gavinj.net

Thoughts on technology, infrastructure, and AI

Connecting an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi to Home Assistant with MQTT

September 13, 2026 • home-assistant, arduino, mqtt

A complete tutorial for bringing an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi into Home Assistant with ArduinoMqttClient, MQTT discovery, two onboard controls and two useful sensors.

Three Small ESP32 Devices, One Home Assistant

September 12, 2026 • home-assistant, esphome, esp32

My first three ESPHome projects turned a LILYGO T-Embed, a Nano ESP32 and a Waveshare reflective display into useful Home Assistant devices.

Eleven Servers, One Hammer, and a Serious Look at Proxmox

September 10, 2026 • proxmox, vmware, virtualization

A Broadcom upgrade conversation sent our infrastructure team looking at alternatives. Three retired servers, a graduate named Thor and a Proxmox trial have made the next renewal much more interesting.

One Jump Box, Many Users: Multi-User RDP on Ubuntu 26.04

September 3, 2026 • homelab, linux, ubuntu

Part 1 of building a hardened multi-user jump host: why the Essential Eight pushes you towards one, and how to get xrdp serving concurrent sessions on Wayland-native Ubuntu 26.04.

There's No Kimi Button: Custom Providers on Pangolin's New AI Gateway

August 30, 2026 • pangolin, ai-gateway, kimi

Pangolin 1.22 shipped an AI Gateway this week. The provider list covers OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, but there's no Kimi or DeepSeek button. Here's how to register both as custom providers, and why the missing buttons turn out not to matter.

gav.ilicio.us

Tesla says it will finally unveil the second-generation Roadster on October 1
After years of delays, Tesla says the second-generation Roadster will finally be unveiled on October 1. Flying cars! The future envisaged in my youth is finally arriving ...
Oracle layoffs: Employees receive the 6am job cuts email from "Oracle leadership" again
Oracle has started another round of job cuts, and once again the news arrived as a 6am email from "Oracle leadership". My heart goes out to the affected employees - a 6am email is a very cold way to part ways. I wrote about this pattern back in March in AI Layoffs in Australia and the Contractor Anxiety They Create, and nothing about it has become more humane since.
Lifespan
After a few weeks listening to David Sinclair's podcast, I'm tempted to subscribe to Lifespan magazine. The future of longevity research is looking extraordinary.
Working with Git Worktrees in Magit
A practical Magit guide to Git worktrees—the neat trick for keeping parallel agent sessions isolated without cloning the whole repository.
Omarchy: Beautiful, fun & agentic Linux
Might be fun to spin this up!
mlc-ai/web-llm: High-performance In-browser LLM Inference Engine
Web-LLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine. Running models locally in the browser removes the need to send prompts to a server and opens up offline or privacy-sensitive use cases.
Reverse Engineering Unknown File Formats with ImHex
This article introduces ImHex by reverse engineering FEZ's save file format. ImHex has become one of the best hex editors I have found recently, and the pattern matching features are particularly useful for decomposing binary files.
'Just use a VPS bro' (OpenClaw version)
This video really encapsulates my life as a Linux admin at this point in time.
A Walkable ASCII Cyberpunk City in One HTML File
I think I'm going to buy this! A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city rendered in a single HTML file.
General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian
This was a really progressive resolution, you can't please everyone - the smartest people I know lean into this technology. I think this will ultimately accelerate Debian and FOSS in general.