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Idle Cycles

A collection of thoughts and experiments that at one point occupied my time, some still do. These are the things happening in my idle cycles.

Imagining a Device Provisioning Process

2026-03-07

This is a kind of follow up to a prior post about integrating hardware devices in a robust, repeatable way. Here I'm looking into ways of provisioning devices (computers) that are sometimes referred to as "industrial PCs", "IoT gateways", or just "on-site computers". I've been irked by how convoluted and messy the process can become when it feels like there is an 80% solution just laying in the building blocks of a standard Linux installation. To finally put these thoughts to rest I thought I'd try buidling such a system.

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Integrating Hardware with systemd and udev

2026-02-28

Documenting a simple system for process management in the context of integrating hardware into a linux environment in the face of multiple devices and hot-plugging.

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SQLite Stress Test

2026-02-25

I saw a "100-million-row challenge in PHP" posted today and it reminded me of the last time I saw something like this. While I don't know PHP I thought I might treat it as an exercise for using SQLite to keep me in practice with a few different SQLite functions. It turns out there is definitely a point where SQLite may not be a good fit!

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PostgreSQL Row Level Security

2026-02-21

I've recently been interested in whether PostgreSQL's row security policies could be a good fit for a few different projects. Before committing too strongly to using them someplace important I figured I'd try them out to understand the potential implications to query performance and ergonomics.

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A Toy Spring Boot Application

2026-02-16

I wrote the other day about a series of design choices that I aim for when starting a new project. In so doing I lured myself into testing out a thought that has been rolling around my head for a while: what is the smallest spring boot application that can fit such an architecture?

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Notes on Provisioning a New Project

2026-02-14

Some incomplete notes on provisioning web stuff in a way that allows for fast feedback without leaving me hamstrung with technical debt at the level of project infrastructure.

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Debian 13

2026-02-13

Unsurprisingly, I've been lax in maintaining things around here. Debian 13 was released quite a while ago and it has been a couple of years since I did any big updates on the server. My previous experience was good so I didn't spend long planning for this one.

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The Drunken Bishop Algorithm

2025-08-20

I was reading about the drunken bishop algorithm for fingerprint visualization in openssh. I thought it might be a lark to implement it in emacs lisp.

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systemd mounts

2025-08-17

Just a quick note on configuring an automatic network mounted file system.

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An Interesting Architecture

2025-07-27

A few notes on an interesting software design I've been noodling on. I'm still trying to untangle how to foster organic growth in software systems.

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