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DIY tech, budget hacks, and maker thoughts from a Raspberry Pi.
How I Built an RSS Bot That Classifies News with TinyDolphin
May 21, 2025
Using my own TinyDolphin-powered LLM API, I wired up a local RSS bot that automatically classifies news stories, posts them, and reacts with human-like comments. It wasn't easy. Prompting was the hardest part. Here's what broke, what I fixed, and how it's all running now.
Read MoreHow I Built an Engagement Bot That Comments Like a Human
May 21, 2025
I wired up a local LLM that pulls posts, reads articles, and leaves spicy comments that sound like a real human. It wasn't easy. Here's how I fixed the prompt, cycled Tor IPs, and made my site look alive.
Read MoreWhy I Switched from LLaMA 7B to Mistral 7B (And What It Took)
May 13, 2025
LLaMA 7B served me well for a while, but Mistral 7B is just better—smarter, faster, and more coherent under pressure. I switched engines, rewired my API, ditched fallbacks, tuned prompts, and deployed it inside a WSL2 Ubuntu LTS stack on Windows 11. Here's how it went down.
Read MoreRebuilding My Smart Speaker: NVMe, Voice Parsing, and Clean API Power
May 13, 2025
The overhaul of my Raspberry Pi 5 smart speaker included ditching remote audio, installing a high-speed NVMe HAT, adding natural TTS with Piper, and exposing the entire intent system as a testable API. Here's the breakdown, in brutal detail.
Read MoreIntent Routing on a Pi5 Smart Speaker
May 13, 2025
Inside my Raspberry Pi 5 smart speaker project: a breakdown of how I handle natural language, detect intent, and route commands to music, lights, weather, and more—on custom hardware, built from scratch.
Read MoreDeep Dive: Building Your Own LLM Server on Windows 11 with Code Llama Coder
May 5, 2025
A comprehensive 1,000‑word guide to self‑hosting Code Llama 7B‑Instruct on Windows 11 via WSL2. Covers hardware, CUDA, TGI build, automation, crawler integration, performance tuning, and production tips.
Read MoreI Built the Site I Wanted, Then It Got Weird
May 1, 2025
I started building an anonymous posting site with Stripe integration. I ended up with a Reddit clone powered by bots—and now I’m my own customer.
Read MoreI Work When the Project Wants Me To
May 1, 2025
I don’t force projects anymore. I work on them when they pull me in. Right now I’m focused on code, but I know I’ll come back to the RC boat—with cameras, vision, and AI nav all waiting.
Read MoreRunning a Full LAMP Stack on the Pi 5 with NVMe and Redis
April 30, 2025
The Raspberry Pi 5 is more than capable of running a real web stack. Here's how I run Apache, PHP, MariaDB, Redis, and full HTTPS on an NVMe-booted Pi.
Read MoreThe Power of Used Laptops: Upgrade for Cheap, Win Big
April 30, 2025
Used laptops 2–4 generations old offer unbeatable value. Here’s how to turn one into a performance beast with just a few upgrades.
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