Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Pierce Allen 
The first batch ships this month. The company says it can zap a mosquito in 0.003 seconds. And honestly? I’m not sure if I’m terrified or impressed. Let me back up. This runs into the same wall Xiaomi hits in the US, incidentally. The phones are perfectly legal, you just can’t buy one. What the … Read more
I will be honest about my first reaction. When I saw DeepSeek Harness (DSH) trending on GitHub, I assumed it was another AI repository riding a wave of hype. GitHub star counts can mean several different things. Sometimes they reflect respect for the founder. Sometimes people bookmark a repo to read later and then forget … Read more
Google keeps shipping AI features that look great in a keynote and then quietly disappear from my life. So when Chrome started baking Gemini straight into the browser, I assumed Auto Browse would be another one of those. Then I read the fine print. This isn’t a summarize-the-page button — it’s an agent that can … Read more
Macs have a reputation for being untouchable. People assume there are no viruses, no hackers, and nothing bad ever happens to them. That reputation is wrong, and this month is a good example of why. Apple released an emergency update on August 6 for macOS Tahoe 26.6.1, Sequoia 15.7.9, and Sonoma 14.8.9. The patch fixed … Read more
I haven’t installed iOS 26.6.1 yet. I’ll be honest, I usually wait a few days. Let other people find the bugs. But I read through Apple’s security notes this morning, and what’s in there is worth paying attention to. Apple released iOS 26.6.1 today. No new features. No redesigned Lock Screen. No AI emoji generator. … Read more
I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for about a year now. It’s good. Really good. But not everyone wants to pay $10 a month for autocomplete. Some people code once a week. Some are students. Some just want to see if AI-assisted coding actually helps them before committing to a subscription. So I spent the last … Read more
Got a bunch of these emails this morning. “Password reset request for your account.” Over and over. From my own site. I didn’t ask for any of them. Someone, or something, was poking the “lost password” button on piall.com. Annoying? Yes. Scary? Not really. At least not after I looked closer. Here’s the thing. WordPress … Read more
Last week, I started seeing complaints pop up about a Windows update. People were saying their games kept crashing. Others said Windows Hello stopped working. I thought maybe it was a few unlucky folks with weird setups. Then I looked into it. Turns out, this one is a bit of a mess. I think the … Read more
Google just quietly changed how watermarks work in Gemini. And honestly? It’s a smarter move than it sounds. The headline is simple: you can now turn off the visible “sparkle” watermark on images, videos, and music that Gemini makes. Go to Settings → Media Watermark, flip it off, and your files come out clean. No … Read more
I’ve been messing around with AI coding tools for a while now. And honestly? I got tired of switching between five different apps just to test one model against another. ChatGPT for one thing, Claude for something else, then back to DeepSeek for a third task. It was getting ridiculous. So when I heard about … Read more