When “prompt engineering” started appearing in job descriptions a couple of years ago, a lot of people rolled their eyes. The idea that “talking to an AI” was a specialist skill seemed a bit absurd. But dismissing prompt engineering misses something important — getting useful output from AI models is a genuine skill, and it’s one that compounds over time. What Prompt Engineering Actually Is At...
155 million units. No console in history has come close to that number, and 25 years after the PlayStation 2 launched in March 2000, it still holds the all-time record. Understanding why the PS2 sold so many units tells you a lot about what makes a platform genuinely great — and why it’s still worth playing today. The DVD Player That Changed Everything In 2000, dedicated DVD players cost...
Everyone talks about AI productivity. Most of it is noise. Here’s what’s actually made a difference in my day-to-day work running TechGurus — the tools I’d genuinely miss if they disappeared tomorrow, and the ones that didn’t live up to the hype. Claude (Anthropic) — Daily Driver I use Claude for writing, analysis, and anything that requires careful reasoning. Client proposals, strategy...
A few years ago, people were putting CRT televisions on the kerb for council pickup. Today, those same TVs are changing hands for hundreds of dollars, and professional-grade CRT monitors — the kind used in broadcast and medical settings — command prices that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. What happened? The Retro Gaming CRT Revival The retro gaming community rediscovered something that...
Seventeen million units. That’s the number most often cited for Commodore 64 sales, and it’s a figure that has never been beaten by any single home computer model. Released in 1982, the C64 defined a generation of computing in a way that’s hard to overstate from today’s vantage point. Why It Won The C64 cost $595 USD at launch — less than half the price of the Apple II. It had 64KB of RAM, a...
Most people’s experience of AI involves sending their data to a server run by a big company. That’s fine for many use cases, but there’s a compelling alternative: running AI models entirely on your own machine. Ollama has made this dramatically easier than it used to be, and I think more people should know about it. What Is Ollama? Ollama is an open-source tool that lets you download and run...
The Game Boy Color often gets dismissed as just a Game Boy with a colour screen. That’s a bit like calling the SNES just an NES with better graphics — technically true, but missing the point entirely. At 27 years old, the GBC has a library and a charm that more than earns it a spot in any serious retro collection. More Than a Facelift Released in 1998, the Game Boy Color had a faster CPU than the...
I get asked this constantly: which AI should I be using? Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini? The honest answer is that all three are genuinely good, and the right choice depends on what you need. Let me give you my actual take after using all three extensively. Claude (Anthropic) Claude is my daily driver, and has been for a while now. Its strengths are in writing, nuanced reasoning, and following...
If you spend any time in retro gaming communities, you’ll hear about MiSTer FPGA eventually. It’s become the gold standard for serious retro enthusiasts — and once you understand what it actually is, it’s easy to see why. What Is MiSTer? MiSTer is an open-source project that uses a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) — specifically the Terasic DE10-Nano development board — to recreate classic...
Ask most people to name the great consoles of the mid-90s and you’ll hear PlayStation and Nintendo 64. The Sega Saturn almost never gets a mention. That’s a shame, because the Saturn is one of the most interesting, capable, and criminally overlooked consoles ever made — and right now, it’s still possible to build a solid collection without selling a kidney. What Made the Saturn Special The Saturn...
