Blog
Notes & shout-outs
Deep-dives, build logs, and the occasional shout-out to a tool or service worth knowing about — written when there's something worth saying.
Jul 23, 2026
·3 min read
·Shout-out: AutoTLM Core on GitHub
Two weeks ago we introduced AutoTLM — our own car-telemetry platform. Since then the library went from v0.1 to v0.9, a free Windows cockpit and a scripting language shipped, the cloud and dashboard went live with real accounts, and the whole thing took its first live drive. Here's the honest progress report: what's live today, the benchmarks we can stand behind (sub-second pushes over bad cellular, ~4 updates/sec offline over Bluetooth, ~40 ms scripted reactions), and what's still on the bench.
#AutoTLM#Automotive#OBD-II#ESP32#Open Source#Telemetry#CarPlay
Jul 15, 2026
·9 min read
·Shout-out: LIVI on GitHub
Wireless Apple CarPlay on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a Carlinkit dongle: it paired over Bluetooth, joined the dongle's Wi-Fi, opened a session, and then showed nothing. No video, ever, then a drop after thirty seconds and a loop. If you searched "Carlinkit connects but no video" or "CarPlay black screen iOS 26," here is the exact failure signature, proof that the dongle and firmware and phone are all innocent, the two debugging techniques that found it (reading the app's worker message bus and tee-ing the raw USB protocol), and the fix. Plus the Raspberry Pi 5 gotchas nobody warns you about, like the missing H.264 hardware decoder.
#CarPlay#iOS 26#Raspberry Pi#Carlinkit#LIVI#Open Source#Reverse Engineering#Automotive
Jul 11, 2026
·8 min read
·Shout-out: AutoTLM Core on GitHub
It started with a check-engine light and a $60 OBD-II dongle, and refused to stay small. AutoTLM is our own car-telemetry platform: a plug-in device, live dashboards, a bench emulator that pretends to be a car — and an open-source Arduino library, AutoTLM Core, released this week under MIT, so the unit is programmable like a dev board that happens to live in your car. Here's what a month of road testing taught us (plain HTTP on purpose, dual-core firmware, lazy OBD init) and what we're aiming to provide.
#AutoTLM#Automotive#OBD-II#ESP32#Open Source#Telemetry#Hardware
Jul 8, 2026
·9 min read
·Shout-out: the Xbox 360 scene
A 2 TB drive followed me through fifteen years of moves with one folder I could never throw away: the complete toolbox for flashing Xbox 360 optical drives. To read a disc you burned yourself, you had to convince the drive itself, by reading its firmware off the flash chip, extracting its key, and grafting that key onto modified firmware. Here is how the whole chain worked, the developers behind it (c4eva, Team Jungle, C0deKing, LIGHTNING UK!), and why I am finally putting my scrubbed archive online for the people who loved this craft.
#Xbox 360#Preservation#Firmware#Hardware#Homebrew#History
Jun 18, 2026
·7 min read
·Shout-out: Rebind
I run a Teensy 4.0 flashed with Rebind's firmware — a programmable input layer that lives in hardware, not software. It looks like a plain keyboard to the OS, needs no drivers, and runs your logic at 8 kHz. That one property unlocks everything from locked-down clinic terminals and accessibility to recoil-killing, aim-assist-style game exploits anti-cheat can't see — and here's why I think showing those off in daylight is the white-hat move.
#Hardware#Firmware#Teensy#Accessibility#Automation#Gaming
Jun 17, 2026
·6 min read
·Shout-out: Valhalla
The easy routing APIs are black boxes — you get a polyline and zero say in why. Valhalla is open-source, self-hostable, and exposes real exclusion parameters, so we can route around ALPR cameras and keep the trips entirely ours.
#Valhalla#OpenStreetMap#Privacy#Routing#SelfHosted
