Take back your data, your devices, and your time.
Owning your own tech doesn't take a technical background or a spare weekend. That part's on me. It usually starts with one thing: a machine that's gone sluggish, a search result that rattled you, a bill that keeps creeping up. Fix that, and the next step tends to make itself obvious. Below is the whole path, start to finish. Go as far down it as you want. Plenty of people stop halfway, and that's fine.
- >Your last gaming laptop ran hot, loud and slow inside a year, and you're not sure if that was the hardware or all the junk it shipped with.
- >That "new" PC arrived with more ads, pop ups and "AI features" than you ever asked for.
- >You're fairly sure you're overpaying for internet, but switching always sounds like more hassle than it's worth.
- >Every week, Google, your TV, the apps you forgot you installed, even your toaster annoyingly learns a little more about you
- >You once searched your own name and didn't love what stared back.
If any of those landed, you're exactly who this is for.
And if none of it did? No harm done. If you'd rather hand the lot over and never think about where your data lives, the fix-it-for-me side is built for exactly that.
It usually starts with one thing.
Each step stands on its own, and each one tends to make the next one obvious. Start anywhere, stop anywhere. It's your rabbit hole. I'm just the guide.
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01// the build
A rig that's all muscle, no padding
Gaming or working, spec'd for what's coming rather than whatever's on the shelf this week. I price the parts at cost and show you the receipts, then build, tune and stress test it properly. Thermals sorted, fans quiet, nothing throttling under load.
what you get- ✓Every dollar aimed at performance, not a retailer's margin.
- ✓Tuned, debloated and cool, not just parts flung in a box on a production line.
- ✓Straight answers on what's actually holding it back. Sometimes that's "don't upgrade yet."
the honest catchA build done right isn't the cheapest sticker in the shop. It's the one you're not angrily replacing eighteen months from now.
→A fast machine running bloated software is a Ferrari stuck in first gear. First gear is exactly how it leaves the shop floor, packed with junk the big retailers never bother to strip out.
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02// the OS
Stop paying the Windows tax in heat and watts
Windows spends your hardware on ads, telemetry and background chatter you never willingly agreed to. Strip it back to a modern Linux setup and the same machine runs cooler and quieter, with every watt finally pointed at what you're doing.
a lot of people happily stop right herewhat you get- ✓No ads in the start menu, no forced 2am reboots, nothing phoning home.
- ✓A laptop Windows had written off, cool and quick again.
- ✓Your games mostly come along too. Steam and Proton have come a long way.
the honest catchSome things don't make the jump: a few anti-cheat games, Adobe's apps, the odd specialist work tool. For most people that's no loss. For some, Windows still makes more sense, so I check what you actually use before we commit to anything.
→Now the machine's lean and quick. Trouble is, it's only ever as fast as the line feeding it.
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03// the pipe
The router your provider hopes you never replace
That free black box from your ISP is the weak link in most homes: underpowered, locked down, and dropping signal two rooms away. I build on the GL.iNet Flint range instead, the same line I run at home. The right model depends on your place and your budget. The Flint 2 is the value pick on Wi-Fi 6, while the Flint 3, 3E and the new flagship Flint 4 step up to Wi-Fi 7 and multi-gig speeds.
Speed is the least of it, though. These run OpenWrt, which is the difference between a sealed appliance and a network you actually control: wall your devices off from each other, funnel all traffic through a VPN from the router itself, block ads and trackers for the whole house, and reach home securely from anywhere. Anyone can buy a fast router. The value is everything built on top of it, and that's the part I do for a living.
what you get- ✓The right Flint for your home, set up and owned outright instead of rented from your provider.
- ✓Hardware that's a platform, not a sealed box. The foundation the next steps bolt straight onto.
- ✓The speed on your bill finally reaching your phone, TV and console, with the dead zones and lag spikes gone when the kids come home.
- ✓Set up and tuned, not flashed with the defaults and left.
the honest catchThere's an upfront cost, and the value is in the setup rather than the unboxing. Buy once and it earns its keep against the box you stop renting.
→Owning the box is step one. Next comes shutting the doors you never knew were open.
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04// the walls
Lock the doors you didn't know were open
The boring kind of security that just works, running on the gear you now own. Your smart TV and guest devices get walled off from your real computers. Ads and trackers get blocked in layers, network wide, then down in the browser. And you get a private, encrypted way back into your own network from anywhere.
another very common place to stopwhat you get- ✓Whole network layer: most ads and trackers blocked for every device at once, phone, TV, with nothing installed on any of them, toaster included. (It happens at the router, before the ads ever reach the device.)
- ✓A hardened browser on top, on the devices that matter, where even YouTube's own ads disappear whether you're signed in or not. (DNS alone can't touch those. This layer can.)
- ✓Chatty smart home gadgets walled off where they can't see your laptop or your files.
- ✓A private tunnel home, so dodgy café WiFi can't read over your shoulder.
straight talkThe honest line is about tracking rather than ads: stay signed into Google or Facebook and they still log what you do on their own turf, and no blocker changes that. Want that trail gone too? That's the footprint deep dive, a few steps down from here.
→Your network's now fast, private and yours. Which raises a cheeky question: are you actually getting what you pay for?
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05// the bill
Quit funding everyone else's intro deal
Loyalty doesn't get rewarded, it gets billed. Those "new customer" prices are there for the taking on a loop, but almost nobody switches because it feels like a part-time job. So I make it my job, not yours.
what you get- ✓We go through your internet and mobile needs and find the deal that's actually better, not the one with the loudest ad.
- ✓A simple churn routine, so you keep landing intro pricing instead of sliding onto the loyal minion rate.
- ✓Offboarding and onboarding dates set in advance with an automated nudge before each ISP deal expires, so it runs itself.
the honest catchIt means changing providers now and then rather than set-and-forget, since the cheap intro deals tend to run about six months. So that's a few minutes twice a year for real money back in your pocket. Worth it for most, not for everyone.
→You've cut what you hand over every month. Which begs a bigger question: what if you stopped renting from them at all?
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06// your own cloud
Quit renting your digital life back to yourself
Your photos, files, passwords. Most of it lives on someone else's computer, injected with ads and rented back to you every month. We can set up your own instead. One quiet little server at home, running Proxmox, doing the job of Google Drive, Dropbox, your password manager and a stack of apps all at once. It's yours, the subscriptions stop, and nothing leaves the house unless you say so.
a few of the jobs it can do- ✓Your own photo cloud and file drive. Your phone backs up to it on its own, so every photo and video lands safely at home, searchable by face, place and date like Google Photos, with no monthly fee and nobody mining them.
- ✓Your own self-hosted password manager using Vaultwarden, locked down on your hardware, instead of a company's that keeps turning up in the breach headlines.
- ✓A media server for the whole house. Your movies, shows and anime in one tidy library, streaming to any TV, phone or browser, ads gone and nothing ever "leaving the service." It all plays from the server, so your own machine stays clean and nothing eats your drive.
- ✓Your smart home, kept in the house. Run the smart lights, plugs and sensors locally through Home Assistant, so they answer to you instead of a cloud overseas and keep working even when the internet drops.
- ✓The paper mountain, tamed. Every bill, receipt and letter scanned, read and made searchable, so you turn up any document in seconds instead of digging through a drawer.
- ✓One box, room to grow. Proxmox runs the lot side by side and leaves space for more: a network wide ad blocker, a private notes app, a recipe box or reading list, a game server for the kids, whatever takes your interest.
the trade offIt's real gear that likes the odd update and an eye kept on it. Set up well it mostly minds itself, and snapshots mean a bad change rolls back in seconds rather than ruining your night. If you'd rather never think about it at all, that's what the set-and-forget option at the end is for.
→You've now pulled your life off other people's computers. Which raises the obvious question: what's still out there with your name on it?
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07// the eye opener
You've never seen yourself the way a stranger with time can.
Type your name into Google and you may get the polite surface. With your say so, I look the way someone with patience and bad intentions would: your email, your phone, the usernames you've reused for a decade. Then I pull it into one picture. The data broker sites selling your details, the accounts you forgot you ever made, the old passwords sitting in breaches, and the dots that join up to where you live, where you work, and when you're not home.
This isn't here to scare you. It's that almost nobody realises how far it goes until they see it on one page (or more). Once you can see it, we start pulling it back: opting you out, closing the gaps, locking down what's left. You walk away with an interconnected graphical report you can actually read and a plan to shrink your shadow. And pulling it back is only half the job. I'll also set you up so the picture doesn't quietly rebuild itself over the next few years, keeping you off the radar instead of slowly drifting back onto it.
what you walk away with- ✓A plain-English visual map of exactly what's exposed, and where.
- ✓Opt outs filed with the data brokers selling you.
- ✓A breach check on your old passwords, and the gaps closed.
- ✓An optional no logs VPN like Mullvad with custom profiles set per use case, Tor for the genuinely sensitive, and separate VMs so one part of your life never laterally touches another.
straight talkI can't make you vanish, but I can take you from wide open to a real pain to find. The tunnels get hardened enough that today's traffic can't be hoarded and cracked open years down the track. The serious gear trades a little speed for that, so we set it to exactly how hidden you need to be. Seeing it all on one page the first time is confronting. That's rather the point.
→Build, OS, network, bills, your own cloud, footprint. That's a lot of plates to keep spinning. Unless you'd rather not touch any of it…
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08// set & forget
…Or, never think about any of it again
Prefer it simply handled? I keep the lot patched, backed up and monitored as a quiet ongoing arrangement. Something plays up and I'm usually already on it before you've noticed.
what you get- ✓Updates, backups and security handled in the background.
- ✓Priority help when something does go sideways.
- ✓One person who already knows your setup, so there's no explaining it from scratch every time.
worth knowingIt's an ongoing cost, not a one-off. Plenty of people don't need it. But if what you're really after is not having to think about any of this, this is the piece that gets you there.
Linux isn't what it was ten years ago.
And what do you give up? Licence fees, ads, telemetry and the constant nagging. What you keep is a computer that does what you tell it, and nothing you didn't ask for.
- ~Reddit rabbit holes at 1am, twelve tabs deep.
- ~A setup that works, but you're not sure why.
- ~The reinstall for when it doesn't.
- ~Your whole weekend, gone.
- ✓Scoped and done in a sitting.
- ✓Explained in plain English, so you can take it over.
- ✓Done to a standard, not a guess.
- ✓You keep the keys. Your weekend stays yours.
Nothing here is off-the-shelf, so take a single piece or stack a few. It all runs on the same plain rate you'll find across the site: $110 an hour, with parts always at cost and the receipts to prove it. Smaller jobs are billed by the hour; the bigger builds and projects get a fixed price agreed before I start, so you're never guessing and never surprised. A handful of combinations come up again and again: