Category: Networking + Technology + Internet
How to Stop Your Raspberry Pi From Failing to Boot (And Survive a Hard Power Cut)
A real-world guide to making your Pi bulletproof, from SD card corruption to NVMe migration I learned this lesson the hard way. My Raspberry Pi 5 was happily serving a production WordPress site when I rebooted it. Two minutes later there was no SSH, no site, just a solid red light staring back at me. […]
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What Causes The Death of Tech Empires?
1. Arrogance Is the Drawbridge Every great empire in history has been brought low by a version of the same mistake. The fortress is so strong, the moat so wide, and the walls so high, that the people inside begin to believe they have transcended the rules. They stop serving the people beyond the walls. […]
Read more →A Simple Script to Check if Your Page is SEO and AEO Friendly
Search engines no longer operate alone. Your content is now consumed byGoogle, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of otherAI driven systems that crawl the web and extract answers. Classic SEO focuses on ranking. Modern discovery also requires AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) which focuses on being understood and extracted by AI systems. A marketing […]
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Why Capitec Pulse Is a World First and Why You Cannot Just Copy It
By Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer, Capitec Bank The Engineering Behind Capitec Pulse 1. Introduction I have had lots of questions about how we are “reading our clients minds”. This is a great question, but the answer is quite complex – so I decided to blog it. The article below really focuses on the heavy […]
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The Hitchhikers Guide to Fixing Why a Thumbnail Image Does Not Show for Your Article on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram
When you share a link on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, X, or Instagram and nothing appears except a bare URL, it feels broken in a way that is surprisingly hard to diagnose. The page loads fine in a browser, the image exists, the og:image tag is there, yet the preview is blank. This post gives you a […]
Read more →How to Use Google to Find Who Is Talking About You Without Your Own Site Getting in the Way
If you publish online, you should periodically search for yourself, not out of ego but out of discipline. The internet is an echo system, and if you do not measure where your ideas travel, you are operating blind. You want to know who is linking to you, who is quoting you, who is criticising you, […]
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Net Time to First Byte (NTTFB): The Metric TTFB Should Have Been
Andrew Baker · February 2026 · andrewbaker.ninja 1 The Problem with TTFB Time to First Byte has been the go to diagnostic for server responsiveness since the early days of web performance engineering. Google’s own web.dev guidance describes TTFB as measuring the elapsed time between the start of navigation and when the first byte of […]
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A Spy Spent 3 Years Planting a Backdoor to Bring the Internet Down. One Person Noticed
On a quiet Friday evening in late March 2024, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund was running some routine benchmarks on his Debian development box when he noticed something strange. SSH logins were taking about 500 milliseconds longer than they should have. Failed login attempts from automated bots were chewing through an unusual amount of […]
Read more →Website Optimisation: Stop Waiting for Fonts
Stop Waiting for Fonts Quick Guide to font-display: swap on macOS Your website might be secretly blocking page renders while it waits for fancy custom fonts to load. This invisible delay tanks your Core Web Vitals and frustrates users. The fix is simple: font-display: swap. Here’s how to audit your sites and fix it in […]
Read more →What is Minification and How to Test if it is Actually Working
1. What is Minification Minification is the process of removing everything from source code that a browser does not need to execute it. This includes whitespace, line breaks, comments, and long variable names. The resulting file is functionally identical to the original but significantly smaller. A CSS file written for human readability might look like […]
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