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This is the first one of these I've sent out. If you're reading it, you signed up somewhere along the way, whether that was on my blog, my business site, or Harder to Hack. This is all the same newsletter now. One place for everything I'm working on across all of those.

I'm a tech and security consultant by trade. I spend most of my working hours on compliance, policy, and helping companies figure out and build up their security posture. Outside of that, I do AI and general tech consulting, and I have a lot of side projects going. I write about all of it.

No corporate marketing. No "10 ways AI will change your life" listicles. Just real projects, honest results, and the occasional rant about technology.

I'm planning to send these out a few times a month at most. No spam. Just a heads up when there's new stuff worth reading, plus anything interesting I've come across.

Harder to Hack: freshly updated

Harder to Hack is a free resource I maintain for securing your personal digital life. It walks you through everything from email and passwords to mobile devices and backups, with specific app recommendations and step-by-step guidance.

I just finished this year's full review of the site. Every recommendation, every linked app, every piece of advice has been checked against current reality and updated where needed. Here are the biggest changes:

• Antivirus: now recommending Malwarebytes over Bitdefender. Simpler, lighter, and covers both Mac and Windows under one subscription.
• Apple's Passwords app gets a nod. If you're all-in on Apple and have Advanced Data Protection turned on, the built-in Passwords app is now a solid option. Bitwarden is still my primary recommendation for most people.
• iCloud backups: Added guidance on enabling Advanced Data Protection for end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups.

If you haven't made it all the way through the guide yet, or if it's been a while since you looked, the information is about as current as it's going to be until the next review.

There are also walkthrough videos now that cover the first part of the guide. I'm still testing that as a format. If people find them useful, I'll make more for the rest of the sections.

New this week

Build or Buy May Have Changed, For Now — A Mac app I relied on shut down. So I built my own replacement with AI in a few days. That got me thinking about what custom software means now, and the security implications of everyone building their own tools.

What I've been deep in

Most of what I've been writing about recently is around a system called PAI (Personal AI Infrastructure). It's an open source project by Daniel Miessler that adds structure to Claude Code: skills, hooks, memory, voice. I use it as the base for my own setup, and I've been building on top of it. The blog posts walk through different pieces of that system.

Setting Up Your Personal AI Assistant — A practical guide to setting up Claude Code with PAI on a Linux VM. This is the foundation for everything else I've been building. Goes way beyond the chatbot experience.

The Many AIs, My Evolving Approach — There isn't just one AI. There are dozens of different things all wearing the same name, and I think the conversation around "AI" suffers from lumping them all together. This is how I think about them and why it matters for how we evaluate what's actually useful.

Worth watching

If you've seen the viral clips of AI agents calling people at 3 AM or texting someone's wife, that's OpenClaw. Here are two videos that explain what's actually going on.

Damian Galarza: OpenClaw Architecture Breakdown — The clearest explanation I've seen of how it actually works. The architecture turns out to be four things: scheduled events, a message queue, an LLM that processes the queue, and persistent state stored in markdown files. He touches on the security side too.

Building Your Own Version — Cole Medin walks through building a custom version of this kind of system with their own tools and guardrails. If you're curious about the patterns, both are worth a watch.

What I'm exploring

Text-to-speech factors into a lot of what I'm building. I use it in Hypercast (a personal podcast tool that turns articles into audio) and to keep my AI assistant talking. I love it when I don't have to send that stuff to the cloud, for latency, security, and cost reasons.

This week I've been doing a deep dive into Chatterbox from Resemble AI. It's their open source TTS model, and it's doing really well for local work. Not quite at ElevenLabs levels yet, which makes sense since it's the open source version of a paid product, but it's impressive for something you can run yourself. I'm working on getting it running alongside my existing Kokoro setup. If the results are interesting enough, I'll write something up.

I'm interested in all of these quality-of-life improvements with AI and home systems. Every little piece gets us closer to that feeling of having an actual assistant. Less Siri, more Jarvis.

More from the blog

• PAI Companion: A Visual Jumpstart for Your AI Assistant — Portal, file exchange, and visual output for PAI. Open source.
• AI-Assisted 3D Printing: What Works and What Doesn't — Experimenting with LLMs writing OpenSCAD code. Honest results.
• See all posts

Projects

A few things I've open sourced or have in the works:

• Hypercast — Personal podcast generator. Send it articles or text and it turns them into audio episodes.
• PAI Companion — Portal, file exchange, voice, and design system for PAI. The onboarding package I use to set up new installations.
• skill-3d-printing — A PAI skill for generating 3D-printable objects with LLMs and OpenSCAD.

On YouTube

I also post videos on my YouTube channel. A few playlists that might be useful:

• Harder to Hack walkthroughs — Video guides for the first sections of the security guide
• Business security — Topics for organizations and IT teams
• Tutorials — Lately focused on AI tooling, but this will vary over time

That's it for now

More coming soon. If any of this is interesting to you, I'd appreciate you sharing it with anyone who might be into this kind of thing.

If you'd rather follow via RSS instead of email: here's the feed.

Thanks for reading.

Chris