Posts on

Digital Sovereignty on the Wrist: Returning to the Pebble Open Ecosystem

Thu, 14 May 2026 12:44:00 -0400

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.

Rooting the Grid: Why the Future of Energy is a Mesh Network

Thu, 07 May 2026 14:15:00 +0000

An exploration of why grid orchestration must mimic the architecture of the internet to survive the AI scaling crisis.

Setting Up snac2 on OpenBSD

Tue, 05 May 2026 11:30:00 +0000

A guide on deploying a lightweight, C-based ActivityPub instance using snac2 on an OpenBSD stack.

Pebble Smartwatch vs Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: Early Impressions

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0100

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.

Liberating the Hardware: Rooting the Dreame X40 Ultra

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:26:00 +0000

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.

Engineering is a Discipline, Not Just a Prompt

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:08:00 +0000

The Digital Archaeological Dig

I recently assisted a friend with a codebase that felt like a digital archaeological dig—a chaotic mixture of Python versions and conflicting modules. The modern instinct was to upload the lot to an LLM to “fix” everything.

The result was absolute carnage.

No version control or history meant “editing on master” in real-time.
More time spent reversing AI “improvements” than fixing the original bug.
A stark reminder: tools are getting smarter, but engineering discipline is becoming a rare commodity.

The Return of the Artisanal Mess

This mirrors the “artisanal” FrontPage websites of the late 90s. A lower barrier to entry does not guarantee higher quality output.

Don't confuse work ethic with work volume

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:36:00 +0000

Don’t confuse “work ethic” with “work volume.”
Bryan Cantrill’s latest post is a precision strike on the “37k lines of code a day” crowd.
In engineering, “virtuous laziness” is about spending hours in a hammock to find the one abstraction that saves weeks of toil.
It’s about minimising cognitive load because human time is finite.
LLMs have no such constraints. They don’t feel the “cost” of complexity, so they’ll happily bake you a 37,000-line layer cake of garbage just because it’s “free” to generate.

Your daily commute: dirt cheap in an EV

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:34:00 +0000

Your daily commute: dirt cheap in an EV.
The average American drives ~64 km per day.
Charging overnight at home costs roughly $0.80 per day, or about $24 a month.
Compare that to your current expenditure at the pump.
No early morning petrol station detours.
No price spikes.
Just plug in, sleep, and wake up with a “full tank” every single morning.

The maths isn’t complicated. The savings are real. The convenience? Massive.

Reporting for Duty: From 90s Light Infantry to Modern Bitpacking

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:45:00 +0000

Standard serialisation protocols have gone AWOL. If you want to get the packet home with only 50 bytes of airtime, you need to enlist bitpacking.

RF is More Magic Than Science: Exploring Meshtastic

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:12:00 -0500

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.