AIHOW
We test tools, measure what they cost and write down what actually worked — including the parts that did not.
Local inference is not free. It costs disk, memory bandwidth, VRAM and time-to-first-result — and only one of those has anything to do with raw compute.
Read articleA non-developer walkthrough of Ollama — what it actually does, what you need before installing it, and the three situations where it is genuinely the right tool.
Upscayl, Immich and GIMP are all free and all open source, but they solve three completely different problems. Here is how to tell which one fits the job in front of you.
One-time pricing does not mean zero running cost. Here is the short list of things that keep billing after the sale — and which of them you can make disappear.
A one-hour evaluation protocol: pick a task whose answer you already know, test the boring cases, inspect the failure mode, and decide in advance what happens when it is wrong.
A practical checklist for setting up repeatable bulk image processing: naming, presets, verification and rollback.
Subscriptions make sense for services that cost money every month. Desktop tools do not. Here is why we chose buy-once pricing.
Software we actually use, ours and everyone else's. Every entry says what it is bad at too.
Node-canvas image workflows that run entirely on your machine
Reach for it when the job is a folder rather than a file: chain cut-out, background, resize and compression into one canvas and run it over a whole catalogue without uploading anything.
One-button AI upscaling, offline
The tool to open when one specific image is too small — an old scan, a cropped screenshot, a photo a marketplace rejected. It does exactly one thing and it does it without an account.
A photo library you host yourself
The best replacement for a cloud photo subscription — if you are willing to be the one running the server. If Docker is not something you want in your life, skip it regardless of how good the app is.
The boring, reliable video transcoder
Twenty years old and still the thing to use when a video file is too big or in the wrong format. Presets cover most cases; ignore everything else.
The newsletter opens with the next batch of guides (one email per batch, no tracking). Until then, the blog and its RSS feed are the fastest way to follow along.