Articles

I wanted to build a native Android companion for Kollect without filling Fedora 44 with a JDK, Gradle, Android SDKs, build tools, emulator images, and assorted mobile-development debris. My complete Android toolchain now lives in an Ubuntu 24.04 Distrobox instead. It builds the APK, talks to my phone over wireless ADB, runs the Android emulator, and even lets Kollect enrich links for free with Gemini Nano through Android AICore.

My Home Assistant OS installation runs as a bhyve VM on a FreeBSD home server, while Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquitto live in a VNET jail with direct access to a ConBee II USB adapter. Homematic comes through a CCU3, and three recent IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices use the Nanoleaf Shapes controller I already owned as their border router.

Kollect is a small native Plasma 6 application I wrote to get interesting links out of browser tabs and into a durable collection. It uses Kirigami and C++ on the desktop, plain TOML files by default, optional multi-user server storage, OpenRouter-powered metadata, KWallet for secrets, and a proper Fedora RPM. The source is not public, but the design is worth documenting.

A small, database-free DokuWiki deployment in a FreeBSD 15.1 Bastille jail, with nginx and PHP-FPM inside the jail and Caddy handling TLS and access policy at the edge.

Some years ago a chana masala arrived in a HelloFresh box and never left the household again. It has since been refactored, hardened, and put under version control. Here is the current release: a chickpea curry for hungry IT people, documented the only way I know how - as a bash script with a proper runbook attached.