Techpad — Tech News, Tutorials & Personal Notes

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.

September 3, 2026·3 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

TechpadinPersonal

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.

August 28, 2026·3 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

TechpadinPersonal

Cleaning Out the Archive Folder

A weekend spent digging through fifteen years of old drafts and dead links turns into a longer meditation on how much has quietly changed since this blog started.

August 22, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinPersonal

The Drawer Where Old Phones Go to Die

I finally emptied the drawer of dead phones and tangled cables I've been avoiding since 2019, and thought about why I couldn't bring myself to recycle any of it.

August 21, 2026·4 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

TechpadinPersonal

Cable Bin Archaeology

A weekend spent cleaning out a decade-old bin of mystery cables turns into a mini audit of old hard drives, an embarrassing 2012 blog draft, and a home network held together with static IP guesswork.

August 12, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinPersonal

The Drafts Folder Has 341 Posts I Never Finished

A late-night scroll through fifteen years of unfinished blog drafts, a hosting migration scare, and why 341 abandoned posts dont bother me as much as I thought they would.

August 6, 2026·3 min read

TechpadinPersonal

The Bridge Board Always Dies First

A dead external hard drive sends me down a rabbit hole of old blog drafts, bad 2013 predictions, and a long-overdue reckoning with my actual backup habits.

August 4, 2026·4 min read