The Backup Script I Should Have Written Years Ago
A SMART-error scare on my laptop turned into finally fixing techpad's embarrassingly loose backup setup, here's the boring three-layer script that replaced it.
Fighting My Own NAS All Weekend
A Labor Day weekend spent migrating a seven-year-old home server setup to a new mini PC turned into a two-day slog through undocumented cron jobs, GPU drivers, and one very good raccoon.
Killing My 13-Year-Old Contact Form
After thirteen years, I finally killed the ancient PHP contact form on this blog and replaced it with authenticated transactional email, once I realized it had been silently failing for months.
Fifteen Years of This, Almost
Techpad turns fifteen in November, and Im using an otherwise slow Sunday to think about why Ive kept typing into this thing since 2011.
Matter vs Thread vs Zigbee: What I'd Actually Pick for a Smart Home in 2027
I've been running Home Assistant with a mix of devices for a while now, and the Matter/Thread/Zigbee question keeps coming up. Here's how I think about it, and what I'd buy today.
Hunting Down Fifteen Years of Dead Links
I finally ran a link checker against 900 old posts going back to 2011 and found nearly a third of every link Ive ever posted is dead. Heres what broke, why, and what I did about it.
Renewing the Domain Again
A yearly domain renewal notice turns into some rambling about why a fifteen-year-old personal blog is still worth keeping alive in 2026.
Why Zigbee Beats Wi-Fi for Battery-Powered Smart Home Sensors
Wi-Fi is great for plugs and cameras but terrible for coin-cell sensors. Here's why Zigbee sensors run for years, and how to add a Zigbee mesh to Home Assistant.
Fixing My Contact Form After Years of Ignoring It
I finally replaced the janky mailto link on my site with an actual contact form backend, and wrote down what worked so I stop re-learning this every three years.
A Hosting Platform I Keep Coming Back To Just Redid Its Whole Site
Tricknowtech quietly rebuilt its site this June and moved to a shorter domain, tricknow.tech. Here's why I keep using it for side projects.
Turning a Spare Moto G34 Into a DIY Tesla-Style Car Computer
A build log: unlocking, rooting, and re-flashing a spare Moto G34 5G with LineageOS to turn it into a permanently-installed Android Auto brain that runs YouTube, Netflix, and any other app on the car's factory display.
Building a Unified Firmware for the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-3.49
A full build log of turning a 172×640 touch strip display into a clock, voice assistant, alarm/timer hub, and push-notification device — including every hardware quirk and bug fixed along the way.