I break things, then write down why.
Homelab rebuilds, developer tooling, and small business websites. Every post is a real problem I hit, the diagnosis, and what I’d do differently next time.
Acer Chromebook 315 First Impressions: Do You Still Need a Windows Laptop?
The interesting question about a cheap Chromebook is not whether it is fast. It is whether the work you do still needs a full Windows laptop. After a couple of days with the Acer Chromebook 315, the answer is closer to no than I expected.
OpenAI Made a $230 Keyboard. I've Owned Enough of Them to Have Opinions.
OpenAI's first piece of hardware is a $230 macro pad for its Codex agents. I run coding agents every day and I've owned a pile of mechanical keyboards, so I have a read on this even though I didn't buy one. The keys that show live agent status are a genuinely good idea. The rest is a $129 Work Louder Creator Micro with a hundred dollars of Codex branding on top.
I Automated YouTube Video Triage, Then Found Out I Was Optimizing the Wrong Thing
I built a tool that flags my weak YouTube videos and rewrites their titles. It felt smart. Then I had OpenAI's Codex red-team the design and checked every claim against YouTube's own guidance. Rewriting metadata turned out to be the wrong fix, and my success metric was measuring noise.
Running a WoW Private Server Client on Apple Silicon: Three Dead Ends and a Better Answer
I wanted to play my homelab WoW private server from my MacBook Pro. The client is a 32-bit game from 2010, and Apple Silicon turned that into a stacked translation problem across three different Wine tools. Here's what broke, why, and why I think the spare x86 laptop is the better machine for it.
How much does Tailscale actually slow you down? I ran the numbers.
Before connecting to my homelab remotely, I ran a speed test to get a baseline. Then I connected via Tailscale and ran it again. The results were almost identical, which would have been a clean story, except the first two tests had the exit node on the whole time.
North D Pharmacy
A local pharmacy site rebuilt around phone calls, directions, hours, and cleaner search signals. Bilingual, static, fast.
Sherwin Travels pass
A documented before-and-after pass on another owned site, including what improved and what still needed human judgment.
The homelab backup series
Moving 45 TB between two NASes, the bottleneck that was not the network, and the drives that did not survive the move.
Developer since 2003. Still fixing my own stuff.
I write software for a living and run a homelab because I want to understand the thing before I trust it. Most posts here start the same way: something broke, the obvious fix was wrong, and the real answer took longer than expected.
If you run a small business and your website is quietly costing you calls, that’s the other half of what I do.
Start a projectNotes from the workbench, once in a while.
The same thing that goes on the blog — homelab rebuilds, tooling that earned its keep, and the fixes that took three tries. Sent when there is something worth sending.