Multi-part investigations, each meant to be read in order.
Systems 7
- The 680M Agent Bench
Local models as unattended coding agents on a laptop's Radeon 680M: which ones are fast enough, and how good the code they leave is
- The 3090 Agent Bench
Local models as coding agents on one RTX 3090, and where the measuring went wrong: context, quants, a leaked CLAUDE.md, a hidden test
- The Telemetry Bill
Moving Spring Boot telemetry from the OTel Java agent to a starter for native image: what changes, what breaks, what it costs
- Fedora, Assorted
Fedora at home: four drives that vanished at once, a SMART count that blamed the wrong drive, two libavcodecs behind one soname
- The Memory Benchmark Nobody Asked For
Native image, memory, and the benchmark nobody warned you about: a Micronaut 5 reactive app in a 256 MB container
- Five Repos, One JDK
Five Maven repos moved to JDK 25 in one day, and an irc-bot whose green build hid five failures
- MikroTik at Home
A neglected hAP ac3 audited and hardened in one night, then blocky in a RouterOS container on a hAP ax3
Machines 4
- Power Stations as a UPS
Two power stations, a BLUETTI AC180 and a DJI Power 2000, as home UPSes over Bluetooth LE, watched by a Go observer for upsmon
- The 128 GB Box
A Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC with 128 GB of unified memory, run headless for local LLMs: BIOS, benchmarks, prefill, agents
- The Boot ROM Knows Everything
Reverse engineering the FiiO X1 music player: USB boot ROM, NAND dump, firmware patcher, EQ tables, a Rockbox bootloader
- The HTC Desire Z Project
An HTC Desire Z bought for parts, on CyanogenMod 7: bloat surgery, a reflash, own launcher and apps, kernels, GPS