Things I build, break, fix, and write about

1 September 2026
Privacy boundaries when AI touches government records

AI governance gets awkward fast when government records are involved, because the model is rarely the problem. The problem is the sloppy boundary around it, the sort I have seen quietly turn a harmless prompt into a route through records nobody meant to expose.

1 September 2026
Metadata schema choices for content libraries

Structured metadata only works when it matches how people actually retrieve content. I have seen neat schemas fail as soon as the library meets real...

31 August 2026
Federation trade-offs in self-hosted social feeds

Federation looks tidy until you let it touch the edges, and then the odd cases arrive fast. I prefer self-hosted social feeds that stay explicit about...

31 August 2026
FireAvert Z-Wave stove shutoffs for offline safety

FireAvert’s setup does the part that matters without asking Home Assistant to babysit it, which is exactly how I want stove protection to behave. The...

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25 April 2026
Setting lifecycle tracking for kitchen appliances with Home Assistant

I stopped treating appliance failure as a surprise and built a Home Assistant replacement schedule around dates, run counts, and service history. It is plain, slightly dull, and far more useful than...

25 April 2026
Security Advisory – 24 Apr 2026

Daily security advisory summary for 24 Apr 2026

24 April 2026
Network segmentation with VLANs, DNS and firewall rules

A proper network blueprint is mostly unglamorous discipline, VLANs with a job, DNS that stays in its lane, firewall rules that mean something, and DHCP reservations that do not rely on memory. Get...

24 April 2026
Security Advisory – 23 Apr 2026

Daily security advisory summary for 23 Apr 2026

23 April 2026
Safe ways to remove Copilot from Windows applications

Windows has a habit of putting Copilot back after updates, so I check policy first, then the package itself. If you need to remove Microsoft Copilot from Windows properly, the trick is knowing which...

23 April 2026
n8n | stable

n8n 2 17 5: enforces credential access for dynamic node parameters, fixes credential exposure risk, upgrade recommended for admins and self hosted users

23 April 2026
Security Advisory – 21 Apr 2026

Daily security advisory summary for 21 Apr 2026

22 April 2026
Configuration management prevents home lab drift

Cheap kit only stays cheap if the software side stays disciplined. A home lab software stack turns into a mess the moment settings live in web forms and half the logic sits in your head, which is a...

22 April 2026
Security Advisory – 20 Apr 2026

Daily security advisory summary for 20 Apr 2026

21 April 2026
Privacy-first car telemetry: monitoring EV charging over MQTT

I took a glossy EV launch page and turned the useful bits into a Home Assistant MQTT car charging dashboard, then spent most of the time fighting the usual small failures, bad keys, vague output, and...