gavinj.net

Thoughts on technology, infrastructure, and AI

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5 posts found

Connecting an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi to Home Assistant with MQTT

September 13, 2026 • home-assistant, arduino, mqtt

A complete tutorial for bringing an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi into Home Assistant with ArduinoMqttClient, MQTT discovery, two onboard controls and two useful sensors.

Three Small ESP32 Devices, One Home Assistant

September 12, 2026 • home-assistant, esphome, esp32

My first three ESPHome projects turned a LILYGO T-Embed, a Nano ESP32 and a Waveshare reflective display into useful Home Assistant devices.

Building a Smarter Home With Home Assistant

May 11, 2026 • home-assistant, homelab, proxmox

My early notes from installing Home Assistant in a Proxmox LXC, discovering solar and media devices, adding AirTouch air conditioning, and thinking about where the smart home stack goes next.

Using Codex to Rebuild My Blog and Import 15+ Years of Blogger Posts

March 28, 2026 • codex, ai, blog

How I used Codex to rebuild gavinj.net as a lightweight PHP and Markdown blog, import years of old Blogger posts, and help with both development and deployment.

OpenClaw, Bob, and a Small Taste of the Future

March 8, 2026 • openclaw, ai, automation

I built an AI bot called Bob on a Mac living on the top shelf of my pantry. OpenClaw, Telegram, Kimi K2.5, and Brave Search turned out to be a surprisingly compelling preview of the future.

gav.ilicio.us

neat-annotations: Hand-drawn CSS annotations
Hand-drawn arrows and handwritten callouts for the web, all in one CSS file. No JavaScript, no build step—just a little personality for your page.
Telstra Outage: The Night a Network Decided the Year Was 2006
One bad GPS clock, one NTP timing loop, and Telstra's network thought it was 2006. Certs, DNS, time—the sysadmin trifecta strikes again, with time taking the lead.
Bonsai 2 27B
Another model for the local-AI shortlist: PrismML says ternary weights shrink Qwen3.8 27B to 5.9 GB while retaining 98.2% of its benchmark score.
My AI Agent That Loves to Talk to Scammers
Scammers have AI callers now, so Paul Nevin built an AI honeypot to keep them talking and map their playbook. Some things never change—only the tools.
fugleramme: E-Ink Bird Frame for Raspberry Pi
A Raspberry Pi identifies garden birds by sound using local AI, then displays them on e-ink as hand-cut 19th-century illustrations. Delightful.
Ubuntu 26.10 Completes Transition to Rust-Based Coreutils
Ubuntu 26.10 finishes replacing GNU coreutils with memory-safe Rust uutils—including cp, mv, and rm. A quiet, drop-in security upgrade.
Alternatives to MinIO for Single-Node Local S3
MinIO's licensing and stewardship upheaval has kicked off the hunt for a replacement. This practical bake-off puts SeaweedFS and S3Proxy near the front.
Tesla says it will finally unveil the second-generation Roadster on October 1
After years of delays, Tesla says the second-generation Roadster will finally be unveiled on October 1. Flying cars! The future envisaged in my youth is finally arriving ...
Oracle layoffs: Employees receive the 6am job cuts email from "Oracle leadership" again
Oracle has started another round of job cuts, and once again the news arrived as a 6am email from "Oracle leadership". My heart goes out to the affected employees - a 6am email is a very cold way to part ways. I wrote about this pattern back in March in AI Layoffs in Australia and the Contractor Anxiety They Create, and nothing about it has become more humane since.
Lifespan
After a few weeks listening to David Sinclair's podcast, I'm tempted to subscribe to Lifespan magazine. The future of longevity research is looking extraordinary.