Blog

The Catstronaut, the Rocket, and the PM From Hell

When a Mark Rober-obsessed eight-year-old asks you, his rocket-scientist dad, to help build the coolest model rocket ever, you say hell yeah. Several months, two RP2040s, a LoRa link, and a Rust rewrite later, you discover your kid is the PM from hell.

2026-08-25T16:19:30

The Simpsons House Fallacy

Step aside, GDP. 80’s sitcom tropes are the new top economic indicators. In this post, I try to answer a surprisingly complicated question: who faced the worse housing market, Gen Z in 2024 or Homer Simpson in 1984?

2024-02-25T16:19:30

Firewalling a Wyze Cam With The Internet Archives (and IPTables)

You ever pass by the bargain bin at Micro Center and think to yourself: "If I don't hack this obvious spyware, what the hell am I even doing with my life?"

2022-12-16T16:19:30

Become Ungovernable: Using Dropbox to Manage DNS

What's the German word for when you build a new thing without realizing that it's already a solved problem and you're just reinventing the wheel? Because I just discovered that I've been (ab)using Dropbox to implement DDNS, which is already a solved problem.

2022-11-28T14:05:00

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

I spent 6 years repeating the same three best practices to fix "slow" Solr queries. But I'd never bothered to work out how much impact any of this advice makes. Turns out you can speed up Sunspot queries by ~350% by just implementing 2 of them.

2019-11-25T16:30:12

So Long, and Thanks For All The Phish!

I've had a Gmail account since the service launched back in 2004. Much has changed in that time, and sadly, we've grown apart. It was finally time to cut ties and move on to greener pastures. It turned out to be a lot easier than I'd thought.

2019-10-27T01:17:23

Does anyone else salt their email address?

Fun fact: the '+' sign is a valid email address character. Not only that, but many mail systems (including Gmail) treat it as the start of a tag. So sending an email to [email protected] is treated as though the message was sent to [email protected]. Once I learned that, I had a brainstorm.

2019-06-03T23:23:17

Dish on a Pole Support

A funny story from my old summer job offers some pretty solid lessons about product support and working with the general public.

2017-01-08T22:18:57

The Epistemology of "Trust Me, Bro"

An overheard discussion, meditations on epistemology, and lobbing oompa loompas at the ocean floor.

2012-08-22T10:00:30