Technology

The grid was built for a different era. Massive, centralised plants and long transmission lines made sense when generation was expensive and demand was concentrated. That architecture has a cost: one break in the chain and millions go dark. It is not bad engineering; it is a design that scaled well past its limits. At Blueprint Power, the strategy was simple: push generation and load as close together as possible. Move to the edge. The shorter the distance between where power is made and where it is used, the less you depend on the transmission backbone. The networking mindset was the means, not the message. ...

I recently spent some time getting snac2 running on my OpenBSD infrastructure. For those unfamiliar, it is a simple, minimalistic, and remarkably efficient ActivityPub instance written in C. It is a fantastic fit for the OpenBSD philosophy, as it plays nicely with native security features like pledge(2) and unveil(2). If you are looking for a way to join the fediverse without the heavy resource footprint of larger platforms, this is a solid choice. ...

I’ve deployed numerous iRobot and Neato units over the years. My previous iRobot fleet served faithfully for five years; they are easy to repair, but their performance has fallen behind, and the mandatory cloud tethering is a strategic disadvantage for any privacy-conscious home. The Dreame X40 Ultra is a superior piece of hardware, but to truly own it, I had to strip away the cloud requirement. The Mission: Local Control To achieve full autonomy, I used Valetudo. It replaces the cloud interface with a local web server, keeping the data off external servers and locked within my IoT VLAN and Home Assistant instance. ...

My dad was a ham radio operator, so I spent a good chunk of my childhood tearing down rigs and building antennas with him. By the time I was old enough to break things on my own, I was compiling Linux kernels with AX.25 support just to mess around with packet radio. Truth is, RF is more magic than science. You can do the math all day, but physics always gets a vote in the end. ...

The breakthrough came when I stopped treating the wearable as a “coach” and started treating it as a sensor. Strategic Summary The Risk: Blindly following “black box” AI health advice. The Solution: Custom data wrangling and multi-year trend analysis. Status: Mission success confirmed by raw data, not app badges. I’ve been a health data geek since the Nike+ shoe sensor era. What started as curiosity evolved into a full-scale surveillance mission on my own biology. By leveraging AI to parse a decade of movement and heart rate trends, I’ve extracted actionable intelligence that not a single health professional has ever asked to see. It’s a strange tactical oversight: we have the telemetry, but it remains siloed from the people managing our care. ...