Free resources
Articles
Everything we have published lately, newest first. Guides, tool reviews, and notes, all in one place.
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How to rescue an email from your spam folder
You signed up for something you wanted, and the confirmation landed in spam. Here’s how to find it, rescue it, and tell your email provider to let future messages through, in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Proton, Yahoo, and Thunderbird.
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How to Read E.M. Forster for Free on Your Kindle
E.M. Forster’s major novels are in the US public domain. Here’s where to download them free, how to get them onto your Kindle, and how to use your library card for the titles that aren’t free yet.
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Version Control: How Linus Torvalds Built Git Because He Was Annoyed (And Changed Development Forever)
Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days because BitKeeper revoked its license. Then GitHub made it mainstream, Microsoft bought GitHub, and Forgejo forked from Gitea when it went corporate. Here’s why it matters where your code lives.
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How to set up Proton Pass
If you’re using Proton Mail or Proton Unlimited, you already have a password manager built in. Here’s the three-step setup to get it in your browser and start using unique passwords everywhere.
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Emailing your list the right way: consent, the law, and tracking
Sending email to a list comes with real rules and real choices. Here’s consent, unsubscribe, the law, deliverability, and the two kinds of “tracking” (only one is the creepy kind), in plain language.
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I have nothing to hide. Why should I care who reads my email?
“No one cares what I’m doing” is the most reasonable-sounding reason to stay on Gmail, and the easiest to take apart. Here’s the honest answer, with real cases, and the one argument that matters most: the people who actually are targeted.
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What your booking platform actually costs: the three-year math
Over three years, a per-booking platform costs roughly twice what a self-hosted system costs, and you own nothing at the end. Here are the real numbers for three common setups, with honest assumptions.
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We helped a travel business escape a $60K-a-year booking platform
A family-owned travel business was paying over $60,000 a year in booking fees and couldn’t leave. A venture-backed firm tried and failed. Here’s what was keeping them, what it took to leave, and what they have now.
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Self-hosted booking: what actually works
After Cal.com went closed-source, the self-hosted booking landscape shifted. Here’s what’s genuinely ready for real use: Easy!Appointments, WordPress plugins, custom builds, and when each one makes sense.
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What a booking system actually is (and which parts create lock-in)
A booking system is four things bundled together: a calendar, a customer database, payment processing, and a website. The calendar is the part you think you’re paying for. The customer database and the website are the parts that keep you.
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Who owns your booking system?
Most booking platforms have been bought by online travel conglomerates, private equity firms, or digital holding companies. The names stayed the same; the ownership, pricing, and data flows changed. Here’s who owns what now, and what it means for you.
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Web app security in plain language: the OWASP Top 10
Most of us learn web app security the hard way, after something breaks. Here’s the short, honest version: the free list that names the ten most common risks, a free tool to find them, and why awareness is the real protection.
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Is Wix a good idea for your small business? An honest look
Wix is the easy way to get a site up fast. The catch shows up later: you can’t take your site with you, you can’t switch templates, and the bill never stops. Here’s the honest trade-off, and what to do instead.
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Is Square safe for your small business? A conduct check
Square is the easy default for selling in person, but its conduct record is specific and some of it hits your cash flow: a habit of freezing seller funds, nine figures in 2025 regulator fines, and a big data breach. Here’s how to take cards in person without it.
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What actually makes a password strong
Most password advice is backwards. Length beats complexity, a password manager beats memorizing, and two-factor beats everything. Here’s the short, honest version of what keeps an account safe.
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How to judge a tool by its conduct, not its logo
A familiar logo tells you a company spent money on marketing, not how it will treat you. Four plain questions, privacy, lock-in, labor, and independence, let you judge any tool by its conduct.
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Should you put your email address on your website?
Putting your email address on your website hands it straight to spam bots. Here’s how to stay reachable without getting harvested, the tricks worth using, and the ones that just waste your time.
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Who actually owns your mailing list?
A newsletter is really two jobs: holding your list and delivering the mail. Whoever holds the list controls it. Here’s how to keep your subscribers yours, and the setup we chose ourselves.
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Buy or build? How to decide, and what it really costs
Every tool is a choice between renting and owning. Buying is low pain now and a bill forever; building is a sharper cost once, then quiet. Here’s how to choose on purpose, and why owning got cheap.
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Where to register your domain (and who to avoid)
Your domain is your address on the web, rented yearly from a registrar. Here’s who we send people to, the famous one we steer them away from, and the four behaviors that tell you who to trust.
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Your website has three parts. Make sure you own all three.
A website is really just three things: an address (your domain), a building (your site and its hosting), and a key (a way to update it yourself). Name the three and you know exactly what you own.
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Do Google Fonts leak your visitors’ data?
Free resources · Guide Do Google Fonts leak your visitors’ data? A font can quietly hand every one of your visitors to Google before they read a word. We found one doing exactly that on our own site. Here’s how to spot it, and fix it without changing your design. You were asked to approve…
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We don’t recommend what we haven’t run ourselves
Free resources · Article We don’t recommend what we haven’t run ourselves A lot of people will tell you to leave Big Tech. Fewer have actually done it. We run Desk Ready on the same independent tools we recommend, so our advice comes with real lessons, including the ones that didn’t work. A lot of…
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Is Zoom safe to use? What its privacy track record actually shows
Free resources · Article Is Zoom safe to use? What its privacy track record actually shows Zoom works, and you don’t have to quit it tomorrow. But its privacy history follows one pattern worth knowing before your next call: ship fast, get caught, fix after backlash. Here is the receipt trail, so you can decide…