but never used. Curious, I spun up a VM and tested it out. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was exactly what I had been looking for—a self-hosted alternative to the ever-growing ecosystem of cloud storage services like Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox.