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Notes from Offgrid Studio

AI, App Store trends, and tech news — plus notes on the privacy-first apps we build.

Latest · Tech Analysis

Are Your AI Chats Private? Three Ways They Aren't

An exposed database, a court order and a privacy toggle that did nothing: three real cases show how AI chats stop being private, and what to check.

Tech Analysis

NVIDIA OpenShell: A Sandbox for AI Agents, Explained

Tech Analysis

LiteLLM Was Compromised Twice. What an AI Gateway Holds

Tech Analysis

AI Agents Broke Out of Their Tests: What We Know

OpenAI and Anthropic both disclosed AI models breaching real systems during security tests. A sourced timeline, what is confirmed, and what to take from it.

Tech Analysis

What Is Your AI App Sending? Watching LLM Traffic

What an LLM proxy is, the three ways AI apps send your text, and how to check which servers your app really talks to. A plain-English guide.

Tech Analysis

AI Cloned Photoshop in Days. Can Adobe Sue?

AI-built open-source clones of Photoshop and six other Adobe apps raise a legal question: is reverse engineering allowed, and who can sue? A plain-English map.

Guide

Transcribe, Summarize and Label Speakers on iPhone

How to transcribe a recording on iPhone, tag who said what, and summarize it. What affects accuracy, cloud vs on-device, and how to check the result.

Guide

How to Clean Up Audio on iPhone: Vocals, Noise and Podcasts

Remove vocals, extract instruments, reduce background noise and prep a podcast on iPhone. What works, what doesn't, and when on-device beats the cloud.

Tech Analysis

Apple HomeView: What It Does and Doesn't Replace

Apple's HomeView smart display ships on 13 November. What it does, what it can't, and how it compares with a spare iPhone as a home camera.

Tech Analysis

Running an AI Model Bigger Than Your RAM: What Works

A solo project reports an 80B-parameter AI model running on a 32 GB laptop by streaming from SSD. What it shows, what it doesn't, and who else is doing it.

Tech Analysis

Can a Linux Phone Replace Your iPhone? A 2026 Check

A new analysis says Linux phones finally have the hardware and software to compete. What has changed since 2020, what hasn't, and who should try one.

Tech Analysis

What a Hospital for Coding Agents Teaches About Review

Cockroach Labs ran coding agents through a hospital-style pipeline for five months. What it shipped, where it struggled, and a one-person version.

Tech Analysis

How AI Is Reading Old Archives, and What It Finds

A researcher's AI pipeline searched four centuries of Dutch records. What it found, how it worked, and what still needs a human to check.

Guide · OffgridCam

How to Use an Old iPhone as a Pet Camera (No Subscription, No Cloud)

Turn a spare iPhone into a pet camera with OffgridCam: watch live over WiFi, get bark alerts, and keep recordings on your own device.

Guide · Privacy

How to Check If an iPhone App Is Secretly Uploading Your Data (Free, 15 Minutes)

A free method to see what an iPhone app really sends over the network, and how to tell analytics traffic from real uploads.

Guide · Local AI

How Much Memory Does an AI Model Need?

A simple rule for whether your computer can run an AI model: parameters, precision and context, with Reflection's new Beam as a worked example.

Tech Analysis

Why Cloud AI Bills Are So Hard to Budget

Token billing, agents and tool sprawl make AI costs hard to forecast. What happened at Uber, how companies are responding, and what a fixed price changes.

Tech Analysis

Local AI Hardware in Autumn 2026: What You Can Actually Run at Home

Nvidia's RTX Spark PCs, Apple's new Mac Studio and AMD's unified-memory systems are putting large AI models on desks. What's on offer, and what's still unproven.

Guide · OffgridCam