Articles
A Guide to Generative AI
Generative AI has been one of the buzziest topics in tech lately, and for good reason. It’s no longer just a tool for tech giants - small and medium businesses (SMBs) can now tap into it to boost productivity, reach customers in new ways, and save time on tasks that once felt like a grind. But “generative AI” isn’t one single thing. It comes in different flavours, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Below, we’ll unpack the main types of generative AI you’re most likely to come across, and weigh up the pros and cons for businesses like yours.
August 20, 2025
Modern VPN Replacements: A Smarter, Safer Approach to Secure Connectivity
The days of clunky, expensive VPNs are numbered. We’ve seen firsthand how modern VPN alternatives like Cloudflare, Netskope, Tailscale, and Netbird are improving the way businesses manage secure remote access and reducing costs. These solutions offer lightweight, intelligent connectivity without the operational and security headaches that come with traditional VPNs. Seamless Connectivity Through Firewalls One of the standout benefits is the ease of connection across networks, even those protected by firewalls or NAT. Tools like Tailscale and Netbird use WireGuard under the hood and peer-to-peer networking to establish encrypted tunnels between devices. That means you can link servers, cloud services, and endpoints (even mobile tablets and smart phones) across multiple environments — without touching the firewall or punching open risky ports. Netskope, on the other hand, adds intelligent access to SaaS and web services, making traffic context-aware and policy-driven.
March 27, 2025
Why You Should Care About DNS Filtering
Businesses have an ironic relationship with ads on web sites and in mobile apps. On one hand, they may want ads in their own web site, or to show to the public to generate new business. On the other hand, loading of ads in web pages can slow a site down and lead to distractions and wasted time at work. But an increasing problem is that some ads are also malicious and when clicked on could put your business information and staff computers in danger.
December 1, 2024
To the Cloud and Back
While there have been many years of publicity about the benefits of moving your IT systems to cloud providers, there’s now more than a few businesses moving systems back into their own control. Web 2.0 1 darling 37signals is but one of those expecting savings of multiple millions. The motto of the 2010s and early 2020s—all-cloud, everything, all the time—seems to finally have peaked — David Heinemeier Hansson
November 8, 2024
Five Steps to Cybersecurity
Improving your business cybersecurity posture can be difficult to wrap your head around. There are many people trying to sell you tools to make you secure but many won’t help do much, other than lower your bank balance. We’ve put together a starter list of things that you should think about to plan to protect your information and systems. These five items can be considered an action list to get you started in understanding the cybersecurity risk to your business. It’s not unlike other areas of risk, but we’ll be more specific in where the risks come from, what’s potentially impacted and how to bring them back to within your appetite for accepting them.
September 15, 2024
Multi-Factor Authentication
This article is part of the ongoing series discussing identity and access management (IAM). What is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)? Your username and password used to login to different websites and passwords is regarded as a single authentication factor. Using MFA means that the login process requires at least two or more factors to do the same thing.
January 18, 2024
Single Sign On
This article is part of the ongoing series discussing identity and access management (IAM). What is Single Sign On? Single Sign On (SSO) is the concept of using one set of login credentials per person for many resources. Those resources might be logging into a computer, a web site, your email or an installed application. It’s one username and password (one identity) for everything.
August 3, 2023
An Introduction to Home Assistant
Home Assistant (HA) is a wildly popular open-source application that allows many things in your home or workplace to be automated. In this article I’ll describe some of the reasons you might want to use HA and how it can help your daily life and do some very useful things. This is an intro level doc and I hope to write some more detailed content on our HA config in the near future. If there is something specific, leave a comment and I’ll endeavour to publish something.
January 9, 2023
Hugo Frontend with Algolia - Part Two
This is part two (part one is here) and the final about how you can implement search functions in your static web site with Hugo and Algolia. You do need to have an index populated with Algolia to follow along below, but for the most part it’s HTML and JS to give your website a search page, call the Algolia API and display the results. Your Layout We’ll keep things pretty basic here as some of the layout depends on the theme you have in your current site. It’s likely you already have some sort of search layout and partials that you can modify (backed up or in a commit you can revert to).
February 7, 2022
Hugo Search With Algolia - Part One
Searching on a static site that only serves basic HTML+JS is tricky. The classic model of backend database and app server you might have used in the past isn’t there any more, so there’s no option to query the traditional database. So how does this work in static sites? One option is to make use of the APIs and services from Algolia. Algolia provides the smarts for the search once you’ve provided the indexed content. Then your static site sends an API request with a search term and they send back the results from what they already know. It’s like searching Google; your browser doesn’t query every site on the internet, it uses the Google search service and returns what they have collected in the past.
January 31, 2022