I Stopped Chatting and Started Filing Issues
Chat is a good scratchpad and a terrible filing cabinet. I moved the actual conversation into Gitea issues, and my projects stopped stalling.
Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time
I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my…
Introducing Cruxwire: a personal news digest that runs on your own hardware
I read too much news, badly. A dozen RSS feeds, three "read it later" apps I never went back to, and the creeping sense that the algorithm-driven version of all this was optimizing for someone else's goals, not mine. So…
Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server
I am not a software engineer. I think in milestones, user stories, and outcomes. Kim wants a smart garden assistant that tells her when to water and when the blight risk is high. I want to build it. Solo homelab…
From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation
When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation"…