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The modern Internet is full of nasty things, most users need protecting from themselves. Sometimes though, it’s important to be able to touch the sharp end of the Internet in order to fix it.

Today on “weird crap that seems undocumented on the Internet” we have DNS that doesn’t want to resolve and DHCP that is acting weird. My home DNS server decided it didn’t want to resolve things any more, and it took far too long to figure out why.

This week I have literally been hacking smart home devices. With a Dremel and a knife…

Let’s briefly look back at last year and see what things were like, then look forward to the coming year and what I want to achieve. I did this last year too, and I’ve just been reading that.

But this is not a post about that, that post was great, it was long and descriptive and kind of amusing to read. And then I deleted it by accident due to some questionable UI choices in WordPress and the wonky trackpad on my tablet.

Did you know WordPress will permanently delete posts without prompting. Hit that “delete permanently” button and it’s gone. Not even Windows is that mean. My mouse pointer was a pixel into the hitbox for “Delete permanently” and I was trying to hit “restore”. And it went.

I feel like over the past year I’ve swapped more broken drives from my NAS than any other bit of gear I own. So seeing how it’s the end of the year, let’s poke around and see how long the drives in my NAS have actually lasted.

I’m starting a graphics based project, and decided to use SDL2 in Windows. This meant setting up a development environment. Here’s some notes on how I set up MSYS2, VS Code and LibSDL2.

I think I’ve managed to make Home assistant tell me how much money the solar power I’m generating would be worth from the grid, and how much running things off solar/battery instead of the grid is saving me.

My workshed is mess, I can barely get into it and I have a bunch of projects that need starting. Let’s fix that…

I’ve got an IBM Model M keyboard and like using it on my PC, but one of its problems is the lack of Windows keys. There’s a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I use almost daily and not having a Windows key makes it annoying. Here’s how I fixed it…