How to Diagnose a Home Network After Router Failure
Work upward from power, switching, DHCP, DNS, Wi-Fi, and discovery before blaming the internet plan or buying a faster one.
All articles
All articles
News analysis, operating lessons, home automation, and guides grounded in systems I run or can inspect closely.
Prevent Overlapping Cron Jobs That Outrun Their Schedule
Use an atomic lock, meaningful exit status, observable duration, and explicit host ownership when scheduled work takes longer than its interval.
A Running Container Is Not a Deployment
Container health does not prove reachability, supported topology, persistent state, client continuity, backup, or rollback.
How I Stream Files Over SSH Without a Temporary Archive
I still use tar over SSH—but now I protect partial files, detect pipeline failures, validate the result, and use rsync when I need to resume.
Three Regression Tests for AI-Assisted Code
Turn real failures into small tests for recursive callbacks, expired identity, and idle connections before an agent changes the surrounding code.
How I Deploy WordPress Changes Without WP-CLI—and Roll Them Back
I deploy this WordPress site with narrow PHP migrations, pre-write checkpoints, plugin backups, and public regression checks—not a stale universal publisher.
Home Lab Backups with Ansible: Apply, Pull, and Restore
Treat configuration deployment, live-state snapshots, secret filtering, and one-file restoration as separate operations with separate trust boundaries.
Mercurial Queues in 2026: What to Use Instead
Use amend for one unfinished change, shelve for interruption, histedit for a series, and Evolve when obsolete-history tracking matters.
Should You Buy Eufy HomeBase 3 for Home Assistant?
HomeBase 3 compatibility, the replacement Eufy Home Assistant integration, and checks for video, events, recordings, and existing automations.
Do You Need a Lutron Caséta Hub for Home Assistant?
Yes—Home Assistant needs a supported Caséta hub. I explain why my standard L-BDG2 is enough for 26 controls and when the Pro model actually matters.