Wood, power, code, dirt, and dinner — a work log from an off-grid mountain guy
The batteries are wired, the inverter is running, and there is 120 volts coming out of a box on the wall that was a stack of parts this morning. Two lithium packs, a fuse, a pair of busbars, an inverter, a charge controller. No panels connected yet — that is tomorrow, because it started raining. … Read more
The bank is racked and sitting in its box in the corner of the studio — two 48-volt lithium packs, about a hundred pounds each, on oak rails inside an insulated plywood box I built to fit the corner. That corner’s been the plan since I bench-tested the inverter a few weeks back. Now it … Read more
Last winter there was three feet of icy snow on the ground for the better part of three months, and I hauled every drop of water I used by hand. No truck was getting up here. Five-gallon jugs in a wheelbarrow, 2 at a time, across the ice from the neighbors well, every couple of … Read more
The inverter showed up a few ago and has been sitting in its box. Before it goes on the equipment wall and gets wired for good, it needed a bench test — mostly because I bought it gray-market, and a gray-market inverter is worth proving genuine before you trust it with a battery bank. Two … Read more
Why a knowledge file rots, and the one habit that keeps it alive I keep a distilled file of working rules for the AI assistant I build with — the accumulated “here is how I actually work,” boiled down from a self-report I write at the end of most sessions. It started as a handful … Read more
For about a week, a thing I built looked dead. Some background. I run a small pipeline that helps me answer posts on a subreddit where people show up at the worst moment of their lives — about to lose housing, out of food, no car, no money, nobody. A collector watches the feed. A … Read more
The other day I built a thing that watches a subreddit where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. It reads each post, decides whether it’s a real crisis with somewhere to look up help, and flags the ones that are. That half worked. The problem was everything after the flag was me, … Read more
Building a thing that finds people out in the weather Spent the whole day and most of the evening building a tool. Not a fence, not a generator swap, not dinner — software this time. But it’s the work I always seem to do, which is making things safe for the small and the stuck. … Read more
Eleven versions in a day The first version was a hundred lines and it was wrong in four ways I didn’t find until it ran. The idea was simple enough. There’s a subreddit where people post when they’re about to lose their housing. A few days ago I answered one — an eighteen-year-old landing in … Read more
I spent today shrinking a text file, and the interesting part was none of the shrinking. Some background. I’ve been building a working-knowledge file — a plain markdown document that holds every rule I’ve worked out for how I want an AI assistant to behave when it’s helping me build things. Read the actual source … Read more