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.
Tutorials
Tutorials
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.
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.
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.
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.
Git Worktrees Saved My Sanity With Multiple Agents
How using git worktrees instead of a single shared directory stopped my parallel coding agents from quietly wrecking each other's work.
My Downloads Folder Finally Sorts Itself (Sort Of)
A small local model plus a five-line cron job finally tamed my Downloads folder, after two failed attempts with fancier tools.
Running Two AI Agents Without Them Fighting Over Files
A practical writeup on using git worktrees to run two AI coding agent sessions against the same repo without them clobbering each other's files.
Transcribing Two Years of Voice Memos With whisper.cpp
I finally transcribed two years of accumulated voice memos using whisper.cpp running locally on a Mac Mini, and learned more about my own rambling than I expected.
Getting FreshRSS Running on the Old NUC
I finally moved my RSS subscriptions off Feedly and onto a self-hosted FreshRSS instance running on an old NUC, and it took about forty minutes I'd been dreading for months.
Getting a Local Model Running on My Ancient Desktop
I finally got a small local AI model running on my old desktop instead of assuming it was too weak, and it took less than two hours once I stopped procrastinating.