2026-01-09 11:30:00
For the past decade, I've used Mailhog for local email debugging. Besides working on web applications that deal with email, I've long used email as the primary notification system for comments on the blog.
I built an Ansible role for Mailhog, and it was one of the main features of Drupal VM, a popular local development environment for Drupal I sunset 3 years ago.
Unfortunately, barring any future updates from the maintainers, it seems like Mailhog has not been maintained for four years now. It still works, but something as complex as an email debugging environment needs ongoing maintenance to stay relevant.
2026-01-06 06:00:00
Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5. So comparing systems with:
Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208.
Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95:
Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages1, the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5.
2026-01-04 03:00:00
Since 2009, this website has run on Drupal. Starting with Drupal 6, and progressing through major site upgrades and migrations to 7, 8, 9, and 10, I used the site as a way to dogfood the same CMS (Content Management System) I used in my day job for over a decade.
But as time progressed—especially after completing a grueling upgrade from Drupal 7 to 8—my enthusiasm for maintaining what's now a more enterprise-focused Digital Experience Platform or 'DXP' for a personal blog has waned.
2026-01-02 23:12:25
Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ.
In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf:
The Gateway is a small (1U/desktop) router with features like a 4-core Arm CPU, 8GB of ECC LPDDR RAM, and decent expansion options for a compact router.
2025-12-26 23:00:41
Dell sent me two of their GB10 mini workstations to test:
In this blog post, I'll cover the base system, just one of the two nodes. Cluster testing is ongoing, and I'll cover things like AI model training and networking more in depth next year, likely with comparisons to the Framework Desktop cluster and Mac Studio cluster I've also been testing.
But many of the same caveats of the DGX Spark (namely, price to performance is not great if you just want to run LLMs on a small desktop) apply to Dell's GB10 box as well.
2025-12-23 00:28:05
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST.
Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated.
But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by more than 5 microseconds.
5 μs might seem insignificant. But it is significant for scientists and universities who rely on NIST's more specialized timing signals.
