How to survive AWS toll-free SMS registration
A toll-free SMS number for a personal safety project I run took several denial cycles before AWS approved it. The denials were all about wording in the…
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Migrating from Todoist with an idempotent import
Migrated all my active Todoist tasks into my own todo backend. 27 tasks across 6 categories (birthdays, bills, dev backlog, groceries, issues for a…
Read →My per-todo chat was a toy LLM in a tool-capable house
My web todo app has a little chat button on every todo row. The idea: open a todo, ask the assistant "what should I do here?", get a tool-driven answer…
Read →qBittorrent was deleting files before Sonarr could import them
Sonarr's queue kept stalling. Episodes would show up as grabbed, sit in the queue, and then quietly fail to import. Re-grabbing the same release didn't…
Read →Tightening Radarr quality profiles to stop Emby transcode lag
Avengers playback was crawling on Emby. Not network, not the client — the Synology CPU was pinned, fan howling, every play.
Read →A $25 bed occupancy sensor for Home Assistant
I wanted Home Assistant to know whether the bed was occupied, and by whom, so it could drive lighting, HVAC setbacks, and a few "is anyone home"…
Read →Hyper Backup stuck in a scan loop over live LXC subvolumes
My Synology Hyper Backup job to Google Drive kept restarting and never finishing. It would run for hours, get most of the way through the scan, then bail…
Read →qBittorrent's auto-remove racing arr imports
Symptoms looked like the same old "files imported but not really" pattern I'd dealt with before, but the root cause this time was subtler — and lived on…
Read →Ring IR mode breaks face-distance thresholds
I have a small face-identification pipeline running against snapshots from my doorbell. It uses a fixed distance threshold to decide whether a face…
Read →Door unlock on iPhone SOS when Apple won't expose the event
I wanted my front door to unlock automatically when my iPhone or Watch triggered Emergency SOS or Fall Detection. The catch is that Apple does not expose…
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