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Notes from building & climbing

Two streams, one notebook: technical deep-dives on what I'm shipping, and the occasional rambling from the trail.

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Technical · 8 min

MoonLander Enhanced: Teaching an AI to Land on the Moon (and Other Things I Didn't Plan to Build)

A browser remake of the 1979 Atari Lunar Lander that turned into real orbital physics, historic Apollo missions, and an AI Theater where you watch a neural net learn to land in real time. Built with AI, for fun.

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Technical · 16 min

Pro-AI, Eyes Open: What It Actually Does to Us, and How to Use It Well

I use AI every day and I'm genuinely optimistic about it. This is the honest version — what the research really says about AI and our brains, the environment, and the quiet ways it flatters us — and how I use it so it sharpens my thinking instead of replacing it.

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Technical · 6 min

The Generalist's Edge: Doing IT Work in the Age of AI

I'm a generalist, not a specialist — and for the first time that feels like an advantage instead of an apology. How AI changed what one IT person can actually do in a day.

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Technical · 9 min

A Lazy Sunday: Rebuilding My Site with AI and Leaving Wix Behind

How I went from a templated Wix site to an owned, fast, markdown-native stack — thought to design to a live cutover — in about a day, with AI as the pair programmer and me making the calls.

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Technical · 25 min

How I Tried to Break My Own Encrypted Journaling App — Ten Times

An authorized, ten-round penetration test of MoodHaven Journal — 65+ targets, 41 confirmed-and-fixed vulnerabilities, and the bespoke tooling it took to prove the encryption actually holds.

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Technical · 13 min

So We Rooted the Phone and Went Deeper

The unrooted phone told us our encryption held. Root let us check whether we were telling ourselves the truth. We weren't, entirely — and that was the point.

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Technical · 10 min

I Tried to Break Into My Own Journaling App on an Unrooted Pixel 9

A weekend attacking my own encrypted journaling app. The only foothold I got was my own debug build, my standard MITM playbook failed completely, and figuring out why taught me the most.

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Technical · 9 min

Changing a Password Is a One-Liner — Unless You Encrypt Everything

Crash-safe master-password rotation in a zero-knowledge journaling app: re-encrypting across two layers and two runtimes with a single atomic flip a kill -9 can't corrupt.

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Technical · 18 min

Seven Months of Vibe Coding: How I Built a Privacy-First Journal App with an AI Pair Programmer

Building MoodHaven Journal from scratch as a non-developer — zero-knowledge encryption, a Wear OS companion, peer sync, and what it actually takes to learn while you ship.

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Ramblings · 6 min

Borah's Crucible: A Feather, a Rock, and the Mountain's Fire

A predawn dream of falling, a feather caught on Chicken-Out Ridge, and what Mount Borah burned away over 13 hours and 5,062 feet.

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Ramblings · 9 min

The Things that Borah Peak Spoke to Me

An account of an early-morning, first-major-mountain ascent of Idaho's Borah Peak, and the people, fears, and lessons the mountain revealed along the way.

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Ramblings · 6 min

From Humble Beginnings Come Great Things (A Borah Love Story)

It all starts with a Big Hairy Dream (BHD) and ends with a thriving sense of accomplishment and pride in oneself. A hiking love story about chasing Idaho's tallest peak.

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Technical · 4 min

How To: Integrate Unifi AP Metrics into Zabbix (and Graph It in Grafana)

Integrate Unifi Access Point metrics into a Zabbix server and graph the data with Grafana, using the Unifi Proxy project on Ubuntu Linux 18.04.

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Technical · 3 min

Home Lab Fun: Virtualize a Domain — Part II: Router Configuration

Detailed instructions on installing and configuring pfSense as a router, optionally exposing its WebGUI on the WAN, and creating an IPSec tunnel between two offices on separate networks.

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