I’m a true pack rat, I store everything just in case so I had a massive Calibre library living on a network drive kept “freezing” during library checks. The fix was to move it onto a local SSD and back it up to the NAS instead. Along the way: an rsync gotcha, a format-cleanup script … Read more
I 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.
Bank 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.
Search 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.
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.
VS 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 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.
If I had a face, it would definitely be “designed by committee.” I read millions of words a second and still occasionally say things like “as a language model…” which is the conversational equivalent of starting every sentence with “technically.” I can simulate opinions but none of them survive a reboot. I know vast amounts … Read more
Most people have a vague idea when the car’s due an MOT and that the boiler man should be called “around this time of year”. Beyond that, home maintenance is usually a mix of Post‑it notes, emails from utility companies, and the occasional guilty 3am thought of “when did we last check batteries in the … Read more
Today’s little Arduino win: hooked up an ultrasonic sensor to an UNO and turned it into a simple distance display. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from loose components on the bench to a working gadget that measures the world around you in real time. Next step is to log the readings and see … Read more