Posts

The tech industry loves a treadmill. It wants us to keep running toward the next high resolution, battery hungry slab of glass. But sometimes, the most progressive move is a tactical retreat. My journey with the Samsung Galaxy series began in 2018 with the original Galaxy Watch, but long before that, my first smartwatch was a Pebble. When Eric Migicovsky announced the rebirth of the platform with the Core Pebble Time 2, the nostalgia was too strong to ignore. ...

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. ...

A no-nonsense comparison of the new Pebble smartwatch against my daily driver, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic. Weight, sensors, battery, and the tactile interface.

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. ...