BUILDING ZONEBRO- A TIMEZONE TOOL FOR THE CHRONOLOGICALLY CHALLENGED
Remote work means coordinating with people across timezones. This shouldn’t be hard. Yet every timezone tool I found was either bloated with features I didn’t need or looked like it was designed in 2003 using Excel conditional formatting. I didn’t want a Swiss Army knife—just a clean way to answer: “If it’s 2 PM in London, is my colleague in Sydney awake or should I wait until tomorrow to passive-aggressively ping them about that PR?”
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VIBECODING WITH GEMINI-CLI: HOW I BUILT A GIT BACKUP UTILITY
I built GiterDone from scratch in about five hours using Gemini CLI, Google’s new terminal-based coding AI tool, all without having written a line of Rust before. I prompted it to scaffold the project, wire up SSH-only Git sync, schedule cron jobs, handle divergence with force-push logic, and statically compile for musl. What started as a weekend tinkering session turned into a working Rust binary faster than I could brew my morning tea in proof that even a non-coder can “vibecode” a solution end-to-end when armed with the right AI sidekick. Enter Gemini-CLI.
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EXPLORING THE ELECTRIC FUTURE: A PERSONAL JOURNEY
One approaches a significant birthday trip with a certain level of expectation: good food, better company, and perhaps a modicum of vehicular reliability. My wife’s 30th in St. Louis promised all of this, save for the last point, which was left entirely to the whims of the rental car gods. Opting for the ‘mystery car’, a delightful euphemism for ‘whatever’s left on the lot’, we anticipated anything from a compact sedan to a mid-size SUV. What we received, however, was a rather sleek, if somewhat bulbous, Hyundai Ioniq 5. An electric vehicle.
Read moreTHE CURIOUS CASE OF THE UNPAID LABOUR AND THE UNWILLING PAYER (OR "YES, YOUR CAR MIGHT NEED A SUBSCRIPTION MODEL")
A few years ago a rather earnest automotive executive informed me, with a straight face, that customers would positively adore forking over $15 a month to activate a car’s pre-installed heated seats. I believe I snorted so hard scotch came out of my nose (it burned). Turns out, Cox Automotive’s research largely agrees with my assessment: only about a quarter of car buyers tolerate subscription features, and the term “money-grab” seems to be a popular choice in focus groups.
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THE ISSUE OF PAY FOR PLAY IDENTITY- SSO, THE PAYWALL, SECURITY, AND YOU (OR YOUR BUSINESS)
Many a day, I’ve found myself peering at the changelogs of some cracking open-source project or freemium bit of kit, only to spot it: Single Sign-On (SSO), specifically the more robust flavour like OpenID Connect (OIDC), tucked behind a paid tier. As a chap who spends an unhealthy amount of time tinkering with home servers and pondering the existential dread of misconfigured firewalls, this makes me unreasonably cranky “Another feature locked away,” I think.
Read moreTRANSFORMING MEDICAL NOTATION WITH AI (OR "WHY ARE PHYSICIANS ALWAYS SO TIRED?) (PART I)
My incredible wife is a brilliant and gifted physician, but I’ve learned in the last few years that the biggest headache for nearly every doctor I’ve met is note-taking and charting. Oddly enough, the records you receive from your doctor through your patient-facing EHR (Electronic Health Record) system don’t just “get there” through fancy doctor magic… yet. I’m hoping to change that, purely selfishly, of course, because I’d like my wife back from the tyranny of the keyboard.
Read moreWHY I REGRET NOT USING TAILSCALE FROM THE START ("CLICK HERE, GET STARTED IN 5 MINUTES!" ISN'T NECESSARILY BS.)
Right, let’s be honest. We’ve all been there: staring glassy-eyed at the home router admin page at 2 a.m., trying to coax sense from a port forwarding rule while the hotel Wi-Fi wheezes like a pensioner with bronchitis. All I wanted was to stream Shrek 2 from my homelab in Georgia (Listen; it’s a great movie, I won’t accept anyone’s judgment). What I got was a three-act tragedy in NAT traversal.
Read moreTHE GREAT HOMELAB MIGRATION (OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE PROXMOX)
Alright, gather ‘round, folks. Let’s talk about my homelab. Specifically, let’s talk about how I, Chris, amateur server whisperer, decided it was time for a bit of a shake-up. What prompted this voyage of discovery, you ask? A subtle, insidious creeping feeling that my current setup, while charming in its simplicity, was starting to hold me back.
Read moreA 'NOW' PAGE, AND WHY YOU NEED ONE
A Now Page I became aware of the concept of a now page thanks to my home LLM/AI, oddly enough. The theory is pretty straightforward- essentially “what is this person working on, what are they doing, who are they in a nutshell?”.
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BLOGGING... AGAIN!?
Welcome! I really am not sure what I’m doing here; starting a new blog in the midst of everything else going on. But occasionally late nights I struggle with a weird form of insomnia where I refuse to lay down or recognize that laying down will create a desire to sleep; and instead I find new projects and systems with which to engage and learn about until 0200 rolls around and the overwhelming desire to rest finally takes me.
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