Security
My own Ghost blog has open signup, so I went looking for a CAPTCHA. Ghost built one and ripped it out. Then Cloudflare Turnstile started reading every visitor's GPU.
AI
It called my sitemap broken (it was not) and my best query busywork (it converts at 20%). What LLM SEO agents get wrong about proportion, and the one thing mine got right.
Fediverse
The euphoric post said it works. Half-truth. Federation works; every interaction (like, boost, reply, open article) silently dies. Here is the real fix: Apache AllowEncodedSlashes + nocanon, plus the hairpin-NAT gotcha.
Postfix was the easy afternoon. Spamhaus, PBL/SBL/XBL and the open-resolver trap were the week-long education nobody puts in the triumphant self-hosting posts.
Security
The world is most influential executives suddenly subscribed to my niche tech blog. None of them had heard of me. A field guide to newsletter bombing, the magic link that clicks itself, and why your blog is the ammunition, not the target.
ghost
There's a correct way to add ActivityPub to Ghost: buy Ghost from Ghost. This is a field report on the other way — six native Ghost blogs on NetBSD, behind Apache and Cloudflare, federated by hand across a hostile NAT, with exactly one self-inflicted 503 along the way.
self-hosted
Plex tripled its lifetime pass and now charges to stream your own files. Bitwarden scrubbed "Always free" as private-equity execs moved in. One week, one lesson about whose "lifetime" it really is, and why you should hold the key yourself.
Better Thermostat vs Versatile Thermostat: 10 days of data, 90% less valve thrashing, 2x faster heating. Here's why I switched and the numbers that prove it.
I bought 8 MOES TRV valves and discovered that firmware lottery can ruin your heating automation. Here's what I learned at -14°C outside.
Discover the frustrating paradox of WiFi VLANs on Cisco switches: they won't work until clients connect, but clients can't connect until they work. Learn practical workarounds for this "chicken and egg" problem affecting your wireless networks.
Transform your homelab with a custom validated domain using Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare, and wildcard SSL. Access services through clean, secure URLs instead of IP addresses and ports.
Subscribe with the form below!
Three supply-chain compromises in eight days self-propagated through SLSA-attested pipelines. The custodians signed the malware themselves.
I needed two recognisable characters across dozens of dark-fantasy scenes. Klein gave me eighteen failed iterations of the same closing - twins, hobbits, photoreal Hollywood stills, a soldier dressed as a beggar - before I stopped fixing the model and started fixing the composition.
3-week rabbit hole. Building an AI-narrated daily RPG, I spent more time reading arXiv than writing code. The surprise: a 1998 algorithm beat every new neural net for handling minority player voices.
Better Thermostat vs Versatile Thermostat: 10 days of data, 90% less valve thrashing, 2x faster heating. Here's why I switched and the numbers that prove it.
I bought 8 MOES TRV valves and discovered that firmware lottery can ruin your heating automation. Here's what I learned at -14°C outside.
Replaced UPS batteries but runtime dropped? The APC remembers old capacity. Instead of shutting down my homelab and fumbling with cables, I calibrated the UPS remotely via Home Assistant's NUT addon using raw netcat commands. Runtime nearly doubled. Zero cables touched.
Locked out of your Microsoft account as the sole admin? Join me on a 2-week odyssey through Microsoft's Kafkaesque support system. Learn the secret backdoors, magic words, and creative workarounds I discovered to finally recover my account. A survival guide born from corporate bureaucracy hell.
I compare the odds of winning the Polish Lotto, the Eurojackpot, and solo-mining a Bitcoin block with a $20 ESP32. The results are shocking — in the world of “lottery mining,” your tiny device becomes a perpetual lottery ticket that also tells time and costs under $3 a year to run.
A punchy summary that highlights the key selling points - the price, dual functionality, practical use cases (laundry + irrigation), and the advantage of real detection over forecasts. It's short, engaging, and gives readers a clear reason to read the full article.
The heating season brings a deadly risk: carbon monoxide. See how a $25 Zigbee sensor (ZC-HM) and Home Assistant can protect your family. A simple setup for a priceless peace of mind. #SmartHome #Safety
"SMART status: PASSED" - the biggest lie in storage monitoring. My WD Red drive was dying with 69 errors at LBA=0, clicking mechanically, yet SMART said everything was fine. A 48-hour battle with silent hardware failure that nearly cost me 4.5TB of data. ZFS saved me, but barely.
Journey through recovering a 12-year-old TrueCrypt volume: from P2V virtualization failures to discovering VeraCrypt incompatibilities with RIPEMD-160, building a 12-million password generator, and creating a PowerShell batch-processing script that reduced 412 days to 6 minutes. Full code included.