Notes from the home lab

Bug testing, literally: a spider in the smart fan

My homemade bathroom fan stalled twice one morning. When I unplugged it, a spider crawled out. The fan has run slower ever since. This is what its own telemetry recorded.

Watching chips talk

Chips talk to each other over tiny wires, millions of times a second, and you cannot see any of it. So I spent an afternoon turning a five-dollar microcontroller into an instrument that can — and found out my I2C bus runs at less than half the speed it claims.

A year of CB App, and now it fits in a pocket

CB App is one HTML file with no server, no account and no network — a scratchpad that keeps everything on the machine it is open on. A year and a few dozen releases later it finally works on a phone and a tablet, without giving up the thing that made it worth using.

I asked Opus how to prompt Opus

I prompted Claude Opus 5 to research how prompting Opus has changed since 4.6, audit my own prompt library against it, and write up the findings. It found parameters that now return 400s, a token budget that fails silently, and advice that reversed direction between generations.

What hemiplegic migraines mean to me

I was diagnosed with hemiplegic migraines in 2012. This is the story I finally sat down and recorded — the stroke-like attacks, a head injury at sixteen, and the fourteen years it took me to find my single biggest trigger hiding in plain sight: Red 40.

I needed an SSH refresher, so I built a sandbox

Four fake computers in a browser tab — practice real ssh, ssh-keygen, scp and ~/.ssh/config without touching a real machine. Plus the copy-paste setup guide I kept re-Googling.

Seed to jar, in three minutes

Four months of my first grow — germination to cured jars — compressed into a three-minute timelapse, stitched from the tent camera that watched the whole thing.

A dashboard for my first grow

My first time growing a plant, so — naturally — I built it a self-hosted Raspberry Pi dashboard: sensors, VPD, a daily journal with AI photo analysis. The Pi's coming down, so I froze the whole thing into a browsable demo.

My go-to prompt starter: Rewrite for Clarity

How I use Prompt Composer's Eval "Rewrite for clarity" mode to turn a messy, typed-as-I-think prompt into a clean structured frame — before/after screenshots and the one rule I never skip.

Prompt Composer: a sneak walk-through

An early two-minute screen recording of the Prompt Composer — building a structured prompt from blank frame to finished, copyable output.

Why prompt composing is the skill that actually moves the needle

The model is rarely your bottleneck — your prompt is. Why composing prompts as reproducible artifacts, not throwaway chats, is the skill that scales your work.

AI is an engine. You drive the car.

A year of sloppy prompts taught me the model is rarely the problem — the framing is. What changed, and the composer it turned into.