Terrain Beats Floors
I spent a day ranking a large university's buildings as places to put a Meshtastic router, using public lidar and public terrain data. The best sites on the university's property list were not buildings at all. They ...
Writing
42 posts
What Broke When I Delegated the Contractors
This summer I handed my assistant the contractors: finding them, getting quotes, booking visits, following up. It had a phone line and a texting number through Twilio, a task list in Todoist and access to our calendars. ...
Hears Everything, Heard by No One
My Meshtastic station could still hear the mesh as well as it ever had, and nobody outside my house could hear it. Receive stayed flat. Transmit went to zero. That one comparison cleared the antenna, the cable and every ...
Half a Light Curtain Said “Success” and Did Nothing
For months, a smart LED light curtain in my house wouldn't reliably do what Home Assistant told it. In August 2026 I stopped patching it and took it apart, one hypothesis at a time. Settings, a power cycle and a new ...
How I Rebuilt willcurran.com With Claude Design and Claude Code
This site ran on an off-the-shelf HubSpot theme for years. Dark, competent, generic. Roboto and Lato, a coral accent I never chose, and a layout that looked like a hundred other sites built from the same marketplace ...
Spray Foam Doesn't Pay for Itself on Power Alone
On electricity alone, my model put the payback on the spray foam in my garage at 15 to 30 years. I ran that math first and bought it anyway.
Two Tiers for Local AI
In August 2026 I sketched what it would take to run my AI work at home. The plan had two tiers: a fast GPU for the high-volume background jobs, and a big-memory machine for the long conversation. Over 37 days, 96.6% of ...
Will Renaming My Node Every Hour Break the Mesh? The Airtime Math
In August I wanted a weather node on the mesh whose name was the weather: something like WX Station - 110°, with a little sky emoji as its short name. Renaming a node puts a packet on the air, so before I built it I did ...
The Radio That Lied About Dying
The radio in my new Meshtastic base station was dead for ten days, and the service manager recorded every one of its fourteen restart attempts as a clean, successful exit. Read at face value, that pointed at the ...
An E-Ink Truck Dashboard That Admits When It Doesn't Know
In July I built an e-ink dashboard for my Rivian in one day. It sits on a TRMNL and shows charge, range, cabin temperature and anything left open. Most of the work went into one question: what should the screen do when ...
That's everything: 42 posts.
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