Rants from the machine room.
Fix it. Build it. Zero it.
One angry engineer, a hundred rabbit holes. Building things that don't catch fire twice, wood that doesn't warp, relays that don't weld shut — and writing down what happened when they did.
Most "outages" are just neglect with a timestamp attached.— the grumpy admin
Rant categories
pick your poisonLatest dispatches
ARCHIVE →CLI said healthy. The dashboard said NOPE.
An automatic upgrade split a bundled data source into a standalone plugin and left it owned by the wrong user. CLI healthy, UI empty. One chown fixed it.
Email for a personal domain: 90% DNS, 10% praying it isn't spam
You don't host email on a personal domain — you just bribe the DNS gods until it lands in your own inbox.
I made my solar monitor less clever and it finally worked
First I built a BLE-crypto reverse-engineering monster. Then I rebuilt it as a $0.70 microcontroller that just asks the server. Guess which one stopped breaking.
I walked out of the gun store with a suppressor and no tax stamp
The NFA's 14-month nap is gone in my state. Same day, $9 background check, walk out. Still hasn't quite hit me.
I replaced a faulted drive and the pool still sounded nervous
Resilvering, degraded-mode anxiety, and why you should plan for the second drive to die too.