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
- CMMS UpdateI promised planned maintenance and then kept going — parts, purchasing, a Kanban work-order hub, twice-daily network scans. A candid update on my home-grown CMMS: what it became, how much of it I built alongside an AI, and why the code is finally coming out of its private repo.
- The Fences Going Up Around Everyday LifeBank branches close, high streets empty, and services move online. Digital-by-default Britain is a modern enclosure — and it’s shutting the poor, the old and the offline out of society itself.
- The Temptation of the Tidy AnswerSearch preserves disagreement; AI resolves it into one tidy answer. The good ones are seductive—here’s what we quietly lose when we stop interrogating them.
- 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.