A home for my side‑quests: geocaching, camper van fettling, tech tinkering, 3D printing, bread that mostly works, whisky that usually does, and whatever else I’m currently obsessed with in a small, rainy corner of North Wales.
Latest posts – My latest thoughts and ideas in date order, head over to any section for a more detailed view
- Bring Back the People in Brown CoatsOrdering campervan plumbing parts online is a mess of bad catalogues and useless AI chatbots. A nostalgic case for the hardware shop expert who just knew.
- What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)An idle CPU was once a sin. Now a bored home server is the point. Lessons from the VAX and DEC days on thrift, utilisation, and what “efficient” really means.
- The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your AfternoonVS Code and PyCharm started as the coder’s friend, then bloated into arms-race complexity. A look at feature creep in code editors and why the best tools get out of the way.
- Why I Gave Up on Apps and Built My OwnWhy I ditched SaaS maintenance apps and built a self-hosted home CMMS in Python, FastAPI and SQLite — tracking 100+ assets across the house, workshop and barn.
- Meditations on a random Facebook shortA reflection sparked by a Facebook short: if nothing truly belongs to us, why do goodbyes hurt? On presence, impermanence, and the only ownership that matters.