Installing an iOS build to a locked iPad
xcodebuild signs it, devicectl refuses to install it because the device is locked. installation_proxy doesn't care about the lock screen — here's the path that works.
Read →BLOG · PAGE 3
Page 3
The seed packet that had no barcode
A seed co-op's packets carry Code 39 item numbers instead of UPCs. I resolved them by treating a 404 as a disambiguator, which worked right up until it confidently returned catnip.
Read →The duplicate function that never threw
A second copy of a helper function silently killed an entire ES module — the page still rendered, nothing worked, and no error ever reached my logs.
Read →Your monitoring can't tell 'off on purpose' from 'broken'
A budget gate told a batch of scheduled jobs to sit out. Their health checks read the silence as death and paged three nights running. The fix was to record the decision, not re-derive it.
Read →The slot that has to forget nothing
A physical tray cell gets reused every season, but the row describing it is the provenance of a plant that's still alive. Partial unique indexes and generational rows.
Read →The monitor was green for 74 days
An ingest pipeline died in June and my monitoring never noticed, because every healthcheck asserted that the script ran instead of that data arrived.
Read →Logging a CLI into OAuth with nobody at the keyboard
A CLI's OAuth refresh token expired on a headless box. Getting it signed in again meant expect, a Playwright browser, and reading the magic-link email out of my own mail pipeline.
Read →A share link that has to forget who you are
Adding public share links to a Postgres row-level-security app means resolving a stranger to a tenant before any tenant is bound — plus a SwiftUI nested-ScrollView trap that dragged a whole screen off its left edge.
Read →The text view that asked for the whole screen
A UITextView with scrolling disabled reports its intrinsic width as the full unwrapped line, and SwiftUI believes it. Why my chat composer ran off the screen edge instead of wrapping, and the four-part fix.
Read →systemd forgets when your job last ran
I built a status panel for six nightly sync jobs and every one of them read 'clean · —'. systemd discards a template instance's ExecMain timestamps the moment the unit goes inactive.
Read →The seed packet that wasn't a barcode
My garden app's packet scanner stripped every non-digit from whatever the camera read. That works for a UPC and quietly destroys a QR code — which is what small seed houses actually print.
Read →Seven Layers of Permission Denied: Netbooting Windows 11 Without a TPM
A network install of Windows 11 failed with permission denied. It turned out to be seven unrelated faults stacked on top of each other, and only one was actually a permission.
Read →Postgres Evaluates the Branch Your CASE Never Takes
A CASE expression with a guarded date cast threw an invalid-date error from the arm that could never run. Constant folding happens before the guard does.
Read →The Contact-Form Spam a Keyword List Can Never Catch
My contact form's blocklist caught crypto scams for months, then a polite Wikipedia sales pitch walked through scoring zero. Adding an LLM stage fixed it — and introduced a prompt-injection hole.
Read →