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...

Latest blog posts you might like

11 April 2026
n8n | stable

n8n 2 15 1 released: fixes Google Drive v1 infinite pagination loop, upgrade to 2 15 1, test Drive workflows, report regressions, roll back to 2 15 0 if needed

10 April 2026
Blocking residential proxy traffic with stateful firewall rules

Most home routers allow everything outbound by default, which is exactly how AVRecon persisted undetected for six years. A stateful firewall with explicit outbound rules and network segmentation...

9 April 2026
Personal health data needs local storage, not cloud

Health data inside a corporate platform means health data inside a jurisdiction you do not control, encrypted or not. Self-hosting it locally—with proper backups and audit trails—trades convenience...

7 April 2026
Stopping lateral movement in homelabs: ACLs, VLAN isolation, and process confinement

A compromised host on a flat network can reach every other node without crossing a single firewall rule. Network perimeter checks are useless if the interior is trusted by default; that is where...

6 April 2026
Air-gapped browsing in homelabs: containment without

A 48-hour gap between exploit discovery and patch deployment is normal, not exceptional. Browser isolation in your homelab is not about making the browser safe; it is about making sure a compromised...

6 April 2026
Amazon Fire TV Stick HD and 2 more Amazon tech bargains

Discover the Amazon Fire TV Stick HD and more tech deals this week.

5 April 2026
Process jails and kernel isolation for untrusted agent code

Running untrusted AI agents in standard Docker containers leaves you exposed to kernel exploits that bypass every namespace and policy you've layered on top. MicroVMs add a hardware boundary that...

3 April 2026
Using IP Reputation Data from Operation Synergia in Your Botnet Firewall Rules

Operation Synergia III sinkholed 45,000 botnet and malware IPs across 72 countries with law enforcement backing. That chain of custody makes the data worth blocking at your firewall; the catch is that...

1 April 2026
Zram and zswap: which memory compression fits your homelab

I've built systems that swap differently depending on what dies first: the CPU or the storage. Zram and zswap solve adjacent problems, and picking the wrong one costs you either write cycles or...

30 March 2026
Blink Outdoor 4 camera + 3 more Amazon tech bargains

Discover the Blink Outdoor 4 camera and three more tech deals this week.