Here be clouds.

My notes on figuring things out — somewhere between enterprise clouds, automation, and small things built to see what happens.

  1. Meet Maclock Clawd: a tiny desk companion for my coding agents

    Raspberry Pi / Automation / AI / Open Source · 6 min read

    Maclock Clawd: an open-source desk companion that reacts to Claude Code, Codex and OMP hooks—thinking, waiting, and celebrating from a tiny Raspberry Pi screen.

    A tiny Maclock, listening for hooksA loose pen sketch of a terminal sending a hook signal to a miniature Macintosh-style desk companion. Clawd waves from its screen, beside a little clock. A coffee cup rests on the desk. Clawd is Anthropic's character; this is an unofficial fan illustration.
  2. When DNS Caching Becomes a Risk: A Hidden Failure Mode in AWS

    AWS / DNS / Reliability · 14 min read

    How DNS forwarding, private hosted zones, and negative caching can turn a transient failure into an extended application outage.

    DNS recovered. The cache didn't.A hand-drawn cloud is back online, but a DNS cache still holds an NXDOMAIN response behind a padlock. A clock represents the remaining cache lifetime, while a connected application still cannot resolve its hostname. Conceptual illustration, not an incident trace.NXDOMAINDNS back onlineNegative cacheStill failingWaiting for TTL
  3. My router got observability. I got carried away.

    pfSense / Observability / AI · 3 min read

    New Relic finally runs on my FreeBSD router. Now I can monitor per-device traffic, write NRQL queries and build dashboards and alerts as code.

    A small router with a view of its trafficA loose line drawing of a home router connected by a wandering cable to a monitor with traffic graphs. Small code brackets hint at programmable alerts.
  4. A webcam made of LEGO. Because of course.

    LEGO / Electronics / Automation · 1 min read

    An old Creative USB webcam, an ESP32, a tiny servo, and an excellent excuse to play.

    A little LEGO webcam, a very serious monitorA loose pen sketch of a studded LEGO webcam with a round lens, a side-mounted servo and a hinged cover, perched on a desktop monitor. Two spare bricks sit beside the stand.
  5. A blog I don’t have to babysit

    Web / Automation · 13 min read

    Astro builds it, GitHub Actions checks and ships it, GitHub Pages serves it, and Cloudflare handles DNS. A small blog, everything as code.

    Paperwork, with a small cloud attachedA loose pen drawing of an open notebook, a folded page, a small cloud and a wandering cable. A few warm marks suggest code without turning the drawing into a technical diagram.
  6. Finding the missing gigabit in my pfSense firewall

    pfSense / AI · 13 min read

    How packet queues, monitoring overhead, and a CPU power policy helped me recover the 2 Gbps my Orange connection already offered.