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News
Can an Old Android Phone See in the Dark? An Honest Guide to Overnight Recording (2026)
4+ hour, 12+ min ago (1126+ words) Every week someone asks a version of the same question: I've got an old Pixel in a drawer, I want to point it at the back door overnight — will it see anything? The honest answer has two halves, and most…...
That Camera at the Intersection Is Building a Searchable Map of Your Life
4+ hour, 15+ min ago (817+ words) A camera can log where you worship, work, protest, or seek medical care without ever learning your name. The license-plate reader debate is no longer hypothetical. Tagged with privacy, technology, security, webdev....
Why Compressing an Image to Exactly 50KB Is Harder Than It Sounds
8+ hour, 16+ min ago (613+ words) Ever wondered why one image hits 50KB at 80% quality while another is still 200KB at 20%? The answer isn't your compression library — it's how JPEG compression actually works. If you've ever tried building an "exact target size" image compressor, you've probably discovered this…...
Why I Prefer Browser-Local Image Resizing for Small Files
5+ day, 22+ hour ago (218+ words) When a form asks for an image under 100KB, the obvious reaction is to search for an online compressor and upload the file. That works, but it also adds an unnecessary privacy decision: does this image need to leave the device…...
Stop Uploading Your Images to Random Servers: Compress Locally Instead
6+ day, 22+ hour ago (232+ words) Every time you use a "free online image compressor," ask yourself: where is my image being sent? The HTML5 Canvas API has had everything we need for client-side image compression for years. Here's the core idea: Zero bytes leave your computer....
Two free image tools I use that need zero install
1+ week, 23+ hour ago (287+ words) I edit a lot of images for the web and I got sick of heavy desktop apps and sketchy upload sites. Two browser tools ended up in my daily rotation: CompactJPG — shrink images without losing the plot CompactJPG Free online…...
Convert a whole folder of images to WebP — locally, no upload, one command
1+ week, 3+ day ago (371+ words) It doesn't scale, and honestly I'm never thrilled about uploading a client's assets to a random SaaS just to save a few kilobytes. So the workflow below does the whole folder in one command, locally — nothing leaves your machine, no…...
I Benchmarked 42 Compression Formats Spanning Four Decades. Here's What to Actually Use.
1+ week, 3+ day ago (916+ words) I run ezyZip, a browser-based archive tool, so "which format should I use?" is a question I field constantly. The honest answer is usually "it depends," which satisfies nobody. So I stopped hand-waving and measured it. We benchmarked 42 archive and…...
Hello World!
1+ week, 4+ day ago (340+ words) Hi, I'm Jian. I build full-stack web apps, and I'm starting this blog to capture what I've learnt. I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where I specialised in signal processing and machine learning. I picked up…...
How On-Device AI Is Changing Photo Management
1+ week, 6+ day ago (166+ words) Screenshots have distinct visual signatures: UI elements, status bars, text overlays, app chrome. A fine-tuned vision model running on Core ML detects these patterns in milliseconds. Laplacian variance measures sharpness. Low variance means motion blur or a pocket shot. These…...