Blog
What worked, what broke and why. Plain-language posts and technical ones for the curious.
The TV, the smart plug, the camera and the kids' tablet usually all share one home network. What can happen when one of them isn't what it claims to be, and how to split the network so devices can't peek into each other's kitchen.
Read articleA server inside an old DVD player's case, running 24/7 just so the kids watch what a parent picked, not what an algorithm served them. What it gives, what it costs, and where it still falls short.
Read articleAfter a firmware update, the DNS settings page disappeared from my ISP router's admin GUI. Instead of guessing, I took apart the router's web app and asked the firmware directly what it can do, what's merely hidden, and what isn't there at all. And why I ended up putting an ASUS behind the box.
Read articleHow I built self-hosted sudo approval over WebAuthn (a physical key, Face ID or Touch ID from an iPad instead of a TOTP code), and why the road to reliable operation was full of false leads, from PAM permission errors to DNS.
Read articleA custom NetHunter kernel port and native Android desktop mode on a phone (Exynos S20 Ultra, z3s) with no current documentation or ready-made guide.
Read articleA practical guide to a stable local AI camera system with Frigate and the Orange Pi 5 (RK3588 NPU), built on real, long-running production use, not a weekend experiment.
Read articleA real diary of a multi-day migration to Pop!_OS 24.04 with full disk encryption, from BusyBox on the third reboot, through subvolume hell in Timeshift, to a hibernation bug that only one specific command could fix, not the obvious one.
Read articleA real story from an Orange Pi 5, dirty boots and a kernel panic looked like a software bug, but it turned out to be two independent hardware problems at once.
Read articleA weekly full-disk backup via dd worked for years. It kept working even after it became ten times bigger than it needed to be. What moving to a deduplicated, verified backup looks like, plus an off-site copy on top.
Read articleWhy enrolling a FIDO2 key into LUKS isn't enough, and what the real path to unlocking a disk with a touch of a hardware key looks like, through the Plymouth splash screen, dracut vs. initramfs-tools, and the systemd ask-password agent.
Read articleA dock sometimes fails to bring up all monitors, a laptop sometimes won't power off. Both are random and can't be reproduced on demand, instead of debugging by hand after the fact, a tool was built to wait and collect evidence ahead of time.
Read articleA homelab app that started as a side effect of routine maintenance, and within a few days grew into a sandboxed, tested, security-reviewed tool ready to go public on GitHub.
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