Echo Studio silently drops Alexa announcements over 600 characters
I have a morning briefing skill that reads me a short summary of overnight events. It worked fine on the Echo Show in the kitchen and was completely…
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manage-bde isn't broken, BitLocker just isn't installed
I had a fleet-status dashboard for some Windows boxes that pulled disk encryption state via manage-bde -status. Several rows were reporting hard errors…
Read →A tiered mail classifier for cheap triage
Once all my mail was flowing through a Lambda, I wanted automatic triage — drop the obvious noise, bucket the rest, only forward the things I'll actually…
Read →Building a TPM-bypass Win11 ISO with offline hive injection
I wanted to PXE-boot a fully unattended Windows 11 25H2 install onto a VM with no TPM, no Secure Boot, and not enough RAM by Microsoft's reckoning. The…
Read →A one-shot CLI so 'add it to my todo list' isn't a research project
Whenever I said "add it to my todo list" to my homelab assistant, it would burn twenty tool calls poking around the codebase trying to remember how todos…
Read →Cutting MX records to SES when your domain loops back to itself
I had cut over the MX records on several personal domains to AWS SES, because I wanted every incoming email going through a Lambda that writes to…
Read →KDP rejected my novel three times for comp titles in the description
I submitted a thriller to KDP in three editions on the same day: Kindle, paperback, hardcover. All three got rejected within a few hours, with identical…
Read →Native iOS todos with an interactive widget
I ship enough native iOS to make my own todo app worth the effort. I already had a backend that powered the web UI; I wanted a SwiftUI app that hit the…
Read →Slipstreaming SSH into a PXE-booted Windows install
PXE booting a Windows 11 install is fine; getting a freshly installed VM to accept SSH from my homelab without me touching it is the actual interesting…
Read →The arr-stack disk-full trap
The home media pipeline went quiet. Nothing new was finishing. CPU on the torrent boxes was high but throughput was zero. Time to actually look at why.
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