In one of my recent blog posts, I talked at length about the virtues and advantages of building personal information intake system around RSS feeds. You get privacy and ownership over the distribution of information without any black box algorithms deciding what to show you (which inevitably ends up focusing on ads or engagement bait at some point). However, no system is perfect, and building your beautiful garden of RSS feeds is no different.| Tom Burkert
Recently, I have been testing how well the newest generations of large language models (such as GPT-5 or Claude 4.5) handle natural language, specifically counting characters, manipulating characters in a sentences, or solving encoding and ciphers. Surprisingly, the newest models were able to solve these kinds of tasks, unlike previous generations of LLMs. Character manipulation LLMs handle individual characters poorly. This is due to all text being encoded as tokens via the LLM tokenizer and...| Tom Burkert
Intro As part of my journey towards higher privacy while using internet, I decided to set up Pi-hole on my Synology NAS DS218play. If you are reading this article, you probably don’t need the following explanation, but just in case: Pi-hole is perhaps the most popular DNS sinkhole, which aims to block ads, trackers and malicious sites for all devices on your local network. Now, your NAS is one of the best candidates for running Pi-hole since it is typically on 24/7 and connected via high-sp...| Tom Burkert
