One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead. Keyboard fine. Touchscreen fine. External mouse fine. Trackpad: nothing. Twelve hours earlier it had worked. I hadn’t changed anything. Welcome to bleeding-edge silicon on Linux.
Guest Post by Luca Herlein
The artificial divide between robotics and drone ecosystems made sense once. Today, it’s holding back the entire industry.
If software changes something in the real world, it’s a robot.
Software development is stratifying into three distinct tiers. Where you land will determine whether you make more money, the same, or far less than today.
After two years of false starts with the Bristlemouth platform and permit headaches, I’m revisiting my whale song project with a completely different approach: semi-autonomous floating drones. The regulatory landscape has forced a rethink, and honestly, it might lead to something better.
I let Claude Code do whatever it wants without asking permission.
Before you spit out your coffee: I keep it in a jail. A container jail.
In my previous post about Claude Code, I talked about using VS Code devcontainers to safely run Claude in “dangerous mode.” That was great for a typical software project. But what about something harder? What about porting a complex hardware-interfacing library from Python to Go, where you need to deeply understand USB protocols, radio registers, and firmware internals?
That’s exactly what I did with gocat – a Go library for controlling the YardStick One sub-GHz RF transceiver. And Claude Code was instrumental in making it happen.
So I’ve been working on this project called client-w-mcp – it’s a leanring project to truly understand how an AI agent works with MCP servers. And I’m exploring Agentic development - with Claude Code.
The first time I used it, Claude just… flowed. It seems to do a lot more by itself to figure things out. I especially like the Task(
The evolution of AI-assisted programming has reached a pivotal moment, transforming from simple code completion to truly collaborative AI agents. This shift represents not just an improvement in tooling, but a fundamental change in how software is developed.
How I mapped some basic keys to be the same on MacOS and Ubuntu and saved my sanity. UPDATED! UPDATED AGAIN!
A short update on my whale song project: I fell down a few technical rabbit hole!
I decided to learn how to write gRPC code in golang - and used ChatGPT as an accelerator! Jump to the writeup.
A short update on my whale song project: it’s shifting technology.
A short update on my whale song project: it’s delayed. Need to sort out some legal stuff.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tech hiring and why it’s a crap-show for so many. I’ve posted my thoughts on staffing software engineers but I have some musing on the way hiring is done today.
Work on the SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit is slower than I hoped.
I have possession and unboxed the SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit!
The SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit may not be able to get to me. There’s some legal paperwork that I don’t have - that may be quite expensive to get. Import/Export laws are a pain.
Recent press about an actual conversation with a whale was preceeded by ground-breaking work by Dr. Michelle Fournet and profiled in the fantastic documentary Fathom on AppleTV. This is a MUST WATCH if you love the ocean - or humanity!
I’ve been accepted into the Bristlemouth Pioneer Program. I’ve been granted a SOFAR Spotter with a Development Kit. Unfortunately it was detained in customs due to it’s high invoiced value. I required a “customs agent” to clear it - which I did not have.
I’ve been accepted into the Bristlemouth Pioneer Program. I’ve been granted a SOFAR Spotter with a Development Kit. I want to build a system capable of autonomously recording whale song (and other ocean data). Humpback Whale songs is incredibly interesting - and scientists have JUST been able to actually talk to whales.
But really getting all “science fictiony” - can we build an ocean phone system to talk to whales?
I undid it. I’m still using my desktop (mostly remotely) and I do love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. But my primary machine is back to the Mac Book Pro.
I did it. I went total Linux on the Desktop again. Full blown beast of a real machine, and am getting a Lenovo X1 Carbon for travel.
Apple moved things around in the Network tab in System Settings. Here’s how to set network order.
Hugo broke image rendering. Well, they made it better, but broke how I used it. Here’s the fix.
Cloning from GitHub hanging for no apparent reason? A work-around. Anyone know why it works?
Imagine my surprise when I could not sudo! Wait, what?
Tl;dr: The AWS Cookbook is a must have addition to your reference library. Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the author.
Tl;dr: read the web instead of Linux for Networking Professionals. This book is a broad, shallow coverage that is probably more easily learned from web pages for free.
Tl/Dr: It’s on the network! But in my analysis, I fell victim to my own bias.
Picking up from last weekend, I play with the ESP32-POE-EA board from Olimex using the Espressif FreeRTOS ESP-IDF Framework.
Been awhile, head spinning, took some time to just play.
Prometheus Alert Manager is an “AP” system, in “CAP” terms. How we made it more Consistent, including a forked repo of the Alert Manager code.
Back to the future, debian again. Ubuntu begone!
Seems like everyone is clammoring for DevOps folks. Do they really know what they want? That term means all things to all people. Some thoughts.
Yet again I am thinking about the overall software development/deployment life cycle, and am back to thinking about CI/CD again.
“Cattle, not Pets!” they say. Except that for a lot of development, coders make their own laptop their favorite pet. “It works on my machine!” becomes normal. I got tired of that and automated the creation of my dev environment..
I’m continuing to dive deep on modern typescript/node development. I fixed a bug in a new tool I am using (projen) and learned a ton along the way. This post is to share some of that.
Merry Christmas Eve! Playing with the Beaglebone sends me into another thought spiral.
I’m revisiting why I don’t like MQTT, and what I am doing about it.
Getting Started with the Beaglebone Black (Again)
A bug in VLC? Grrrr. Reminds me of the old days.
X11’s xdotool cli is snazzy, and solved an annoying window placement problem.
Some Thoughts on MQTT
Playing around with Tasmota - as the sensing core of an IoT-based swimming pool temperature control system.
Progress, but not where I want it to be. But it builds and installs the FreeRTOS AWS IoT demo.
A few quick notes on getting the AWS IoT C SDK running on Linux.
Dipping a toe into the FreeRTOS ESP32 world.
Finally got a few minutes to play withe the ESP32-C3 DevKit that Espressif was kind enough to ship. So I made a blinky light using the onboard WS2812 LED.
Just started playing with Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.
This week I passed the AWS SysOps Administrator (Associate) Exam. Here’s some notes on what I did to prepare, and observations of the process.
It’s back to the future again. Fidding with node.js a lot, but you know, C is still my favorite language. Dug up some old code to read/write from a serial port.
A quick measure of the costs of running on-premise computers.
A simple hotkey extension in Chrome that makes my life easier.
Quick reminder: how to increase the copy-paste buffers size in iTerm2.
Everyone is all on fire about SRE. But what is it really? It’s as easy as 1-2-3 if you boil it down to the basics.
The Blackburn theme for Hugo has a bug in how it shows social media icons. Here’s how to fix it.
Debian not good for me on the desktop - back to Ubuntu, lost the snaps.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W is likely the basis of my next few projects.
Ubuntu just went too far with the snap crap. Back to Debian!
A trip down memory lane: the first linux telephony drivers
One of the core principles of modern “DevOps” development is to treat your documentation as code, just like code. My team at Cisco open sourced how we do that.
In AWS the AMI ID for a particular VM image is unique to that region. But it’s name is consistent across AWS. When building infra-as-code (such as terraform) use the name, not the ID. And some musings on terraform. Is it still the right answer for infra-as-code?
Link to posted video “CloudSphere: Impedance Matching Legacy Apps to Prometheus Monitoring by Greg Herlein & David Wang”
Quick reminder how to enable RDP sessions from OSX to an Ubuntu box.
SSH tunnels are basically indistinguishable from magic.
The default behavior of Ubuntu 18.04 is not friendly for a notebook that swaps back and forth from desk to mobile.
What exactly is Cloudy DevOps? How do you go from classic data center Enterprise deployments to the cloud? Here’s some of what I’ve learned across a half-dozen teams who’ve done it.
I’m building a robotics board that basically is a WiFi REST interface to a variety of I2C sensors - the I2C side uses an I2C switch driven by an ESP32. My first RBOT board arrived, but alas, I got schooled on surface mount part numbering.
From 1997 to 2010 I believed it was only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop became a reality. I gave up in 2010 and went to OSX. But we may finally be close! Here’s my notes on installing Linux Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Inspiron 15 7000. It’s the easiest and happiest linux ever for me.
On Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)
Thoughts on AWS re:Invent 2018
I2C Tools I am Using for the RBOT Project
I2C Port Expander for Robotics Use - Getting Started with the NXP PCAL6416A