Went to the Dara Ó Briain’s show in Eindhoven tonight. (Re:creation)

Excellent story, very funny audience interactions (especially when he didn’t know what ASML is, in a town filled with ASML engineers). He’s excellent at making a sad/real life story funny and heartwarming.

I’ve been working with drywall for the past 2 weeks, building walls and soffits. I’m extremely proud of the results, but goddamn my back is killing me, cutting the panels on the ground, screwing the panels to studs (on the ground) and bending over to cut weird angles to match the extremely crooked walls our 260+ year old house has.

This is after 2 weeks, I have to idea how actual builders do this for most of their working life.

Today was the first day I was honestly incredibly impressed by Claude Code.

I was working on an Android device which I need to provision in bulk. I've built the AOSP ROM myself, but I needed to access the userdata partition from outside of the device (which is quite hard in recent Android versions, because the filesystem is encrypted using device keys). For testing purposes, I wanted to disable filesystem encryption and switch the userdata partition to ext4.

I did this myself, but ran into an issue when using recovery mode to clear out the userdata partition. The recovery image was set up to use the f2fs file system and not ext4. I could manually use mke2fs to format the partition, but seeing as I was testing and wanted to clear the userdata partition often, this was less than ideal.

I gave Claude Code access to adb and my serial terminal hooked up to the debug UART of my device. All by itself, it extracted the recovery partition, extracted it, patched the fstab, packed up the image and then flashed it back.

This is far FAR beyond what I expected Claude Code would be able to do. It worked, first time and it saved me at least an hour in reading documentation on cpio and other image generation/unpacking tools.

It's also quite scary. Yes, I still needed to tell it what to do and what I expected and obviously, this was quite technical. But it did it. All on it's own.

Have these tools actually become good / useful?

Unpopular opinion:

I miss the old Twitter. I had many (online and IRL) friends there. I left when Elon took over and the group has fragmented. I don’t speak to many of them anymore. Mastodon is simply not the same, and never felt the same for me.

I’m mostly social-media-free at the moment, and although it’s much better for my brain, I do miss the genuinely nice conversations and IRL meet-ups I’ve had because of it.

I’ve been experimenting with running LLMs locally, trying it with Opencode. (A sort of open source claude code like cli tool to run LLMs against your code base), because I refuse to give OpenAI or Anthropic my code.

I tend to test them with small tasks and then expand to bigger tasks.

Today I loaded the “Qwen3 coder 30B” model and asked it to convert a medium sized ReactJS project to Vue. It refused, because apparently it thinks it might allow me to create malicious code.

Yeah, I think programmers might be fine for the foreseeable future.

Step 1 of our Italian solar and battery install completed.

3x Victron Multiplus II 48V 5000VA inverters
1x Victron SmartSolar MPPT RS 450|200 (11kW) solar charge controller

Mounted on OSB panels with Red (fire proof) plasterboard on top.

Next step: 32 EVE MB30 cells in 2 battery boxes with JK BMSes and the Victron Lynx busbars.

I got a disembarkation ticket for our boat.

Guess I’m standing by.

The joys of living rurally…

This is the second time in 5 months that a rat or mouse has chewed through a cable in our garden.

We have a network of pipes in our garden through which wires run to several sections of our yard. On the intersections of those pipes there are inspection pits, which I suspect are popular locations for rodents to visit.

Last time we had a large arcflash and a fire, this time I caught it before it became a problem.

Here in Italy, they don’t have cables with metal shielding, so I’m looking for a different solution to protect the wires. Does anyone have an idea?

Sitting in the waiting room of a local hospital here in the Netherlands and some guy is watching a Polish soap opera on full volume on his phone, whilst snorting his nose and loudly chewing snuss.

I’ve rarely felt the need to punch somebody in the face more than now.