Writing / builds/page/1

builds/page/1

12 posts filed under builds/page/1.

Builds · 6 min read

A Check That Can't Fail Is Worse Than None

A canary built to catch one bad state passed exactly that state, because grep -c prints 0 and also exits non-zero. The post ends with copyable self-tests that run a known-bad and a known-good input through a check in ...

Builds · 8 min read

Trivia Over LoRa: a game show on a slow, lossy radio mesh

Since June I have been running a game show on a radio network where one message tops out at 200 bytes, takes up to about two and a half seconds to send, and may never arrive. My trivia bot asks a question every hour on ...

Builds · 3 min read

"Precise" Is Less Precise

In Meshtastic, the map report has its own position precision setting. Set it to 32, the number that means full precision on a channel, and your node shows up on the public map less precisely than if you had picked 15. ...

Builds · 7 min read

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 ...

Builds · 7 min read

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 ...

Builds · 6 min read

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 ...

Builds · 7 min read

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 ...

Builds · 7 min read

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 ...