Dispatches on motorsports, photography, software, and making things. Opinions are mine. Accuracy is the goal.
A short-term gear test that turned into a permanent part of my workflow. 3M WorkTunes ended up being less of a “review unit” and more of a daily-use tool — balancing hearing protection, shop work, and yard work without friction.
A short-term gear test that turned into a permanent part of my workflow. 3M WorkTunes ended up being less of a “review unit” and more of a daily-use tool — balancing hearing protection, shop work, and yard work without friction.
A third-gear transmission failure was supposed to be the interesting part of the week. Then an alignment appointment left me chasing VSC faults, checking suspension bolts in a parking lot, and reflecting on how many people would never know to look underneath the car in the first place.
PAX is doing a job nobody asked it to do and doing it imperfectly. DPAC started as a frustration with that imprecision — here's what building an alternative taught me about why the problem is genuinely hard.
Moving a 2017 iMac to Arch Linux was not the path of least resistance. It was, however, the correct decision. Here's what the experience actually looks like after living in it — with KDE Plasma, a photography workflow, and a dev stack that had to keep working through all of it.
Motorsports photography is uniquely permissive — most venues let you walk close, drivers expect coverage, and the spectacle is the point. But ethical documentary practice still applies. Here's how I think about representation, consent, and access in a context that often assumes they're non-issues.
The stringing and blobbing that shows up in summer isn't a slicer problem, a temperature problem, or a retraction problem — it's a humidity problem. How I built a drying workflow around a food dehydrator, a PTFE passthrough, and a proper storage system, and why it fixed 80% of my quality issues overnight.
The 13B doesn't forgive inattention. It rewards warmup routines, precise cooldown habits, and oil that you actually change on schedule. Running an RX-8 on a hillclimb program is, among other things, a sustained lesson in the difference between knowing what a machine needs and actually doing it.
The argument for self-hosting isn't technical, it's philosophical. Every service you depend on that you don't control is a single point of failure for your own work. Here's how I think about the line between convenience and fragility — and where I've drawn it in my own infrastructure.
Scraping LinkedIn at scale is either easy or impossible depending on how you go about it. The legitimate path — compliant APIs, Proxycurl, structured rate management — is slower and more expensive than the alternatives, and almost certainly worth it. What I learned scoping a 3,000-profile extraction project.
The Teensy 4.1 is fast enough to log GPS, IMU, and CAN data simultaneously without choking. Here's the hardware architecture behind the N.O.V.A. data logger — M9N GPS, LSM6DSO32 IMU, MCP2515 CAN module — and what building it taught me about real-time data pipelines in constrained environments.
The Dexcom G7 and t:slim closed loop work well enough on a normal day. On a hillclimb day — with the adrenaline, the physical demand, the heat, and the schedule that doesn't flex — it requires a different kind of management. What I've learned running a closed-loop system at competition events.
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