- 2026-07-12
Your Smart Diffuser Is an ESP32 With the Cloud Keys in Plaintext
Pura's smart scent diffusers are cloud-locked ESP32 boards that talk to AWS IoT, gate the fragrance cartridges behind a signed NFC token, and ship with their per-device private key sitting unencrypted in flash. Here's the full teardown: pulling the firmware, MITMing the cloud, cracking the dual-bay NFC, and rebuilding both two-bay models on local ESPHome with no cloud at all.
- 2026-03-15
I Reverse-Engineered the TiinyAI Pocket Lab From Marketing Photos. Here's Why Your $1,400 Is Probably Gone.
A $1.7M Kickstarter built on forked academic research, undisclosed MoE architectures, split memory pools behind PCIe bottlenecks, and a company that won't tell you who they are. I did the math. The math doesn't care.
- 2026-03-11
I Bought a $450 Coding Toy for My Kids. Then I Opened It Up.
Cubetto promised screen-free coding for toddlers. What I found inside was a cheap BLE SoC, a Darlington array pretending to be a motor driver, hall effect sensors instead of NFC, and a company that quietly abandoned everything that made the product worth buying.
- 2026-03-04
I Bought NVIDIA's $4,000 'AI Supercomputer.' Then I Sold It.
The DGX Spark promised local AI inference for developers. After five months of real workloads, a kneecapped memory bus, a broken software stack, and an architecture that NVIDIA couldn't be bothered to support, I sold it and ordered an M3 Ultra Mac Studio instead. Here's what I learned about bandwidth, business models, and who's actually building the future of local AI.