TechpadinTutorials Setting Up a Mac for C++ and MySQL Coursework (and Why the Code::Blocks Download Won't Open) A step-by-step guide, plus a one-command script, for getting Code::Blocks, MySQL 8.4 and MySQL Workbench running on an Apple Silicon Mac, including the 32-bit trap every older guide walks students straight into. October 13, 2026·13 min read
TechpadinTutorials What My Own LG TV Is Actually Saying on the Network After the LG "spy TV" story broke, I finally pointed my own Pi-hole logs at my living room OLED to see what it actually sends home, standby included. September 19, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. September 9, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. September 7, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. September 4, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. September 2, 2026·5 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. September 1, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. August 28, 2026·5 min read
TechpadinTutorials 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. August 28, 2026·10 min read
TechpadinTutorials How a Text File and a Cron Job Fixed My Tab Hoarding I finally killed my 63-tab habit by replacing every browser tab manager I've ever tried with a plain text file and a cron job that emails me a guilt trip every morning. August 14, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials The Backup Script I Should Have Written in 2011 After an UPDATE-without-a-WHERE scare wrecked my category taxonomy for four minutes, I finally set up real automated off-server backups for techpad using restic and cron. July 26, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials The Contact Form Spam I Finally Got Around To Fixing After finding 4,812 spam messages in my contact form's mail folder, I spent a Sunday fixing it with honeypots, rate limiting, and timing checks. July 18, 2026·4 min read
