Archive
Automation
Industrial automation, SCADA, PLCs
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The NAS Wasn’t Broken, Just Slow: A QNAP Timeout Debug
Three weeks of a cryptic TypeError turned out to be a 5-second timeout fighting an 8-second NAS. Here’s how a library’s hardcoded timeout masqueraded as broken code, and the simple reset that fixed it.
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I Gave My Home AI a Radio and Let It Explore
A cheap USB radio receiver on the house AI server, a deliberately dumb service that lets the agent use it without a shell, one night of sweeps from 24 MHz to 1.7 GHz, the spectrum turned into sound,…
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What Old Hardware Is Still Good For: Eleven Real Jobs for Two 2016 GPUs
Two used datacenter GPUs from 2016, with none of the features modern AI assumes, now search a family photo archive by description, label who said what in a recording, split songs into stems, clone a voice, enlarge images…
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Big Generalists, Small Reflexes: The Model Fleet on a Private AI Server
A chatbot is one model behind a text box. This is a fleet of a dozen — a fast agent brain, a mixture-of-experts daily driver, ears, a voice, a memory grounded in my own notes, an image screener,…
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Watching the Watchdog: Nine Months of UPS Data, a Third of It Missing
The UPS was fine. The grid was fine. The monitoring was the thing that kept dying — a third of nine months of telemetry simply missing, a firewall that only let one host’s replies through, and a shutdown…
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The Letterbox Is an Attack Surface: Going Paperless with an AI Mail Clerk
Scanning is a tenth of going paperless. The rest: OCR baked into the PDFs rather than an index, a search service that was quietly eating a third of the NAS, and an AI that reads the mail —…
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The Meter Was Already Broadcasting: Reading Gas Usage Off the Air
A $30 software-defined radio, an antenna, and an SCM+ decoder — reading the number a utility meter already shouts over 900 MHz several times an hour, instead of photographing its dials. Protocol notes and the current state of…
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Three Numbers and a Float Switch: Instrumenting a Fish Tank
An ESP32 reading pH, dissolved solids and temperature off a tank — with three-point probe calibration exposed as Home Assistant buttons, and TDS temperature-compensated so the reading means something.
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Teaching a Camera to Read a 60-Year-Old Gas Meter
I built a computer vision pipeline that reads my outdoor gas meter from a photograph — four alternating-direction dials, ORB alignment for a future drone, and a philosophy of failing honestly instead of guessing.