Workbench
The toolshed. Engineering essays with the codebase clipped to the back. Builds, opinions, post-mortems.
5 entries
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Moving data you can't afford to lose
The boring disciplines behind a data migration you can actually prove: irreplaceability order, checksum gates, offsite-restore tests, uid preservation, and verifying by function.
- zfs
- rsync
- restic
- nfs
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The Quiet Press: a newspaper that turns itself off
A Raspberry Pi, an e-paper panel, and a battery that lasts because the device spends almost all its life switched off. The architecture, the design, and what the schedule taught me.
- raspberry-pi
- fastapi
- playwright
- home-assistant
- mcp
- e-paper
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Draining a server with the lights on
Retiring a flaky, load-bearing box in an afternoon: DNS, public ingress, home automations and all, with nobody noticing.
- docker-swarm
- dns
- cloudflare-tunnel
- observability
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Blueprint: Migrating a 70-Device Zigbee Network to a New Coordinator Stack — Without Re-Pairing
A field-tested runbook for moving Zigbee2MQTT from an ember (EFR32) coordinator to a zstack (CC2652P) one in place — including the undocumented channel_mask trap, a socket-contention root cause, and what an AI pair-operator actually contributed. With three postscripts: the beta-firmware auto-update ambush, the week-long hunt that ended in a wrong-board-variant firmware and a Wi-Fi AP squatting on the mesh's spectrum, and a 72-hour soak that finally turned the claim into proof.
- zigbee2mqtt
- zigbee-herdsman
- zstack
- home-assistant
- mqtt
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An EPUB, via email.
why mcp-readwise has fourteen tools, but the one that actually mattered ships markdown to your Reader Library by SMTP — and what that detour says about API design.
- python
- fastmcp
- pandoc
- aiosmtplib
- resend
- docker