Writing

I built a browser extension for people who drown in tabs — triage, folders, sessions, tab sleep, a site blocker, focus mode, and per-URL notes. The twist is the default: all of it runs on your machine with no account. The networked bits — built-in AI, sync, payments — are optional, relayed through my own Raspberry Pi so no API key ever ships in the extension. Here's what it is and what went into building it.

product · 4 min read · Jul 2026

A 3TB drive I refused to reformat, three family members who each get their own private cloud, and a filesystem with no Unix permissions. This is how I turned a Raspberry Pi 5 into a self-hosted Nextcloud NAS — the External Storage trick, the reboot-order bug that silently writes to the wrong disk, and the backup that isn't really a backup yet.

homelab · 12 min read · Jun 2026

How do you watch a Raspberry Pi 5 — CPU, memory, temperature, every Docker container, and the logs — from anywhere on the internet, without opening a single port on your home router? Part 1 of a series: the map, not the wiring.

homelab · 8 min read · Jun 2026

MobX was eagerly allocating a ComputedValue for every @computed getter on every instance — even ones that never get read. This is the story of issue #4616, the lazy fix that landed in PR #4639, and the quiet contracts that made it harder than it looks.

open source · 7 min read · May 2026

E-paper displays need microsecond-accurate electrical pulses to move ink particles. This is the story of how the ESP32 RMT peripheral generates those pulses, and what broke when Espressif rewrote the driver API.

embedded · 6 min read · Mar 2026

A single malformed UTF-8 byte froze an entire e-ink display. No crash, no error — just an infinite loop. This is the story of how a bare continuation byte exposed a parser bug in embedded firmware.

debugging · 4 min read · Mar 2026

From 128 characters in the 1960s to every writing system on Earth. The history of text encoding, why UTF-8 won the internet, and what happens between bytes and the pixels you read.

history · 5 min read · Mar 2026