Geeky Schmidt

An attempted improvement that only makes things worse.

We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.

GoToSocial had a bug serving 0-byte images.

Migrating decades of personal archived email from Thunderbird mbox format into Proton Mail via the Bridge IMAP interface.

APT29 is hijacking hotel Wi-Fi to steal Microsoft 365 tokens.

What if your electricity provider could tell you’re not home without ever looking out the window?

The USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft recent updates got me thinking about AI in software engineering.

I bought a Nordic Track treadmill back in 2024.

When I started out, I told anyone who’d listen that cloud storage was trivial.

Good intentions, bad implementation.

When I was a kid in Sicily, my mom and I would bike across the flight line at Comiso AB so I could play Frogger on a Commodore 64 at the BX.

BLUF: If we keep burning junior talent today, we will have nobody to inherit tomorrow.

Mobile power generation in the field.

Spain’s new mandate requiring telecom operators to maintain 4 hours of backup battery power at their transmission masts is a major victory for clean distributed energy assets at the edge of the grid.

The year was 1997.

Nicholas Schmidt - Chief Technology Officer & Technology Leader

Token counts, cloud subscriptions, and API rate limits are a constant drain.

“We Shouldn’t Use Probabilistic Models to Solve Deterministic Problems”: Why AI “Browsing Agents” Cost $281/Month to Do What a $5 VPS Can Do 📊📉 I recently ran some analytics on my self-hosted Postgres database for Miniflux, and the raw metrics tell a fasc…

An honest, data-driven look at living with the first-generation Ford F-150 Lightning after nearly four years, 65,000 kilometres, and heavy real-world utility use.

I just finished watching CultRepo’s brilliant new documentary, The Story of C++: The World’s Most Consequential Programming Language, and it sparked a lot of nostalgia.

Aaron Brethorst’s recent piece argues that domain expertise is the ultimate moat in an AI-driven world.

The tech industry loves a treadmill.

An exploration of why grid orchestration must mimic the architecture of the internet to survive the AI scaling crisis.

A guide on deploying a lightweight, C-based ActivityPub instance using snac2 on an OpenBSD stack.

A no-nonsense comparison of the new Pebble smartwatch against my daily driver, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic.

I’ve deployed numerous iRobot and Neato units over the years.

The Digital Archaeological Dig I recently assisted a friend with a codebase that felt like a digital archaeological dig—a chaotic mixture of Python versions and conflicting modules.

Don’t confuse “work ethic” with “work volume.”

Your daily commute: dirt cheap in an EV.

Standard serialisation protocols have gone AWOL.

My dad was a ham radio operator, so I spent a good chunk of my childhood tearing down rigs and building antennas with him.

Moving from 'app badges' to raw data wrangling for operational longevity.

Whether it’s the cadence of a score, the logic of a codebase, or the spoken word, language is the ultimate “human” terrain.

A reflection on the transition from traditional coding to AI-generated systems and the necessity of digital right to repair.

The Dance Between Eros and Agape I’ve spent much of the past few years contemplating the meaning of love and life given my personal cirumstances.

After revisiting SailfishOS earlier this autumn, I spent a week living with its open-source cousin, Ubuntu Touch.

Not my proudest work, but I needed a quick shell script.

Why I stopped using Discord for open source and how I bridged IRC into Matrix using Heisenbridge on OpenBSD.

Efficiency is the most overlooked opportunity in edge data center design.

My latest reflections on SailfishOS as of September 2025.

Living out in the boonies has its charms: quiet nights, open skies, and an estate that keeps me busy, but internet choices aren’t one of them.

Thanks to Anirudh for getting me started on the right path!

OpenBSD and Me OpenBSD holds a place near and dear to my heart.

There’s something delightfully analog about growing up before smartphones.

I’ve been a loyal follower of Nokia’s mobile innovation journey for years, starting with the Nokia N800 and every subsequent device.

In my teens, close family friends gave me a [Sega Nomad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_Nomad) along with several Genesis/Mega Drive games.

I’m the kind of guy who buys a car and keeps it forever.

Sitting in a coffee shop in Vienna feels like stepping into a timeless tradition.

After travelling most of my life, I have been on a crusade to reduce my tech baggage.