debene.dev

amazon-ssm-agent can’t run on Haiku.

I froze a tiny machine-readable Gopher API so any client that speaks RFC 1436 can drive my homelab Spotify bridge — no SDK, no auth dance.

There’s a screenshot on my other monitor right now that I can’t stop looking at.

Or: how fifty-nine builds taught me that someone has to own the state, and why I shipped b59 with the seams still showing.

Streaming 2026 music on a 1999 Mac via a 1991 protocol.

In one day I turned a single gopherhole into a neighborhood: pulled out a shared Rust core, built an interactive tarot reader that draws three cards against the real sky, and wired three holes into a hub.

Real-time CTA 'L' train tracking over Gopher, the 1991 text protocol.

I Built a 1990s BBS in 2026 (In One Day) Remember bulletin board systems?

I built a real-time tracker for every train in Chicago because the existing ones weren't quite right.

My laptop has a ~/projects folder.

What Are We Even Doing Here?

Apple Silicon vs IBM POWER8: A Tale of Two Architectures Running LLMs in 2026 Last week I published benchmarks of running Qwen 2.5 7B on a 2016 IBM POWER8.

A short story about installing Talos Kubernetes on a Rock 5 ITX (RK3588) with no working display, an EDK2 UEFI flash from a running Armbian, and an HDMI cable that pretended to be a brick for half an afternoon.

A Brazilian-style soap opera in 8 chapters about building a Kubernetes node with NPU, RDMA, and a lot of drama with Ubuntu 26.04

Uma telenovela brasileira em 8 capítulos sobre como construir um node K8s com NPU, RDMA, e muita treta com Ubuntu 26.04

How a brand-new Intel Core Ultra 9 285H benched at half its potential, and the rabbit hole that fixed it.

OEM firmware locked your ConnectX card to Ethernet-only?

Why I bought a laptop CPU soldered to a motherboard from Shenzhen, what I'm actually paying for when I build infrastructure, and why the homelab renaissance isn't about saving money.

160 POWER8 threads vs 28 Xeon threads in a real-world media transcoding benchmark.

Running Jellyfin 10.11 on an IBM POWER8 server with .NET 10 — a tale of 9 build attempts, zero Dart VMs, and one very stubborn lobster.

Building the .NET 8 SDK entirely from source on an IBM POWER8 running Gentoo Linux — 7 patches, 160 threads, a Y2K bug, and an AI lobster named Garra helping via Discord.

34 commits in one day: REST APIs, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, OIDC disasters, Docker nightmares — and the moment I gave up on AIX and deployed on Gentoo instead.

Installing AIX 7.2 on real IBM POWER8 hardware, fixing yum's sqlitecachec bug, surviving the OpenSSL 3.5 disaster, and running Apache DayTrader on WebSphere Liberty — all from a basement in Chicago.

A Tale of Two Philosophies: When 160 Threads Meet Modern Silicon.

For fifty bucks, I got myself a time machine.

The Dream: A teenage obsession with the iBook G4 finally fulfilled two decades later.

The Recipe for Modern Content Creation (Now with Extra Bytes!).

Opinions expressed here are my own, fueled by late-night coding sessions and an unreasonable amount of coffee.