Who writes this

Alberto Gulotta

I have been taking computers apart — and, often enough, putting them back together — since I was a kid in Palermo with a Commodore 64. This site is what thirty-five years of that turned into.

It started with a beige box

The Commodore 64 was the first machine I had, and it taught me the thing I never unlearned: a computer is not a sealed object. You can open it. You can change what it does. You can break it, and the breaking is usually where the interesting part is. Nothing since has felt different — the boxes just got faster and stopped needing a cassette.

Then everything else

In the thirty-five years since, the list of machines and operating systems I have not tried has become much shorter than the list I have. Not for a job: out of curiosity, at my own desk, on my own hardware. I install things to see what they actually do rather than what the box says, I push them until something gives, and I have spent more evenings than I should recovering a system I had no reason to touch in the first place.

Two of those evenings turned into something I still think about.

About fifteen years ago I decided to find out whether a Mac operating system really needed a Mac. Everything about it said no: the hardware was ordinary, the installer expected parts I did not have, and every attempt ended in a boot that went nowhere. Then one of them did not. The desktop came up on a machine that was never meant to show it, and I sat looking at it for a while. Nothing was gained — I had a computer that already worked. What I had learned was that the line between “this only runs here” and “this only runs here for now” is drawn by people, and people can be wrong.

Around the same years I got curious about the padlock on the little router everyone had at home. It said WEP, and WEP was what protected the whole flat. I wanted to know whether that word meant anything, so I studied it until I could answer the question for myself — and the answer was that it meant almost nothing. The scheme was weak by design, and patience was the only skill it demanded. It was never about getting in anywhere; it was about finding out that a lock everybody trusted was mostly theatre. The industry eventually agreed and retired it.

That is the habit, and it is the only qualification I claim here. I am not a certified anything. I am someone who has been trying software for a very long time, who reads a promise on a landing page and immediately wants to check it, and who has learned to tell the difference between a tool that works and a tool that demos well.

Why this site exists

AI tools now arrive at the pace those machines used to arrive, except there are twenty of them every week and most of the reviews you find were written by someone who never opened the thing. Half of them rank whatever pays best. You can read five articles about the same tool and still not know whether it does the one job you need.

So: guides written after actually using the tool, in plain English, saying what it is bad at as well as what it is good at. One island, one district per subject, one click from the square to the guide you came for.

The rules I hold myself to

• Verify, never remember. Every price, limit and feature is checked before it is published, and the page says when it was checked. Software changes weekly; a guide that does not carry a date is a guess.
• If I cannot verify it, I say so. An honest gap beats a confident invention.
• Nobody pays to be here. No tool buys a place in a guide, a better position, or a kinder sentence. There is no arrangement to disclose because there is no arrangement.
• Mistakes get fixed in public. When I get something wrong, the correction goes on the page with the date, not quietly into the archive. If you spot one, write to me.

About the darker island

Turn the island over and you land in a copy of it where the lights are red — that is where the guides about the dark web live. The line there is not a matter of taste: I explain how it works and how to protect yourself, and I do not publish instructions for reaching or using illegal markets. A site that lives on trust burns itself down the day it crosses that.

What it costs you

Nothing. Today the site earns nothing at all — it is written in the evenings, like every experiment before it. If that ever changes, this page will say how, and it will say it before the change, not after. What it will never change is what ends up in a guide.

Where I am

Palermo, Sicily, which is — appropriately — an island. The city on the home page was not an accident.

Write to me

Corrections, a tool worth looking at, a guide you want to write yourself: it all reaches the same place, and I answer in person.

aitoolsprimer@gmail.com

Alberto Gulotta — founder and editor, and for now the whole newsroom.
Who is responsible for your data is set out on the privacy page.