Writing
The full stream: longer essays, short notes, and the odd field observation. If the home page is the front page, this is the archive.
- essay
Paying for a machine that guesses
I pay for several AI models every month. Some days they save me an hour; on others I spend that hour proving them wrong.
- note
A password vault is not a secrets manager
I set up a self-hosted password vault so household logins stop appearing in chat. The easy assumption was that it could replace the encrypted config store behind the homelab. It ca…
- essay
The half-a-job problem — setting completion goals on hobby projects
AI made it easier to start hobby projects, which made the old half-finished-project problem louder rather than smaller.
- note
When an old hardware guide points you at the wrong chip
I reopened an RFID cloning project after leaving it alone for about a year. My starting point was the same guide I had used before, including a compatibility table that made Gen2/C…
- essay
The label that should have stayed in the shop
A complete build record for turning a surplus Solum retail label into a Home Assistant-backed Codex status display: EFR32 recovery, Pico 2 flashing, S3+C6 radio architecture, no-solder decisions, wiring failures and the path to a homelab enclosure.
- essay
Home Assistant (Mind Over Matter)
A few days with Matter, Thread, IKEA devices, Home Assistant, and the gap between standardised onboarding and reality.
- essay
Busy and productive finally look identical
Fifteen production releases in 2 days, and the uncomfortable question of whether AI made me better or just better at slicing the work small.
- essay
Tools I stole from work — New Relic
Second in the Tools I Stole From Work series: putting work-grade observability under a home network, and trimming the free tier when it hit 100GB.
- essay
Moving my skills and memory between agent tools
Moving a skill library and a file-based memory store between agent tools without copying either, by pointing both at one source of truth.
- essay
A short reflection after speaking with Adam about pixelmesh, and why LoopCoach should show AI improving quality of life rather than just productivity.
- essay
One place for the agents: building an MCP hub
Consolidating MCP config from three agent tools into one self-hosted hub, and why I split it into themed namespaces instead of one catch-all.
- note
When a honeypot only exists in Python
I was tightening the Stafford Camera Club join form after a new spam example got through. The interesting part was not just the missing bare-domain filter. The form class already h…
- essay
A coding agent's biggest flaw isn't bad code - it's never knowing when to stop. Give it one ticket and it'll finish it, then suggest three more improvements. Each one is reasonable. Each one feels related. A few hours later, a simple fix has become a whole new project.
- essay
I tried to break into my own house
Late one evening, I found myself standing on my own doorstep with a torch and a clipboard, inspecting the house as though I were an external auditor. The exercise started as a routine security review of my homelab and internet-facing services, but it quickly turned into a reminder that the most obvious risks are not always the ones you notice first.
- essay
Tools I stole from work - Playwright
I started running browser-driven smoke checks against a volunteer-run camera-club website. The tool was free. The discipline came from somewhere else.
- essay
The useful part of running agents at home is not the intelligence. It is the containment: narrow jobs, short tool lists, visible audit trails, rate limits, and a real kill switch when something starts behaving oddly.
- note
Bambu Studio URL schemes - what doesn't work and why
I spent an embarrassing afternoon trying to wire up an "Open in Bambu" button on my hobby 3D-print catalogue. The MakerWorld site has one and the workflow it offers is obviously th…
- essay
Treating my house like a production system
Notes from running a homelab and a family with the same brain.
- essay
Running a small fleet of agents in the house
What I've built on top of someone else's agent runtime, and why the discipline matters more than the kit.
- note
A second container, for the smaller stuff
This is where the shorter stuff lives now — links worth keeping, paragraph-length observations, anything that doesn't quite earn an essay. The [long-form posts](/blog) stay on the …
- note
Postmortems as a genre, not a chore
A useful test for any postmortem template: would I voluntarily read this back in six months?
- note
Cron jobs you've actually restored from
A cron job that has never successfully completed its restore path isn't a backup — it's a hopeful gesture.