TL;DR — Early on I fixed a flaky USB NIC (Realtek r8152) that caused short dropouts. Weeks later the box began hard freezing. Logs from the previous boot showed SD host timeouts (sdhost-bcm2835 ... timeout waiting for hardware interrupt) and ex... read more

I wanted to add a lightweight way for people to interact with my Jekyll posts without running my own backend. Utterances turned out to be perfect: free, simple, and powered by GitHub Issues. Setup Steps Create a repo just for blog comments (... read more

This is the TL;DR version. For the full background and debugging steps, check out Fixing PiHole USB NIC Flapping. If your Pi-hole randomly drops off the network and you see this in dmesg: r8152 1-1.4:1.0 eth0: carrier off r8152 1-1.4:1.0 eth0: c... read more

After creating gitkwik to handle versioning and commits on my Node based project, Dashatron, I wanted a simpler version for my Jekyll site. This version removes all the NPM logic, supports versioning directly inside _config.yml, and auto-builds th... read more

For a while, my zero.local Pi-hole / Tailscale box would randomly go offline. DNS queries failed, Tailscale would scream about DERP disconnects, and sometimes the only fix was a reboot. This was on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with a Waveshare ETH/USB ... read more

Update 2025/09/05: There were display issues following this update. I will post a followup once I’ve corrected them. I’m traveling at the moment but have an idle morning so I’m geeking around and I see Debian 13 Trixie was release a week or so a... read more

When I bought my house about five years ago my mother in law gave me her old lawn tractor. It was around 18 years old and had plenty of hours on it but it was in good shape. It my was first lawn tractor and a point of suburban pride for an idio... read more

Rayhunter Project Banner from EFF.org Rayhunter Project Several months back I saw an article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that talked about using cheap mobile hotspots to detect cellphone intercepting Stingrays. Although I have... read more

Why… This started off as an answer to a Reddit post. Essentially, the poster asked if a 3 or 4 was good enough to run something. The memory requirements were discussed and it came down to a 4 or 5 and I dug into the prices to show it’s only $5 m... read more

I was updating Dashatron today to fix some issues I’d been having, and I kept remembering things I needed to do after pushing the commit. So I threw together a bash script to make the whole process easier — something I could run at the end of a wo... read more

After pushing my 2011 Mac Mini to the edge of thermal detonation with a Pi benchmark, I wanted to see how the infamous 2013 “trashcan” Mac Pro held up doing the same thing. This machine gets a bad rap, but it’s got a lot of cores and memory so I w... read more

So I had a late 2013 Mac Pro sitting around that was firmware locked, and I finally decided to see if I could wipe the EFI password off it manually — with a CH341A SPI programmer and some guts. I think it’s a beautiful example of the industrial d... read more

In May 2025, after seeing a video from Linus Tech Tips about setting a new record calculating Pi, I was curious what this was all about. I did some reading and realized there were several different categories that benchmark these records but that ... read more