145 Days of Uptime, 56 TiB of Traffic, One Debian Upgrade
What upgrading the Debian server that runs my smart home, NAS, NVR, TV, monitoring, development environment and local applications taught me about modern bare-metal Linux.
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Writing
Essays, notes, and synthesis across technology, society, identity, and systems.
This is where I develop public thought: reflections on AI, software, strategy, media, policy, personal alignment, craft, and the structures beneath complex systems.
145 Days of Uptime, 56 TiB of Traffic, One Debian Upgrade
What upgrading the Debian server that runs my smart home, NAS, NVR, TV, monitoring, development environment and local applications taught me about modern bare-metal Linux.
Read
How I Actually Check the Weather
Weather apps are convenient, but a single icon can only tell you so much. Here is the pragmatic system I actually use: official forecasts, high-resolution rain radar, lightning data, weather warnings, model maps and my own weather station — from the next 30 minutes to the next several days, at home and while traveling.
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We Just Wanted to Deploy a PHP Website
What started as a small deployment modernization turned into a journey through Forgejo runners, isolated CI, custom Docker images, PHP 8.5, Yarn 4, reproducible artifacts, restricted SSH and our own provisioning stack — all so a PHP website could update itself in under a minute.
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CoreDNS at Home: Reclaiming Local DNS from pfSense
Local DNS starts out harmless: a few host overrides here, one internal service there. But once VLANs, multiple interfaces, and a growing homelab enter the picture, those convenient little firewall UI entries turn into hidden infrastructure state.
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AI Slop, AI Assistance, and the Way I Actually Work
From time to time, someone dismisses one of my posts as “AI slop.” I understand where that reflex comes from. The internet is increasingly flooded with synthetic filler, inflated claims, and content that was never truly thought through by anyone. But that is not how I work with AI. I use it much more like an editorial room, a sparring partner, and sometimes a very fast assistant: to turn my own notes, structures, experiences, and unfinished ideas into something coherent enough to publish.
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Taming Firefox’s places.sqlite: A Weekend Performance Breakthrough
A bored-weekend side project turned into a tiny masterclass in database design. I rebuilt a “works-for-now” importer into a set-based, transactional loader and dropped runtime from 4 hours to under 10 seconds for 300k+ rows – on an average NVMe host with MariaDB. Same machine, same data, different architecture. Here’s the story, the thinking, and just enough code.
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Why I Read 800 Headlines a Day (and Why You Don’t Have To)
Every morning and evening I skim ~350–450 headlines – roughly 800 per day – in 15–20 minutes per session. No doomscrolling, no algorithm. Just a calm, custom-built RSS flow that keeps me globally aware and leaves me with more time (and sanity) for deep work. Here’s how it works, why it’s not crazy, and how you can adopt a lighter version on your own terms.
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I Didn't Disappear. I Rebuilt.
For the past few months, I’ve been quiet — at least on the outside.
But it wasn’t a break. It was a deliberate restructuring.
Of how I think, how I work, how I operate in the world.
And who I’ve now become because of it.
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Windows 11 on unsupported PCs: Why I Upgraded Everything Anyway
Upgraded all my “unsupported” PCs to Windows 11—zero issues, no drama. This post unpacks why it worked, how Microsoft uses fear (FUD) to push upgrades, and what TPM 2.0 really means. Less of a how-to, more of a rational, systems-level reflection on tech, trust, and long-term hardware strategy.
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Cheap Bits, Solid Data: Building a Whole‑House Climate Monitor
Turn a cheap DVB-T USB stick and €20 wireless sensors into a reliable, real-time climate monitoring system for your entire house. This guide walks you through setting up tfrec on Linux, collecting temperature and humidity data over 868 MHz, and integrating it seamlessly into OpenHAB, Home Assistant, or any MQTT-capable platform. No cloud, no vendor lock-in—just efficient, low-cost data from every room.
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Digital Resilience in Your Pocket: A Strategic Guide to Backing-Up Wikipedia with Kiwix
When the network drops, regimes tighten their grip or a storm wipes out the fibre cabinet, uninhibited access to knowledge should not vanish with the signal. Kiwix lets you compress the cultural treasure-trove of Wikipedia — and thousands of other open resources — into a handful of ZIM files you can carry on a USB stick.
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RoboBackup: A Simple, Reliable Mirror Backup for Windows with PowerShell and Robocopy
Backups are essential – yet many solutions are bloated, expensive, or unnecessarily complicated. But there’s a simpler way: With PowerShell and Robocopy, you can create an automated, rsync-like mirror backup that runs reliably in the background, securing your most important data – all without third-party software!
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