The Setup I have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, Home Assistant, WireGuard, and a bunch of other stuff for my home network. I built a security audit command for Claude that spawns 16 specialized agents to check different things — SSH hardening, CrowdSec status, backup verification, that kind of thing. At the end, it maps everything to NIST CSF categories and gives you a score. ...
Inspired by All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka—a story about a soldier trapped in a time loop who uses each death to get better at surviving. Part 1: The Death The war is already happening. Has been for decades. The battlefield is commercial real estate. Office towers, hotels, warehouses, medical buildings. Every one of them hiding secrets. ...
Upgrading a Raspberry Pi 5 from SD card to NVMe storage. 28x faster I/O, 35°C cooler temps, and whether it’s worth $130.
Continued from Part 1, where I ripped out the Hue Bridge and got all the lights working on ZHA. The Voice Control Question At the end of Part 1, everything worked except voice control. The last checkbox on Issue #9. Two options: set up Google Cloud manually (free, but you have to deal with OAuth and consent screens and API keys), or pay $6.50/month for Nabu Casa and have it just work. ...
The Problem That Finally Broke Me Every morning, same thing. Wake-up automation fires at 6:30. The Hue bulbs fade up nicely to 70%. The IKEA bulbs? Sitting there at 4%. Barely glowing. I kept thinking I’d configured something wrong. Checked the automation. Checked the bulb settings. Tried different transition times. Nothing helped. Turns out it’s not me. Hue bridges just don’t handle third-party Zigbee bulbs properly. The IKEA Trådfri bulbs receive the final brightness value but ignore the fade duration entirely. They jump straight to whatever you set. Known issue, apparently. Forums full of people with the same complaint. ...
I built Memory Bank for my home infrastructure repo. Three months later, I finally applied it to the system that actually makes money. Then during a real project, the whole data architecture changed.
When ‘systemctl status’ says everything is fine but your network is down, you learn that hard NFS mounts and critical services don’t mix.
A 404MB log file growing at 160MB/day. 87% of it was mDNS traffic. One thermostat was sending 66,000 queries with zero responses. The fix wasn’t log rotation - it was understanding why.
Three root causes, 10+ debugging iterations, and 2792 permission errors: How platform-specific build artifacts turned my seamless dev workflow into a troubleshooting marathon.
How an AI assistant saturated SSH connections, crashed a Pi, triggered rate limiting, and why that incident led to mandatory safety rules for AI-assisted infrastructure management.